Living by the Book/Living by the Book Workbook Set (13 page)

Today I realize that he was wisely practicing the second strategy to first-rate Bible reading:

The genius of the Word of God is that it has staying power; it can stand up to repeated exposure. In fact, that’s why it is unlike any other book. You may be an expert in a given field. So if you read a book in that field two or three times, you’ve got it. You can put it on the shelf and move on to something else. But
that’s never true of the Bible. Read it over and over again, and you’ll still see things that you’ve never seen before.

Let me suggest several ideas to help you in this process of reading repeatedly.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking about books such as Isaiah and Jeremiah, and you’re saying “Man, I’d die before I got through them.” But may I remind you that the bulk of the books in Scripture are no longer than two or three ordinary columns in a newspaper. And even the longer books are shorter than most novels. So go ahead and read books of the Bible at one sitting.

The value here is that you’ll be able to appreciate the unity of each book. That’s what most people miss when they skip from passage to passage. They never get a sense of the whole. Consequently, their perception is fragmented. It’s like switching from channel to channel on a TV set, catching a few scenes or snatches of dialogue but never watching an entire program.

I remember one time when I was studying the book of Matthew. I had studied it before and even taught it. But frankly, I had never quite grasped where the writer was going. So I carved out a slice of time one Saturday morning and read the entire twenty-eight chapters. For the first time in my life, I finally began to understand what Matthew was trying to communicate in his book.

The same is true for the rest of the books. Each one was written as a unit. They only hang together when read in their entirety, just like any other book. Reading them at one sitting will help you grasp that big picture.

Often readers dive into the middle of a book in the Bible, and then they can’t figure why the text makes no sense. They wouldn’t think of starting a novel in the fifth or sixth chapter, and then condemning it as dull and uninteresting. But that’s exactly what they do to the Scriptures. They take a passage, rip it out of its context until it virtually screams, and then wonder why they can’t understand it.

Remember our study of Acts 1:8? Fortunately the first word,
but
, warned
us to go back and check out the context. And since we were only eight verses into the book, it was no problem to pick up the narrative from the beginning. Doing so helped us discover all kinds of things about the purpose of the book, the writer, the man to whom it was written, and the setting in which verse 8 takes place.

But suppose we had chosen to study Acts 2:8, or 8:8, or 28:8. Standing by themselves, these verses make little sense. It is not until we link them with their surrounding paragraphs, and those paragraphs with their surrounding sections, and those sections with the entire book of Acts, that they take on significance.

So we’re back to the same issue: the books of the Bible were written as units. If you cut them anywhere, they bleed. So if chapter seven has the measles, you can be sure that chapters six and eight have got the same disease.

The danger in reading repeatedly is familiarity with the text. After a while you can put yourself to sleep. One way to avoid that is to use a variety of translations so that once you’re on intimate terms with one, you can try another. It keeps the experience alive, and you’re bound to notice new things.

One of the most exciting developments of the last few years is the proliferation of audio versions of the Bible. You can get almost any translation you want. I like to listen to them in the car, but there’s nothing to prevent you from listening to them while you’re working in the yard, painting the garage, tanning at the beach, or jogging down the street.

The values of this habit are many. First, you change the sensory experience from the visual to the aural. For many portions of Scripture, this is closer to the way the material was originally presented than it is in its current, written form. For instance, all of the teaching of Jesus, including the parables and the Sermon on the Mount, was presented verbally. The book of Job was probably recited long before it was written down. And the Psalms were mostly sung, not read. Hearing the words is a far more involving experience than reading them.

The voice of the reader helps too. No two people read Scripture exactly the same way. So hearing the tapes is like encountering a new translation. The words may be the same, but the emphases are different. Furthermore, if the reader knows what he’s doing, he can bring the text alive in an engaging way.

A final benefit of recorded Scripture is that you can play the recording over and over to gain the value of repetition. I mentioned the man who had read a particular passage at least a hundred times. Imagine
hearing
a passage one hundred times. You think you might remember something of the truth in that passage?

This follows from everything I have just said. There’s nothing like the sound of your own voice to get you involved in Scripture. Reading out loud forces you to pay attention to every word.

Furthermore, there’s actually a biblical precedent for doing so. Deuteronomy 6:7 instructs parents, especially fathers, to “teach [the words of Scripture] diligently to your sons and . . . talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.” In other words, God’s Word should be part and parcel of your conversation at home. In light of this principle, I ask, when was the last time your kids heard you read the Bible to them?

Actually, I encourage you to let your whole family get in on the act. Have your kids read to you, then you read to them. Work your way through the gospels, or the Old Testament histories, or perhaps one of the epistles. Use a translation that is easy to read. I guarantee you’ll drive biblical truth where it belongs—into your memory.

This idea has been around for years, and with good reason. Many of us feel exhausted just looking at the Bible. We figure we’d be in our rocking chairs by the time we read the entire thing. But the truth is that it’s possible to read through the whole Book in a year’s time if we read a few chapters a day. Many Bibles even have a schedule for that in the back.

Imagine sticking to a program like that year after year. It wouldn’t take
long for you to read every verse of Scripture ten, twenty, or even thirty times.

Of course, you don’t have to take a through-the-Bible-in-a-year approach. You could try reading a Psalm in the morning and a Psalm at night. That would take you through the entire Psalms almost five times in a year. Or read a chapter of Proverbs every day—the entire book every month. Or concentrate on one book for one month: a chapter of Ephesians or Galatians every day on Monday through Saturday, four times; or a chapter of 1 John every day for thirty days.

You can devise your own schedule for completing these books. Or come up with a plan of your own. The point is, devise a way to help you mark your progress. If you’re a person who needs structure or who likes to achieve goals, this is a great way to read Scripture repeatedly.

T
here’s an old saying that nothing good happens fast. I don’t know if that’s altogether true, but it does have some bearing on Bible study. Unless you’ve got highly developed habits of reading, it is unlikely that you can just dip into the Word for five minutes and come away with much of significance. In fact, highly skilled readers devote a lot more than five minutes to the task. They’ve learned to approach Scripture using the third strategy of first-rate reading:

That’s a hard assignment for most of us. We live in an instant society. The things we used to want tomorrow, we now want right now. And the things we used to need right away, we now need yesterday. So it’s no surprise that if we do decide to open our Bibles, we expect results instantly and effortlessly. If we don’t hit the jackpot in short order, we’re liable to get very frustrated, very quickly.

But the fruit of the Word takes time to ripen. So if you are the least bit impatient, you’re liable to bail out early and miss out on a rich harvest. Many people do that. They get disillusioned with the process. Perhaps they
are looking for entertainment rather than enlightenment. People tell me, “Look, I tried to read the Bible, but it’s like plowing through concrete.”