How to Read the Bible
From the Series: How
Speaker: Heather Zempel
Date: January 13, 2008
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Transcript
Welcome to National Community Church. If you have a Bible, you can turn with me over to Psalm 19 and put your finger there, we’ll be there in just a second. I want to say a special welcome to you tonight, thanks for being with us. If you are a student, we want to extend a special welcome to you, welcome back to school. If you are joining us via our podcast or webcast, we want to welcome you along with our four locations. It’s crazy all the stuff we have going on isn’t it.
I am Heather Zempel, I am the Discipleship Pastor here at National Community Church, which means that I primarily oversee our small group ministries and also Spiritual Formation Leadership Development, and we are in a new series now called “How”. Very practical, in fact Pastor Mark said last week, painfully practical, as we explore some spiritual disciplines and activities that will help us grow strategically and intentionally throughout this coming year as we seek to become followers of Christ and ultimately hope to become more like Him. So last week Pastor Mark kicked off the series with “How To Set Life Goals” and I know that all of you exercised that spiritual muscle this week and set 100 life goals right? I heard one yeah down here somewhere. Setting goals can be an exercise of our faith, and today I want to talk about another one, and this is a goal we want you to set this year, and it’s a goal for studying the Bible and we’re gonna talk tonight about how to study the Bible. Now this probably won’t be the most inspirational or motivational sermon you’ve ever heard because again, it’s going to be painfully practical. When you walked in tonight, you got a little brochure that has some information in it on how to study the Bible, these aren’t necessarily sermon notes, I’m not going to go over all this material tonight. If I did, you’d be here for a few days, but you can take this home with you and hopefully it will be a resource and a guide to you as you seek to try to implement some of the things that we’ll talk about this weekend.
Now some of you have already hit the snooze button on me, because about half of you are saying, “Ok I’m done with this whole Bible reading thing, I’ve tried it, I know I’m supposed to do it, I know it’s a good thing for me, and I’ve tried. At least half a dozen times, I’ve started in Genesis 1 and I have just tanked out at Leviticus 1.” And you’ve tried and it hasn’t worked. There’s another group of you tonight that are checking out because you’re like, “Oh, I know how to do this, I know how to read my Bible, I do it, it’s great, I know I’m supposed to do that and I’ve got it covered.” I want to do two things tonight and they are kind of at the polar opposite extremes. One is, I want to de-mystify this whole Bible study thing. I want to break it down and make it simple, it’s really not that difficult and there are a few things we can all do to make it very simple for us to read and study the Bible. So for you guys that have started in Genesis 1 two dozen times and just completely just flamed out at Leviticus 1, we’ll talk about some things tonight that will help you get through that whole problem. For those of you who are bored with this whole idea because you’ve heard it your whole life and you’re just done with it, we need to recapture a sense of awe and mystery of the Bible. We have forgotten the power of this story. It’s a story of ultimate sacrifice and gut-wrenching betrayal, it’s the story of love and romance and mystery and intrigue and murder, and we have lost that, and tonight I want to re-wet our appetite for the story of the Bible.
The instructions of the Lord are perfect, reviving the soul. The decrees of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple. The commandments of the Lord are right, bringing joy to the heart. The commands of the Lord are clear, giving insight for living. Reverence to the Lord is pure, lasting forever. The laws of the Lord are true, each one is fair. They are more desirable than gold, even the finest gold. They are sweeter than honey, even honey dripping from the comb. They are rewarding to your service, a great reward for those who obey Him.
Just listen to these words, listen to the words of this Psalm. They revive, they make wise, they bring joy, they’re a great reward. They are more desirable than gold. When was the last time we desired the Word of God like that? 66 different books, 40 different authors, written over a span of about 1,600 years on three different continents, in three different languages, and all of them point to the same message that God loves you so much that He sent His son on the most daring rescue mission in history. That’s what this is about, and we’ve got to rediscover our hunger for the Word, that we realize it revives us, it brings us joy, it is a reward to us, and it is more desirable than gold.
