My burden in these messages on Proverbs is to help you touch the Word of God by your new man, by exercising your spirit to pray-read. Pray-reading changes the Bible from letters to Spirit and life. Apart from pray-reading, the book of Proverbs is merely a collection of proverbs. But when we pray-read Proverbs, our pray-reading causes all the proverbs to become words of Spirit and life to us.
Ephesians 6:17-18 unveils the matter of pray-reading, and our invention of the term pray-reading was based on these verses. Ephesians 6:17-18 tells us to "receive the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which Spirit is the word of God, by means of all prayer and petition, praying at every time in spirit." Here we see that we should receive the word of God not merely by exercising our mind to understand but by means of all prayer and petition, praying by exercising our spirit. Prayer is general; petition particular.
We receive the word by reading. However, to receive (read) without praying is altogether a matter in the mind. Along with our reading we must pray. When we pray-read the Word by exercising our spirit, the word in black and white immediately becomes the Spirit. In this way the Spirit and the word are one. When we read, it is a word. When we pray with the exercise of our spirit, the word becomes Spirit and life. Whenever we come to the Word we must pray, and we should pray not merely with the mind but with the spirit.
The Bible is God's breathing. God is breathing out Himself as the word (2 Tim. 3:16a). This means that the Bible is God's exhaling. The exhaling of God in the Bible is waiting for us to inhale. When we read any verse and pray, this praying becomes our inhaling of God's breath. By this the Word becomes Spirit and life to us in our experience. If this is not our situation, then even in our reading of the Bible we are not in the new man but are still in the old man.