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Read Until Your Heart Burns Within You
A Practical Way to Hear God in All the Scriptures
Ryan Patrick Murphy
June 13, 2026
I love the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus.
After Jesus rises from the dead, he appears to two disciples on a journey from Jerusalem to Emmaus, but the catch is that they don’t recognize that it’s him.
Even after he teaches them from “all the Scriptures” about the Messiah, they still don’t recognize Jesus.
It’s only when he breaks bread with them that their eyes are opened, and they realize that their hearts had been burning within them while he was explaining the Scriptures to them.
27 Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. 28 As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. 29 But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. 30 When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. 31 Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight. 32 They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”
I believe many of us approach Scripture like the disciples approach Jesus on the Road to Emmaus.
Scripture is meant to be the meeting place of God with us, but we often don’t recognize God as we are reading the Bible.
Instead of encountering the living God in the pages of our Bibles we rush through them, make it about information instead of encounter, make checkmarks on our Bible reading plans, or stand confused or even offended by some of the words in Scripture.
Additionally, in our content-saturated world we can be so inundated by podcasts, social media posts, sermons, and sound bites it can feel easier to hear God through one of this mediums than through wrestling with an ancient text that can sometimes be confusing or feel distant from our current context.
When was the last time you heard God speak in the Bible?
When was the last time you encountered God in his word?
I believe the road to Emmaus offrs us a key of how to hear God in Scripture:
We must read until our hearts burn within us.
Scripture is meant to be our primary space of divine encounter.
When John writes his first letter to the early churches, he says he is writing so that they may share in the same fellowship that he has with Jesus (1 John 1:1-4).
This is wild — the disciple who lays his head on Jesus’s chest says that by reading his letter, we can have the same level of intimate access to God.
Consider these words from inimitable Catholic theologian von Balthasar:
All of the sudden we just know: prayer is a conversation in which God’s word has the initiative and we, for the moment, can be nothing more than listeners. The essential thing is for us to hear God’s word and discover from it how to respond to him. His word is the truth, opened up to us…God word is his initation to us to be with him in the truth. We are in danger of drowning on the open sea, and God’s word is the rope ladder thrown down to us so that we can climb up into the rescuing vessel. It is the carpet, rolled out toward us so that we can walk along it to the Father’s throne. Is is the lantern which shines in the darkness of the word…Finally, God’s word is himself, his most vital, his innermost self: his only-begotten Son, of the same nature as himself, sent into the world to bring it home, back to him. And so God speaks to us from heaven and commends us to his Word, dwelling on earth for a while: “This is my beloved Son: listen to him” (Mt 17:5).
What I’m inviting us to here is really quite simple and practical.
When I say “read until your heart burns within you,” my suggestion is that we read until a word or verse jumps out at us.
Then, I’m inviting us to believe in faith that this is the author of the word inviting us to a dialogue with himself.
Bring the word or verse that jumps out into a conversation with heaven. Talk to God and let him talk back.
If possible, try to recall the word or phrase that jumped out at you throughout the day and use it to cultivate a continual conversation with God.
So, I’d love to invite you to pray today. Take a few deep breaths. Maybe as you breathe in, pray “Come,” and as you breathe out, pray “Holy Spirit.”
If you have the space, open up your Bible — perhaps to the Psalms or to Mark 1 — and read until your heart burns within you!
Best,
Ryan