Probably because I was preparing for this message, and when you’re going to have to stand up and preach on something, you have to be even more intentional about doing it in your own life, but on Friday morning I woke up with two different verses on my brain. Sometimes I wake up with the craziest things on my brain. One morning it was the depravity of man and that’s a whole other issue, but Friday morning I woke up and there were two verses from Psalm 119 that were just right here and I couldn’t shake them out of my head. One is Psalm 119:20 that says: I am overwhelmed continually with the desire for Your laws. I am overwhelmed continually with the desire for Your laws. The other one was Psalm 119:14: I have rejoiced in your decrees as much as I have rejoiced in riches. And what I was challenged with that morning was when was the last time I was overwhelmed with the desire for God’s law? In the middle ages, the churches had to chain the Bibles to the pews so that people wouldn’t walk out with them. Several years ago, there was a village in Indonesia where there was one Bible for the entire village and the church in that village had that one Bible that they shared amongst themselves and they heard that there were free Bibles being given away in another village called Sopa, so what the village decided to do was send a delegation of men to Sopa to get these Bibles and bring them back. That village was a 7-day walk away. Those men walked for 7 days to get 300 Bibles that they could bring back to their village so the entire village could have a Bible. But so many of us can’t reach 7 inches across the nightstand to pick one up.
There was a North Korean evangelist last year, last year guys, who was executed for distributing copies of the Bible. So many of us have Bibles gaining dust on our shelves. There is a hunger in so many places of the world for the Word of God, and we don’t have it, and we need to get it, and we need to cultivate that. We need to ask the Holy Spirit to develop that inside of us. So tonight I want to re-wet our appetites and I want to give us some very practical, painfully practical steps for why and how we should read the Word of God.
But first of all, let’s just talk a little bit about why we should read it. First of all, and this is very obvious, it teaches us about God. Psalm 119:12 says: Blessed are you oh Lord, teach me your principles. If you read throughout Psalm 119, you see over and over that there is a connection between knowing God’s law and being thankful for God, for praising God, for expressing gratitude for God. The more we know about God, the more we love Him. The more we know about God, the more we can praise Him. The more we know about Him, the more we can be thankful. So we read the Word of God because it teaches us about God.
The second reason we read it is because it teaches us how to live. Psalm 119:105 says: Your Word I have hidden in my heart that I might not sin against you. So there’s something about knowing the Word of God and being in the Word of God that actually helps us live correctly. Joshua 1:8 says: Do not let the Book of the Law depart from your mouth, but meditate on it day and night so that you will be careful to do everything in it, then you will be prosperous and successful. The Bible, when we know it and apply it, helps us to be prosperous and successful in our day to day living. A lot of us pick up this Book and we think, “That’s a lot of archaic language about a bunch of ancient people doing a bunch of weird things.” But the reality is these were real people living in a real time and real situations. The cultural context and historical context might have been different but there were still marriages to nurture, there were still jobs to do, there were still finances to manage, there were still decisions to make and the Bible gives us keys to all those things. But it’s bigger than just that, the Bible also gives you a purpose. It gives you a sense of destiny. Author John Eldridge wrote: For most of us, life seems like a movie we have arrived at 45 minutes late. We find ourselves in the middle of a story that is sometimes wonderful, sometimes awful, often a confusing mixture of both, and we haven’t a clue how to make sense of it all. It’s like we’re holding in our hands some pages torn out of a book, these pages are the days of our lives, fragments of a story. They seem important, or at least we long to know they are, but what does it all mean? If only we could find the book that contains the rest of the story. This is the Book that contains the rest of the story. It is God’s story. He is writing your story against the backdrop of His story. See a lot of times, we approach this Book like it’s a systematic theology, or a set of principles and statements that must be embraced and obeyed. Some people have viewed it as a Science textbook or a political platform or an anthropology book. And the Scripture certainly does speak to all of those different areas, but what it is first and foremost is the story of God and His passionate pursuit of a people. And its when we view our lives against the backdrop of Scripture that those age-old questions of who am I, why am I here, what is the purpose of life, those questions get answered. This give us purpose and it gives us destiny. There is a great quote from Lord of the Rings where the little hobbit Sam asks of Froto, “I wonder what sort of tale we’ve fallen into?” We need to fall into God’s tale tonight and watch the way that our lives and history change as a result.
