Reading with Eyes of Faith

J. Neil Daniels

When you read the Gospels—really read them, not just skim the familiar stories like a well-worn photograph—you begin to realize how unnervingly alive Jesus still is on those pages. He isn’t a distant figure locked in first-century Palestine. He moves through the text with startling immediacy: a man who could calm storms with a word, but also pause to notice a bleeding woman reaching for the fringe of His robe. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John each show you a facet of Him, like four camera angles capturing the same radiant subject. But unless you approach those pages with what the old Puritans used to call “the eye of faith,” you’ll only see the surface—ink, paper, and pious words. It’s like trying to appreciate Handel’s Messiah by reading the sheet music in silence.

Active reading, when it comes to Scripture, is a deeply spiritual act. It means refusing to sit as a passive observer, nodding politely while the text does its work elsewhere. It’s reading as a participant, not a spectator. It entails entering the scene, hearing the crunch of the Galilean gravel underfoot, feeling the tension in the synagogue when Jesus declares, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). I remember once underlining that verse and just sitting back, realizing that the congregation in Nazareth heard the voice of the incarnate Word reading the written Word. It’s dizzying if you think about it. To read that passage without awe is like staring at the burning bush and taking notes on its botanical structure.

But the challenge is, we grow dull. We know the stories too well, or at least we think we do. We glide over the feeding of the five thousand, missing that it happened near Bethsaida, a real place on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, sometime around spring when the grass was green (Mark 6:39). These aren’t bedtime tales; they are eyewitness testimonies, anchored in time and geography. The evangelists are not mythmakers but reporters. Luke even says so, calling his account an “orderly narrative” based on those “who from the beginning were eyewitnesses” (Luke 1:1–2). Yet even the most careful scholarship can become sterile if it lacks faith. The heart must kneel where the mind observes.

Reading with eyes of faith doesn’t mean abandoning reason or critical thought. It means reading with expectancy, expectancy that the same Spirit who inspired the text still speaks through it. It’s that quiet conviction that the Man who told Peter to cast his net on the right side of the boat (John 21:6) can still direct your life today. When I read John’s Gospel, I’m often struck by the small, unnecessary details—like the “hundred and fifty-three fish” they caught. It’s almost absurdly specific. But that’s what happens when someone has seen something so astonishing he can’t help but remember every detail. Faith attends to those moments, lingering there, wondering what deeper resonance lies beneath them.

At its best, encountering Jesus in the Gospels is not a literary exercise but a kind of communion. The page becomes a meeting place between the temporal and the eternal, the reader and the risen Lord. Augustine once said that when we read Scripture, “God speaks to us,” and that’s no metaphor. The same Christ who called Levi from his tax booth calls the reader from distraction to discipleship. But you have to come ready to hear… to lean forward, eyes open, pen in hand, heart expectant. Otherwise, the words remain words. Faith turns them into a voice.