When one approximates elliptic equations by the spectral collocation method on the Chebyshev-Gauss-Lobatto (CGL) grid, the resulting coefficient matrix is dense and ill-conditioned. It is known that a good preconditioner, in the sense that the preconditioned system becomes well conditioned, can be constructed with finite difference on the CGL grid. However, there is a lack of an efficient solver for this preconditioner in multi-dimension. A modified preconditioner based on the approximate inverse technique is constructed in this paper. The computational cost of each iteration in solving the preconditioned system is O(ℓNN logN), where N,N are the grid sizes in each direction and ℓ is a small integer. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed preconditioner.