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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!

Academic and Devotional Reading Should Overlap

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I appreciate JoAnna Hoyt highlighting a point I’ve been making for years: academic and devotional reading should overlap.

This is just one of 9 suggestions Hoyt has for those involved as students or professors at Christian universities or seminaries. But it’s an important point for anyone who seeks both inputs and outputs from Scripture. In other words, this idea is not just for students reading the Bible to write a paper on it, but also for small group leaders reading the Bible in preparation to lead a discussion.

Even if you are reading for outputs (such as writing a paper or leading a small group), your reading should impact yourself first. If it doesn’t, you are not qualified to teach it. How hypocritical is it to ask someone else to apply a text to their life that you have refused to apply to your own life?

For this reason, you don’t need to have separate “devotional time” and “prep time” in the Bible. Your Bible learning should inform your Bible teaching. Walk with Christ, and then call others after you to do the same. Please don’t separate or reverse that order.

Check it out!

It’s Not Too Late

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Tim Challies knows what you and I both know, but might hesitate to say aloud: We easily get off-track and discouraged in our daily Bible reading. Maybe you started the year with great intentions, but circumstances have eclipsed your plans, and now fall is just around the corner.

You could decide to just wait out the next 4 months and try again in the New Year. Or you could make something great happen right now. Challies wants to help you with the latter option, and so do I.

I simply want to encourage you not to surrender the rest of this year. In fact, I want you to believe that you can still make this an extraordinary year of reading your Bible. However, for that to be the case, you will need to take a bit of time to consider how to read, what to read, and how to either form a new habit or re-form an old one.

Are you willing to try again? Challies has a few great ideas:

  • Make your devotions relational
  • Listen to the Bible and pray out loud
  • Involve someone else
  • Use your commute

He then offers specific suggestions for Bible reading and for prayer time. This might be just the sort of advice you need!

Check it out!

Why the Bible is Not Always Easy to Understand

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Kenneth Berding used to think everything in the Bible should be easy to understand.

There was a part of me that thought that the Bible should be easy to understand. I mean, if it’s really from God and if God wrote it to teach us his character and ways, including the way of salvation, you would think that it would be easy to understand, wouldn’t you?

But the same grounds—connecting the nature of the Bible with the nature of God—eventually leads to a different conclusion.

I was assuming that God should be easy to comprehend—that everything about God should be immediately accessible. But unless God himself chose to create a world in which everything is simple to understand—and tells us that it is so—I was simply forcing my assumption upon God that his communication should be easily and quickly understood, at least by me.

If you have struggled with wondering why parts of the Bible are so difficult to understand, Berding’s reflections may encourage you.

Check it out!

The Bible is More Desirable, More Delightful

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Clinton Manley asks why we don’t read the Bible, connecting his answer to two Old Testament characters who believed something was more more desirable or more delightful than God’s Word.

In other words, when we (like Achan and Samson) find other things more delightful or desirable than Scripture, the problem is not Scripture; the problem is us. This is good news, because taste can change; godly taste can be cultivated. And that’s exactly what David is trying to do when he describes God’s word: He’s trying to help us taste and see that the word is good. So, let’s follow him.

Psalm 19 explains that in keeping God’s word, there is great reward (Ps 19:11). Manley traces that idea through the Scripture to calibrate our taste buds.

Check it out!

Bible Reading Tips for Beginners

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This piece by Kevin Halloran would be a great one to send somebody just getting started with reading the Bible. It covers the most important background, offers strong motivation, and provides a practical path toward a habit of communion with God through his word.

Halloran gives 15 practical tips, some of which are:

  • Understand what the Bible is
  • Understand what the Bible does
  • Read prayerfully
  • Read humbly
  • Read in community
  • Read in context
  • Expect difficulty
  • Don’t give up

I commend this article for your consideration and to share with friends and converts.

Check it out!

Addressing the Real Reasons We Don’t Read the Bible

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Marshall Segal introduces a series of posts that will take a stab at addressing the real reasons we don’t read the Bible.

If we’re honest with ourselves, a lot of modern American excuses boil down to one: I’m just too busy right now.

Really?

Am I really too busy to hear from God? Am I too busy to have my soul revived by his living and active word? Am I too busy to receive the wisdom I desperately need in all of my busyness? Am I too busy to have my dim eyes awakened again to ultimate, spiritual reality? Am I too busy to have my easily distracted mind focused on the most important things? Am I too busy to taste the sweetest honey and receive the finest gold? Are we really too busy?

We’re not — and we know it. So, why don’t we read God’s word more than we do? In part, because we haven’t admitted the real reasons we don’t read the Bible.

Segal goes on to mention apathy, pride, illiteracy, and attention spans as some of the “real” reasons, which will be covered in other posts in the series. These reflections are well worth 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.

Can You Trust Your New Testament as a Legitimate Text?

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John Samson has a wonderful article walking through, in non-technical language, the history of how we got the New Testament text we have today. In so doing, he addresses the foolish and cartoonish claim that reading the Bible is like a cosmic “telephone game” through history.

Samson explains:

The telephone game is fun exactly because it was designed to distort the message. It is one slim chain, one whisper at a time, and you cannot check the whisper you heard against anything else, not even the whisper before the one you heard. By the end of the line, you have no way to test anything that occurred along the way. Distortion is basically guaranteed.

The New Testament is the exact opposite to this.

Samson goes on to admit that we don’t have the original manuscripts, and there are many variants, but none of that is reason for concern.

If you’d like to know the truth behind how the text of your Bible landed in your hands, and why we have such an embarrassment of riches as evidence for its legitimacy, Samson’s article will not let you down.

Check it out!

Finding Motivation for Bible Reading

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Reagan Rose tells a compelling story of his transformation with respect to Bible reading, from feeling guilty to finding delight in the Scripture. He found the conviction that the Bible can be understood. He realized he didn’t have to read it, but he gets to read it. And he began seeing specific changes in his life as a result of reading it. He writes:

I write this in the hopes that it might be helpful to some other believer who, like myself, eagerly desires to read the Word with consistency but finds themselves discouraged by their lack of consistency.

Perhaps his testimony can encourage you as well.

Check it out!