Bible reading should be easy, right? In this video, author and bible teacher, Jen Wilkin, explains why that’s a misconception and how we should approach studying the Bible as more of a discipline and skill.
The entire video is above, and the complete transcript is below.
Probably the biggest misconception that people have about studying the Bible is that it should be easy. I think that we think that because God wants me to know Him and the Bible is how I know Him, then it should be easy for me to gain access to that information.
But really, if you think about any discipline you’ve ever learned – and we’re called to be disciples, which means that we are to be disciplined. Any discipline you’ve ever learned, whether it was learning to play a musical instrument or learning to cook a recipe really well or learning to be proficient in a sport, the first time that you sat down to learn that you weren’t good at it, you felt kind of dumb, and you probably wanted to quit.
Bible study is a similar skill. It’s absolutely a skill. And so we need to go into it expecting, not that it will be easy – that the Holy Spirit is just going to dump truth on us just because we were faithful to sit down and flip open the covers – but rather, that if we obey just some simple reading tools that we would use with any book, that the Bible will begin to yield up treasure to us.
But most of us, have kind of forgotten the things that we learned in high school English class with regard to reading according to the kind of genre that we’re reading or just a simple thing like reading from start to finish in a book before we start trying to pull it apart into smaller pieces.
Reclaiming a method and then applying it faithfully and slowly and taking a long-term approach to how we encounter the scriptures can be a huge help to us. Rather than thinking, “I have 10 minutes to give to this and I need something to be yielded up to me in that 10 minutes.”
That’s a big misconception that a lot of people have, but it’s one that can be easily overcome. Because three years from now you’ll be better than you are today. And five years from now you’ll be better at it than you were three years from now. And so and so forth. You do develop proficiency over time.
I don’t know that anybody ever feels like they’re mastered the Bible, but the good news is, we can keep moving forward and growing in the knowledge of the Lord and therefore being increasingly conformed into the image of Christ.
