Renewal

For Christians who take the Bible seriously, there is always the danger that we become entirely cerebral and neglect the heart.
Of course you can never be too cerebral - we're to love God with 'all our mind' - but we can neglect to 'love God with all our heart'. (Of course people of other traditions tend to neglect the mind which is equally sinful, but that's another story).
This morning, I was struck by something written about the book of Revelation by Vern Sheridan Poythress  (no, I'm not making the name up, he's a serious Bible commentator and scholar!):

Renewal to our lives comes through worship, through adoring this God who created us and saw fit to redeem us through the blood of the Lamb. Revelation renews us, not so much from particular instructions about particular future events, but from showing us God, who will bring to pass all events in his own time and his own way.

We must allow serious study of God's word (which is essential if we love God with our minds) to flow into adoration and worship from the heart because that's God's plan for his creation, and especially for man.
But the reason so many don't make this final step into worship and adoration when they read their Bible is because we think the Bible is about us not about God. So, in the case of Revelation, we spend too much time trying to decipher what the book might (but probably doesn't) say about today's geopolitics instead of seeing that it shows us the character and attributes of God - it is a revelation of God's majesty and sovereign authority, it's about the God who saves and judges, and so it must be read intelligently with the OT as the pirmary point of reference, not geopolitics of today or yesterday.
Similar principles could, of course, be applied to any book of the Bible, and if we allow God's word about himself to lead us to adoration, praise and worship from the heart, it will give God the glory he deserves, put our lives into proper perspective and transform our living.