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Don’t Let Study Replace Reading

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A few weeks ago, I gave two of my daughters new study Bibles. But along with the Bibles came a few rules I expect them to follow:

  • Don’t use the study Bible as your main Bible, but keep it on the shelf as a reference.
  • Don’t use the study Bible just because a passage feels hard to understand. Work on the passage as far as you can first.
  • Don’t crack open the study Bible unless you’ve got a specific question on a specific text.

Ben Hicks has a thoughtful piece about not study Bibles in particular but the process of Bible study in general. In “Don’t Just Study the Bible, Read it!” he addresses the numerous ways that “study” could get in the way of direct interaction with the Scriptures. For example,

If you want to get started reading your Bible, there’s a lot of help available. Literally thousands of books, podcasts, videos, and other resources have been designed and published to help you study the Bible, many of them free of charge. You could listen to sermons every hour of the day, every day of the week and not begin to make a dent in all the sermons that were uploaded to that internet from that previous Sunday. All of this is wonderful, and could rightly be described as an “embarrassment of riches.” We have near limitless assistance in better reading the Bible. The danger, of course, is that these wonderful tools can become a replacement for actually reading the Bible.

He’s absolutely right. Let’s not get so caught up in the supplements that we starve ourselves of the true feast.

Hicks’s piece is worth a bit of your time. Check it out!

After 5 Years, You’ll Be Unrecognizable

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Back at the New Year, Ben Hicks offered some encouragement for regular Bible reading. Now that the year is almost half-over, perhaps some encouragement is in order. Keep on keeping on. It’s worth it!

Writing about the student who is tempted to quit his Bible reading because he hasn’t been perfectly consistent with it:

No, he doesn’t quit. You don’t expect to see a drastic change overnight. But he continues to work at it. Some days he misses. Occasionally he makes sinful choices that really set him back. But he stumbles along, developing the skill of Bible reading and getting better and better at it. After a week nothing looks that different. After a month, you can kind of tell. After a semester, there’s noticeable change. After 5 years, he’s unrecognizable.

Have you been struggling? Are you tempted to give up? Don’t do it. Get back and try it again. Little by little, “you are turning the central part of you…into something a little different from what it was before” (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity).

Hicks might provide the encouragement you need. Check it out!

And then get back into the Scriptures.