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How to Read and Understand the Bible

By Mary Fairchild

JimMooberry

 

 

 

The following is a phonetic reading of an expository teaching tapes of  Pastor Jim Mooberry; “The Faithful Word.”

 

HOW TO READ AND UNDERSTAND THE BIBLE

“Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15).

“Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought: but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.  But as it is written, ‘Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.  But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of , God.  For what man knoweth the things of man, save the spirit of man which is in him?  Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of  God” (1 Corinthians 2:6-11)

I find it paradoxical that there is so little understanding about this subject in a day in which there are more Bibles available than in any other time in history.  In fact, there are more Bible in existence in the United States today than there has been in any time in history—in fact probably more than all of history combined.  In fact, more being produced and sold.  More translations being made, and yet this is also becoming the most biblically illiterate generation of Christians in our history.  Religious activity is increasing everywhere.  Christian books, religious books are being read more than ever, but the majority of Christians just don’t read their Bible.  In church—yes, we read the Scriptures.  Sometimes at home, occasionally, but faithfully and regularly, no.  And the results are really very predictable and they’re really rather alarming—THAT IS THE LACK OF DISCERNMENT IN CHRISTIANS TODAY, THE LACK OF STABILITY IN THEIR LIVES, POWER, AND TRUE FAITH….and it comes from our lack of reading the Scriptures.

The Bible is the most important book that you will ever read as a Christian.  I don’t say that lightly or in some trite way.  IT IS THE ONLY BOOK THAT IS THE SURE GUIDE THROUGH THIS LIFE INTO THE NEXT LIFE.  It is the only book that allows us to reach the emergencies of life and also to cushion the shocks that come to us in life.  It’s the only book that will really heal our broken hearts, make us wise, warn us, give us joy, no other book will do that.  And it’s my great burden that the people of God tap into the riches that are in the Word of God.

HAVE THE PROPER ATTITUDE: BE YIELDED

A couple of things we need to understand about reading the Bible—you need to do it with the proper attitude.  You have to have the proper attitude to read and understand the Bible and to profit from it.   Someone has said, “Attitude in life is everything.”  Attitudes are much more important than aptitudes.  What are they?  1)  Yieldedness: being yielded to God ; you yield yourself to God when you come to His Word.  This book is intended to perform a work of personal transformation in your life.  That’s why God has given it to us.  1 Thes. 2:13, Paul says, “For this reason we also constantly thank God that when you received from us the Word of God’s message you accepted it not as the word of men but for what it really is, the Word of God which also performs its work in you who believed.”

BE EXPECTANT THAT GOD WILL SPEAK TO YOU: EXPECT TO HEAR THE VOICE OF GOD IN YOUR MIND (NOT AUDIBLE)

THE WORD OF GOD PERFORMS A SUPERNATURAL WORK IN YOUR LIFE OF PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION—OF MAKING YOU MORE LIKE JESUS CHRIST.  2 Cor. 3:18 says that it is a progressive work.  Says there from glory to glory we are being conformed to the image of our Savior and so you can expect that this book is going to change your life.  Now this supernatural work depends on our cooperation with God, His Spirit.  So we don’t want to come to the Bible with our own agendas.  We don’t want to come to our reading of the Bible with some attitude of detachment.  We need to recognize our need and come with a yielded spirit.  In fact, our prayers should be like the Psalmist in Psalm 119:18, he said, “Open my eyes that I may behold wonderful things from thy word.” That should be our attitude as we approach the reading of the Word of God.  “God I come before you yielded to listen to you to learn from you.”  And that’s the second attitude.   NOT ONLY A YIELDED ATTITUDE BUT AN ATTITUDE OF EXPECTANCY.  In other words, expect to hear the Word of the Lord—the voice of God.  Now before we go any farther I want to remind you and reassure you that I’m not talking about some audible voice.  You don’t come to the Word of God and hear something in your ears.  This is the voice of God in the mind—the teaching ministry of the Spirit of God.  But expect that God will speak to you through His Word.

REVELATION: GOD HAS SPOKEN

Now, I want to clear up some confusion about this and there are three words that you need to understand in order to clear up a lot of confusion.  The first one is the word REVELATION.  Revelation is the word that means God has spoken.  In fact, “Thus saith the Lord” or an equivalent occurs 2,500 times in the Bible.  So revelation means “God has spoken.”  And that’s why we read 1 Cor. 2 this morning because it is such a classic passage about revelation and what else I’m going to talk to you about—inspiration and illumination.  In 1 Cor. 2 it says, “Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard which have not entered the heart of man all that God has prepared for those who love Him for to us God revealed them through the Spirit for the Spirit searches all things even the depths of God.” The Word is “apocalusus” in Greek.  It’s the word that you get apocalypse from.  It means revelation—to disclose something; to unveil something.  So revelation means God has spoken.  He has disclosed to us truth that we otherwise would not know.

