Sometimes when you read a passage of Scripture it brings you back to important moments, events, or relationships. For example, I cannot read the first chapter of II Corinthians without being led back to a brief gathering with about seventeen relatives at a church in Arkansas. We had gathered for a double memorial service for my sister (forty-eight years old) and her daughter (eighteen years old) who had died in a tragic boating accident. The words about suffering and comfort and community always bring me back to that hard day when it hit me that, a few days earlier, we had been a family of nineteen. Now we were seventeen.

This morning I read II Timothy 3:16, which, I believe was the first verse I memorized (that is, of course, except for John 3:16). I was in a small group in college (“Go, Tar Heels!”) where I made friends for life and where I learned about the authority and trustworthiness of the Bible. I learned to read the Bible every day and to memorize passages. All these years later I hold on to those holy habits, though, admittedly, I am much better at daily reading than memorizing.

However, I have remembered that passage from II Timothy and it has stayed with me all these years:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is profitable (useful) for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

All Scripture. God-breathed. Training in righteousness. Equipped for every good work. These phrases keep coming back to me. It was this emphasis in college, thanks to InterVarsity staff and student leaders, that set my life on a trajectory of trusting, even needing, Scripture in order to know how to be fully who I am: God’s child.

Yet this morning when I read this oft-read verse, a new thought came to me. Scripture comes from God to make us more like God. Scripture is meant to correct us and make us more holy or righteous. Scripture is a gift from God for the people of God, to help us think and act more like God.

In fact, one of the reasons we study Scripture is not simply to learn about what it means to be holy but to become more holy. Scripture may come to us through the eyes with which we read it, or through the ears with which we listen, but it is meant to go deeper than our eyes and our ears. It is intended to penetrate the soul and bring about conversion of every desire, every passion and therefore of every word and work.

In the opening verse of II Timothy 3, Paul highlights what we are NOT meant to be: “lovers of self” (3:1). Elsewhere, Scripture tells us we are to “deny ourselves, take up our cross daily and follow” Jesus (Matthew 16:24). Such passages, rattling around in my brain and bouncing synapse to synapse, eventually grab me and lead me to examine myself with a sense of awe, wonder, and humility.

Can I really deny myself? This is exactly the opposite of what our society tells us. But Jesus lays it out clearly. The self and its passions must be denied, even killed (crucified). Absolutely uncompromising. Can we nuance this a little, soften the hard edges? Could it mean something like, ‘sometimes you don’t get what you want’?

Deny myself? Really?

As I ruminate and meditate on these thoughts and then walk out into the real world, the God-breathed powerful Word penetrates my soul, and I begin to think and act differently. It is the way of Scripture. Then it becomes the way of the cross.

In the early church, most of the earliest theology (even Paul’s letters) reflects the notion of a spirituality that means becoming more like Christ, by accepting his grace and then living into it.

So, as I walked away from my meditation this morning, I thought of what a wonderful thing it would be if our relatives, our neighbors, our church members—in fact, if all of those around us—allowed this God-breathed, living book to penetrate their souls. Such persons, submitted to the Bible’s teachings, would be wonderful neighbors and friends. They would be willing to deny themselves and seek to bear others’ burdens. They would be humble and kind.

This is my prayer: In this time of such an age of anger, division, and distrust, may our devotion to God’s Holy, life-giving, sanctifying, humbling, and grace-filled Word make us such neighbors and friends.

Dr. Scott W. Sunquist, President of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, is author of the “Attentiveness” blog. He welcomes comments, responses, and good ideas.