With a Subtitle: Scripture and the Spirit work together, never in competition, to guide the believer.
A brief Excerpt: Matthew Henry reminds believers that true guidance comes only when Scripture and the Holy Spirit's teaching are held together, never apart.
Quote Source – Matthew Henry
Henry’s counsel sounds almost too simple to need saying. Stay near the Bible. Ask the Holy Spirit to teach you. But strip away the plainness and you find two errors this single sentence quietly corrects—errors the church keeps stumbling into, generation after generation.
The first error treats the Bible like a manual you can master on sheer intellectual effort. Learn enough Greek, read enough commentaries, and the text will surrender its meaning without any help from above. Henry, who spent his life buried in commentary work himself, knew better than that. Without the Spirit’s inward teaching, the sharpest mind still reads Scripture from the outside looking in. Paul says as much to the Corinthians: “the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14).
The second error runs the opposite direction. It chases spiritual experience—feelings, impressions, a voice in the quiet—and treats the Bible as scaffolding you can kick away once you’ve had your encounter. Henry closes that door too. Notice his wording: Christians “keep close to the word of God,” and only then, “in everything,” seek the Spirit’s teaching. The Spirit doesn’t operate apart from the text He inspired. He operates through it, opening eyes to see what was there all along.
The Spirit Who Wrote the Book Teaches the Book
Peter puts the connection plainly:
knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. [2 Peter 1:20-21]
The same Spirit who breathed out the words is the one Jesus promised would guide believers “into all the truth” (John 16:13). That isn’t two separate ministries running side by side. It’s one Author making sure His own book gets read rightly.
This is why Henry’s sentence holds “word” and “Spirit” together instead of setting them against each other. Some Christians lean hard on doctrine and starve for the Spirit’s warmth; their faith turns brittle, more argument than worship. Others lean hard on felt experience and drift from the text; their faith turns soft, shaped by whatever seems true that week. Henry wants neither ditch. He wants the road down the middle—Scripture read prayerfully, and prayer shaped by Scripture.
What This Looks Like
Practically, this cuts against the hurry most of us bring to our Bibles. Reading fast to check a box gives the Spirit little room to work. So does opening the Bible only when we already feel spiritually restless. Henry’s counsel asks for a rhythm: sit with the text, ask before you read—not just “what does this mean” but “Lord, teach me”—and expect that the same God who inspired these words still wants to illuminate them for you, personally, this morning.
That’s not mysticism. It’s just taking seriously what the Bible claims about itself and what it claims about the Spirit’s ongoing work in the believer. Close to the word, open to the Spirit—Henry’s whole sermon fits in one line, and it still holds.
Salvation – Eternal Life in Less Than 150 Words
Distributed by – BCWorldview.org