INSPIRATION: GOD HAS INSCRIBED HIS REVELATION

The second word is inspiration and that word means God has inscribed His revelation.  He has INSCRIBED it and this is what we have—the Scriptures, the Bible.  I believe that the Bible teaches us that this inspiration of God is plenary and verbal.  PLENARY means “full or total.”  VERBAL means “right to the words—they are inspired.”  Inspiration is the guarantee that God has taken His revelation and has inscribed it accurately for us.  That’s what inspiration is all about.  This is extremely important.  That means that every word of the Bible is the Word of God to us and for us in this very day in which we live.  2 Tim. 3:16, “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, …”  That word inspired is literally “God-breathed.”  It speaks of the source of it and it speaks of the accuracy of it.  SCRIPTURE IS THE VERY BREATH OF GOD.  Why is that so important?  It exposes a lot of errors and you have to be careful when you’re out in the world today because these are coming even from some pulpits.  There is first of all the error of something called “partial inspiration.” That is there are some who will say, “Well this book is inspired by God.  It is recorded faithfully in accurately in matters of faith and practice, but not necessarily in matters of science or history or other things.”  And the reason that that is said is because some people have some difficulties with what the Scriptures say when they compare what men say in science and historians and other people like that.  And so they see this difficulty and try to deal with it and they say, “Well the Bible is only inspired in  matters of faith and practice…” Well let me ask you a question, “Who is the one who tells us which ones those verses are?”  “Who’s the one who tells us, “This is a matter of faith and practice and this is not…”  Who decides?  And let me ask you another question, “Where does the Bible claim that  to be true?”  You won’t find that in the Bible.  The Bible claims that this is the Word of God from cover to cover and if it is inspired by God, then it is accurate from cover to cover.  That’s what plenary means.

The second error is the idea of “concept inspiration” sometimes called “limited inspiration.”  And that’s where people said, “Well, the concepts that God revealed where inspired, but then when men wrote them down there were left to themselves and so Paul was trying to remember the best he could what he saw and what God said to him and if he made some mistakes in transmission, well that’s okay we should expect that this is a human book.  But the concepts were inspired.”   Well, again you have to go back and say, “Who’s going to tell you which word Paul wrote down was not part of the original concept?”

And Jesus said this in Matthew 5:18, “For truly I say to you unless heaven and earth passes away, NOT THE SMALLEST LETTER OR STROKE WILL PASS AWAY FROM THE LAW UNTIL ALL IS ACCOMPLISHED.”

If you have a King James version it says “JOT AND TITLE.”  It was the two little strokes.  The smallest strokes in the Hebrew alphabet.  One was like a little accent mark.  Jesus says not one of those will pass away until everything is completed—that doesn’t sound like partial inspiration to me.  Or concept inspiration.  No, THIS BOOK IS INSPIRED BY GOD—IT IS GUARANTEED TO BE ACCURATE—INFALLIBLE BECAUSE OF THE NATURE OF GOD.  Now our Bibles today are descended from literally thousands of copies of the original writings.  The original writings are called the Atographa—it simply means the autographs—the original autographs that don’t exist anymore.  I believe that God caused them to disappear after a period of time.  They were either destroyed or something happened to them.  We probably, knowing our human nature, we would bow down to them they are so close to God.  But what we have is thousands of copies of them and through the science of textural criticism they are compared.  And if there’s a disagreement then other copies are brought in to compare and through this application of observation we can tell what the original text was.  And Sir George Kenyan, the late director and principal librarian of the British Museum said concerning these things, “Thanks to these manuscripts, the ordinary reader of the Bible may feel comfortable about the complete soundness of this text.  Apart from a few unimportant verbal alterations, naturally books transcribed by hand the New Testament as we now have it has come down in tact.  We can be sure today that we have that which is close to the autographs as anything possibly can be.  And for the autographs I believe in verbal plenary inspiration.” And so what he’s saying is that with the exception of just a handful of issues, perhaps a verb here or a tense there, or a phrase here in which they are still not certain because it seems like either the inclusion of it or the exclusion of it both has good evidence with exception of a handful of those things, we, in fact, have the original writings before us in the copies.