So let’s talk about how we do this. If we’re talking about how, I want to talk about how not to read Scripture, alright? There are two ways that many of us read Scripture, I do this, and it’s not the best way to do it. The first is called the Bible roulette method. Anybody familiar with it? It’s where you know you’re supposed to read Scripture so you do this number in the mornings and you plop down on a verse and you read: And Judas went out and hung himself. And you know that’s no good, so you close it back up, you say, “God let’s do this again.” You shake it up, you spin and you read: Go therefore and do likewise. Now, I’m not saying that God can never speak in that way. Sometimes He does. If those were the verses you got, that’s probably not God speaking. But there are times when in prayer, the Holy Spirit might drop a Scripture reference into our hearts and He might seek you that way, but that’s not the normal way that we should approach Scripture. The other method we sometimes use is the yearbook method. Think back to middle school, high school, you get your yearbook, what do you do? If you’re like me, maybe because I’m prideful or something, I begin to flip through and look for pictures of myself and pictures of my friends, pictures that mean something to me. And sometimes we do that with the Word of God. We get up in the morning and we know we’re supposed to read, so we want to turn to a good place in Scripture to find our God-fix for the day, and we usually turn to a Proverb or a Psalm or one of the epistles because those are great places to find pictures of us.
Deuteronomy is a terrible place to find pictures of us. But in Ephesians, we can find a picture of us. So we go there and we get that word that speaks to us and means something to us, we close it back up and we’re done for the day. Again, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that approach, but it doesn’t give you the entire perspective on Scripture that God would want you to have. So now, I’m finally getting to the “how”, we’re half way through and I’m just now getting to the how.
How to study Scripture. Seven principles that will help you engage in the Word of God.
Number 1. Choose an appropriate translation. This is real inspiration isn’t it? Ah, translation. Choose an appropriate translation. You know, it can be intimidating looking for a Bible, you go into the bookstore and you’ve go Bibles covered with metal, you’ve got all different colors, you’ve got a million different translations, you’ve got Bibles for men, Bibles for women, Bibles for couples, Bibles for kids, Bibles for firemen, it goes on and on and on and you don’t know what to choose. Choose an appropriate translation. Now this is boring but hang on with me for a couple seconds. Translation theory. This is a little oversimplified but we’re gonna run with it. There are three primary ways that Scripture is translated. The first is called literal translations; these are word for word translations of the original text. They are very accurate but not always very readable, because it just takes one word and directly translates it into the modern equivalent word in our receptor language. Examples of this are the New American Standard Bible or the King James Version. On the total opposite end of the spectrum is what’s called the free translation or paraphrase. That’s where the general idea is translated and conveyed in the modern language. Some translations like the Message or the Living Bible would fit into that category. The sweet spot right in the middle is called dynamic equivalent, and what happens in that translation is they try to translate phrase for phrase in a way that maintains the accuracy but makes it a little more readable in our modern language. It takes into account different idioms and figures of speech and metaphors that might not be as recognizable to us today and translates them in a way that is meaningful. Some scholars would argue that something like a New International Version is more accurate than even the literal translations because the way that something is expressed in the original Greek or Hebrew just translated directly into English might not be as meaningful as something that is translated phrase for phrase. So choose an appropriate translation. Most scholars believe that the NIV hits the sweet spot of accuracy and readability. So if you’re looking for a good translation, that’s one. Get a good study Bible that has notes in the margins and things that give you insight into what you’re reading. It’s good I think to sometimes have several different translations so you can look at how the Scripture is translated several different ways. You can do this easy for free online at www.biblegateway.com or www.youversion.com. Easy way to do that. And sometimes you want to change up your translation. If you’re doing devotional reading, change the translation you are using every now and then, because what happens is we read these familiar Scriptures and we just kind of skip over them, but when you read it in a different translation, it will hit you in a different way. For whatever it’s worth, I typically use the NIV for my personal reading and personal study. If I’m doing a very systematic word for word study, I’ll use New American Standard. I typically preach from the New Living Translation, which is a little bit newer. The reason I preach from that is because it was translated in such a way that when it is spoken out loud it would hit the ears of a modern audience in a similar way that it hit the ears of the first century church. So choose an appropriate translation.
