Open Your Eyes to God’s Redemption Story

My son Sutton got glasses at age three. It opened my eyes to how much he couldn’t see before. No wonder he had a hard time going up and down stairs! No wonder he would always stand close to the TV instead of snuggling up with Momma and Daddy! His poor brain couldn’t compute the blurry images he was seeing from a distance. How much had he missed out on? I had all sorts of mom guilt that my sweet Sutton had needed glasses and I’d had no idea—I just thought it was his unique personality to stand so close to the TV!

His optometrist explained to me that one of Sutton’s eyes was not really working, and therefore the other eye was doing all the work. The weaker eye could essentially “turn off” if it wasn’t able to pull its own weight. My son would go half blindish without glasses. Now, it is highly likely I just botched that explanation, but we are going to roll with it because it makes an excellent illustration for my points below.

Many Christians today are walking around with a similar blindness. We (often subconsciously) think the Bible is too hard to understand or too boring to read. We sometimes automatically assume we’re supposed to dislike the Old Testament and struggle through the details of Revelation. It’s like we’re squinting at the Bible trying to find what we think we’re supposed to find instead of seeing clearly what is presented there. If we’re not careful, we may go half blind to the true meaning. Instead of squinting and leaning in too close, asking, “Why don’t I understand this?” or “What does this mean for me?” let’s step back, put on our new glasses, and look at the Bible with a newfound 20/20 vision.

The Bible Made Simple

The story of the Bible can be summarized in one phrase: the story of God redeeming his people for his glory. When you look at the Bible as one big narrative, made up of smaller stories, you’ll see it is all about God saving his people. In a perfect three-act structure, the subject is God, the problem is our sin that has corrupted our relationship with a holy God, and the story arc is of God rescuing and ransoming us back to himself.

Did you catch that? The Bible isn’t primarily about us. We aren’t the main characters. It’s the story of God redeeming his people for his glory. Is it for us? Definitely. But it’s not primarily about us.

Maybe you can’t decide whether you should take a new job or not. So you open the Bible and read Jeremiah 29:11: “’For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’” But reading that verse only frustrates you because God isn’t spelling out his plans for you more clearly.

Some of us may be wondering, “Why didn’t God spend more time laying out who I’m supposed to date, what major I should choose in college, and where I should live?” But this is because we have been fed the lie (through culture) that everything we do, including reading the Bible, should be about us. But if I open the Bible and immediately look for myself in it, is that really worship? If I go to the Bible looking for answers only during times of personal crisis, is that showing faith-filled dependence on God, or is it treating him like he’s a magic genie?

Going to the Bible only looking for solutions to our problems is taking the Bible that displays the story of God redeeming his people for his glory and manipulating it to be our own story. It’s for you, but it’s not about you; it’s about him! And, ironically enough, if we read those passages in context and look at what the Bible actually says, it will end up affecting the details of our lives. But it will also do so much more. Reading the Bible and seeing how it really is all about God makes our interpretation and application so much more powerful.

The Bible is much more than just a map to follow or a clue book in which God gives us hints about what to do. When you read the Bible, you can see through story after story that God is not dependent on our hearing his hints and doing the perfect thing; rather, he works in, through, and despite us. Friend, the Bible is not just an old, dead, boring book we “ought” to read. It is alive and active, God-breathed, and it never passes away.

Tune in to hear Bible teacher Faith Womack this Wednesday, January 21, on LIFE TODAY. Adapted from No More Boring Bible Study by Faith Womack. Copyright © October 2025 by Zondervan, a wholly owned subsidiary of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc. Used by permission.