Number 2. Read critically. Read critically. Acts 17:11: Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures to see if what Paul said was true. One of the most important theological pieces of instruction I ever got was actually from my mom. I don’t know what prompted her to say this, I don’t remember the context, but she said to me one time, “Heather don’t believe what someone says just because they are standing behind a pulpit. You get in the Word of God and figure it out for yourself.” I don’t know if she realized it or not, but she was actually training me to become a Berean. Some of us read Scripture and we read right over it and we think we already know what it says so we don’t read it very critically. Others of us have just assumed we can’t understand what it means so we don’t try to understand what it means. There are a few questions we can ask ourselves as we are reading Scripture that help us put it under the microscope, pick it apart and really understand what it is saying to us. One thing we can do is know the genre of the book that we’re reading. The Bible is not one continuous story line, you have to think about the Bible as a set of books or a library of books that are shelved according to their genre. So you’re going to read the law very differently from how you would read the history or the poetry or the prophecy or the letters. One of the best example of understanding this actually came to me from our Assistant Media Pastor, Jeremy, and he said, “It’s sorta like when you’re reading a newspaper, if you pick up the front page and you read ‘Thousands slaughtered in African slum’ you are going to have one particular understanding of that, a certain interpretation of that, you are going to react to that in a certain emotional way. If however you go a couple sections over and pick up the sports section and it says there that the LSU Tigers slaughtered the weak, incompetent, slow Ohio State Buckeyes… you know I had to work that in… then you are going to have a completely different reaction to that. If you are a good moral, upright person, you are going to have a positive reaction to that! (Laughter). Different ways of understanding the word slaughter. And the same thing is true of Scripture, when you’re reading poetry or prophecy, you might read it differently from how you read the history or the law or the narratives or the epistles. So know the genre, know the type of book. And a good study Bible will help you figure that out. Know who wrote it and why they wrote it and who they were writing to. Look at the theme that is the over-arching message of that book, look for recurring words or phrases in the text. A great example of this is if you read the book of Ephesians and you are looking for those words and phrases, you will find over and over again, “in Him” and “in Christ” over and over again, and if you pay attention to those, you realize that in the book of Ephesians, one of the main points is to teach us our identity in Christ, and when you see those recurring words, you pick up on the message of the Book. So read critically, put Scripture under the microscope and examine it and test it and pick it apart and put it back together again.
Number 3. Read devotionally. If reading critically is putting the Scripture under a microscope and examining it, then reading devotionally is flipping that upside-down and putting yourself under the microscope of Scripture and letting Scripture pick you apart. It is not as much fun of a process. Reading critically is about getting information, reading devotionally is about life transformation. Over and over in the Bible, we read the word “meditate”: I meditated on your Word day and night, I meditated continuously. And we kind of have a negative connotation associated with that word in our culture today, we associate it with new-age religion or weird stuff that Christians shouldn’t do. But the original meaning of this word meant to chew on the Scripture. So we need to meditate on it, we need to let the Scripture soak into our lives so that it does what it says in Colossians 3:16: The Word of Christ dwells within us richly. The best way to read devotionally is to include prayer. Pray at the beginning of your Scripture reading, pray at the end. It’s a good thing to ask the Author to come help you understand what He has written. It is a good thing at the end of your reading to say, “God what do you want me to take away from this reading that I just went through?” Read devotionally, pray. If you come across something you don’t understand, ask the Holy Spirit to help you understand it. This is something I tend to forget, I read something in Scripture and then I run to every commentary I can find to figure out the meaning, and then think, “Oh wait, I could ask the Author.” And the Holy Spirit can speak to you about the meaning of that passage. Read devotionally, it is a way for you to connect with God.
Number 4. Write down your observations. Write down what you are seeing in Scripture. Sometimes you might read something that, ya know, you’re not doing the yearbook method so you don’t really see a picture of yourself in what you read, but if you write down some observations, you may find that later, you come back to that and find that it is very meaningful and applicable to some new place you’re at in your life. A few years ago, a discipleship pastor encouraged me to every time I read Scripture to write down a speck of truth. And the word SPECK is an acronym that stands for: a Sin to confess, a Promise to claim, an Example to follow, a Command to obey or Knowledge to believe, and I think that’s written out in the notes that you have if you’re trying to capture that. A Sin to confess, a Promise to claim, and Example to follow, a Command to obey or some new Knowledge that you’ve just received that you need to believe. Write down a speck of truth every time you read Scripture, and I would recommend that every time you read, you have a pen, you have a highlighter in hand so you can circle those recurring words or you can make notes in your margin, or if you’re like me and you don’t like notes in your Bible, I use a journal. Jesus never commanded us to journal, but if people hadn’t journaled, we wouldn’t have the Bible, so I still say it is a good spiritual discipline, so journal. Write down the things you are learning. I used to do that in a notebook, I do it now mainly on my computer. I have a Word document that I open up anytime I do a new study and keep notes on there. You might want to blog about what you are reading. Earlier in 2007, I did a verse by verse through Psalm 119 for a couple months and every day, I just blogged my thoughts on that particular verse and it was a way to keep me accountable and a way to keep me journaling about what I was reading.
Number 5. Read in community with others. I’m a small groups person, you know I had to throw that in. Read in community with other people. It is very valuable when you sit down with the text and your wrestle over it in the context of community. We weren’t created to do this Christian thing on our own. We were created to do it in the context of relationships. And reading in a community with other people keeps us sometimes from attaching meanings and interpretations to passages that were never intended to be attached to that. We all kind of come at Scripture through our own lens of our experiences and our own presuppositions and when we read in community with others, those begin to break down. We’ve got some small groups starting up in a couple weeks. Some of them are listed on the back of that handout, the ones that are really focused on Bible reading and going through Scripture. I would encourage you to plug into one of those. If you don’t like any of those, that’s fine, it doesn’t hurt our feelings, it doesn’t have to be an NCC small group. Find 3 or 4 friends that you can get around a coffee table with once a week and go through the Word of God together. Read it in context of community. But it is not just community, it is reading what others have said about Scripture throughout the years. We’ve got 2,000 year’s worth of men who are much smarter than any of us and probably love God more than most of us, who have written their thoughts on different passages of Scripture throughout the years. Sometimes it comes in the form of commentaries, sometimes it comes in the form of letters they’ve written, sometimes in the form of books. Read those books along with Scripture. An example of how I did this last year, at the beginning of the year, I did a study on humility and as I was doing that, I went out and grabbed a couple of books. An author by the name of Andrew Murray had written a book many years ago, and then a contemporary author, C.J. Mahaney had also written a book entitled Humility. Knowing the character and the life of both of those men, I wanted to read what they had to say about the topic I was studying, so I brought those books side by side with the Scriptural text and it helped me learn more about that. So look at commentaries. There are a lot online that are free. If you are studying a certain topic, grab some books from people that might have something to say that is helpful and meaningful as you study that particular Bible character or that particular book or that particular spiritual characteristic or trait. So read in community with others.
Number 6. Have a plan. Set goals. However you want to say this. This is so important because if you don’t do this, then you’re gonna rely on Bible roulette and yearbook method. If you don’t have a plan, you will default to those settings. So have a time and place. For me it usually works out best really early in the morning when there aren’t many people and the phone is not ringing and emails aren’t coming through and it is just quiet, or really late at night. Those are times that tend to be best for me to study. Set timelines and goals. Just to give you an example, last year I started the year off with a study on humility, then I went to a study on the book of Habakkuk, I went through Habakkuk for a couple months just verse by verse and chapter by chapter. Then I did some study on the cross, the cross of Christ, what does the Bible say about the cross? What does it mean for us today? I did some verse by verse through Psalm 119. I read large chunks of the New Testament last year, but if I hadn’t set those plans in place, if I hadn’t written those down, I don’t know that that would have happened. Right now I’m in the process of figuring out what I want to do for 2008. I’m in a study of the book of Nahum right now, which is just blowing my mind, really crazy through that book. I want to look at Zephaniah, I want to look again at Psalm 119. I’m wanting to do a study of John 15 where I go through that passage about I am the vine and you are the branches and I’ve gotten another book from Andrew Murray where he has done a whole series on John 15. So make a plan, write it down, and in your plan make sure you’ve got some variation. Balance the Old Testament and the New Testament. You spend too long in those Minor Prophets, you’ll start doing weird stuff. Balance the Old and New Testament. Balance the type of books you’re reading. Balance if you’re doing big devotional reading where you read large chunks of Scripture at one time, then where you might spend days just chewing on one verse of Scripture. In your handout, there are different ways that you can read the Bible, different plans that are laid out for you, where you can read biographically, or you can read about different historical times in Scripture. If you are going to read through the Bible in a year, I would encourage you to get chronological Bible because that keeps the story moving along and you don’t get bogged down in some of those more seemingly tedious areas of Scripture. So have a plan and set timelines and goals and go for it.
Number 7. Apply it to your life. D.L. Moody said the Bible was not given to increase our knowledge but to change our lives. It’s not enough to just get information, you’ve got to put it into practice. In fact, in Matthew 23, we see Jesus’ condemnation of the Pharisees who knew Scripture really well, they had all the information, and they looked great on the outside, but this is what Jesus said about them: The teachers of religious law and the Pharisees are the official interpreters of the law of Moses, so practice and obey whatever they tell you but don’t follow their example for they don’t practice what they preach. We’ve got to practice what we preach. So choose a good translation, read it critically, read it devotionally, read it prayerfully, have a plan, set goals and timelines, read it in community with other people. And start today.
Now some of you are thinking this is really great but don’t know where to start, like, ‘do I start in Genesis 1:1 again?’ Maybe. I always encourage people to start in the book of Mark. Mark is the shortest gospel, so you get one knocked out really quickly and you feel good about it, right? It’s the story of Jesus, stories about His miracle and His teachings and it moves quickly and it is exciting. I’d go from there to the book of Acts and read about the early church. Acts is one of the most exciting books of the Bible, and then maybe read the book of Ephesians which talks so much about what it means to be the church and what it means to be a follower of Christ. Then maybe go back and read Genesis where some of those fun Old Testament stories that are so familiar to us are. Then maybe read the book of Psalms. Those are a couple of starting places or a potential path for you to go as you start reading this year.
The point is this, God desperately wants to sweep you in to His story. He wants to bring you into this epic tale that He is writing throughout history. There is a fascinating verse, this is so cool, in II Corinthians 3:3: Clearly you are a letter from Christ showing the result of our ministry among you. This letter is written not with pen and ink, but with the spirit of the living God. It is carved not on tablets of stone, but on human hearts. Think about that for just a second. This is the Word of God, this is true, this is His story. What Paul is telling the Corinthians is that as you live with this as your backdrop, you become a letter from Christ. You can become a part of this tale that God is telling throughout history. You become a part of His story. We find ourselves somewhere between the end of the book of Acts and the end of Revelation and He is using your life to tell His story. But it’s only when we live with this as the center of our lives. Imagine just for a moment what it could be like if everyone of us lived in such a way that our lives were a letter from Christ to the world around us. Imagine what we could do if each one of us every day for the next week decided to apply one thing that we learned from Scripture in our every day, walking around lives. We could change the course of our life, we could change the course of the lives of those around us, we could change history. In the beginning, God. Where does it go from there? Let’s fall into God’s tale tonight and immerse our lives in the story of Scripture.
God, thank you so much for your Word, thank you so much for giving us this precious gift that you so carefully wrote through human hands. Father we pray tonight for people around the world that don’t have a copy of this Book and so desperately need it, we pray for translators and linguists and pastors and missionaries and we pray that your Word would spread across this earth. And I pray that we would have a new appreciation for it, that we would hunger for it the way the Psalmist hungered for it. And God I pray that we would read it in such a way that we apply it to our lives and it changes us, it changes those around us, it changes those around us, and it changes the history of our lives. We ask it all for your glory, God. We thank you for it, in Jesus name we pray. Amen.
Ministry Transcription
Margaret Salyers
606-706-5006
margaretsalyers@gmail.com