ILLUMINATION:  GOD GIVES UNDERSTANDING TO HIS REVELATION

The third word, and this is where we come back to reading and understanding in the Bible, is the word “ILLUMINATION.”  If revelation means God has spoken, and inspiration means God has inscribed His revelation, Illumination means God gives understanding to His revelation.  Although we can get the basic facts of the Bible on our own, in fact, anybody can sit down and can read this book and tell you the basic facts on the surface of what it is saying even though that is true THE SPIRIT OF GOD HAS TO OPEN THE MIND AND THE HEART IF WE ARE TO UNDERSTAND THE SPIRITUAL TRUTH THAT IS THERE.   Again, we return to 1 Cor. 2, but before we do that let me read to you from Luke24: 44,45…this is just before the Lord ascended into heaven he is walking with some of his disciples later He meets them at this house and listen to the word he says, “Now he said to them, ‘These are my words which I spoke to you while I was with you that all things which are written about me and the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.  You have this word, I have spoken it to you.  THEN HE OPENED THEIR MINDS TO UNDERSTAND THE SCRIPTURES.”  You see the apostles heard Him talk about the fact that everything that Moses wrote about Him had to come to pass and they could go back and they could see what Moses wrote and yet they couldn’t quite put it together in their understanding.  Well, Jesus opened their understanding so they could finally comprehend it—that’s a spiritual work.  IT IS DONE BY THE SPIRIT OF GOD.  So that’s why in 1 Cor. 2 these verses are so critical when you talk about illumination.

In verses 13 and 14 Paul says, “Which things we also speak, not in words taught in human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit COMBINING SPIRITUAL THOUGHTS WITH SPIRITUAL WORDS.  He’s saying that here are the spiritual words they have been inscribed by the Spirit of God through the human writers and now he comes and gives spiritual thoughts to them so we understand what they’re communicating.  Now that necessitates a relationship with the author doesn’t it?  And he goes on to say that the natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God for they are foolishness to him and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually appraised.  THE BIBLE IS A CLOSED BOOK TO THOSE WHO DO NOT HAVE THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THEIR HEART—IN THEIR LIFE.  So don’t be disturbed or surprised when unbelievers say that they don’t even believe this is the Word of God.  Or they say they don’t understand this book…  Or it’s written by humans it’s just filled with errors.  All of those things are natural for them to say because they do not understand the real meaning of this book.  But the point for us is that God speaks to men through His Word.  THE SPIRIT OF GOD, AS YOU READ THE WORD OF GOD, WILL COMBINE SPIRITUAL THOUGHTS WITH SPIRITUAL WORDS AND YOU’LL UNDERSTAND.  All those who are saved have heard this voice.  John 5:25, Jesus says that they hear my voice and they live.  The day you were born again, the day your became a Christian you heard the voice of the Son of God—it wasn’t audible, but it was the ministry of the Holy Spirit in your heart.  So, be expectant when you read the Word of God.  God is going to speak.

BE ATTENTIVE: GIVE YOUR ATTENTION TO THE WORD OF GOD

The third attitude is to be attentive.  Be yielded, be expectant, and be attentive.  Give your attention to the Word of God.  Psalm 1 talks about who the blessed man is—who the happy man is.  It says two things.  Verse 1 says the negative, “how blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers.”  And then he tells us the positive, “but his delight is in the law of the Lord and in his law he meditates day and night.”  It’s in the Word of God that he meditates and gives his attention and so we need to give quality attention to reading the Word of God.  The only illustration I thought of the other day was, and men you will identify with this so will your wives and that is that it’s quite common for men to read the newspaper while their wives are talking to them.  And their wives are trying their hardest to get through and explain something and the men are going, “That’s right honey, ….” While reading the paper…  God doesn’t want us to come to his Word with that kind of a divided attitude.  He doesn’t want us to read the Word of God in front of the TV.  He doesn’t want us to come to the Word of God with a divided heart, He wants us to come with an attentive mind and pay attention to what we are reading and interact with it and so our attitude should be yielded to God, expectant, and attentive.  That’s the first thing that is necessary if you are going to profit from reading from the Bible.

HAVE THE PROPER GOALS

The second is to have the proper goal and there are two of them.

  1. The first is to understand what God is saying.
  2. The second is to apply what God is saying.  

The first is to understand what God is saying and to do that there is a process.  We normally call it interpretation.  When you read any literature you’re not thinking about what you are doing interpretively, you’re naturally communicating and interactive and I’ll explain why.  The process of reading the Scriptures and interpreting the Scriptures is to give attention to the words and their meanings, not to feelings and impressions.  Some people have this idea that the Bible is some sort of magical book and that you don’t read it like you read other literature and that you have to approach it with a certain magical outlook or something and you expect things to just appear in your mind.  That’s not the way God communicate to us.  This book is literature as well as being a supernatural divine book.  Now people say today, quite often, “to me this verse means…..”  Well that’s fine everybody can have their opinion, but what I’m concerned about is “What did the author mean by it?”  That’s what we want to know.

There are two ways in which people communicate—one is true and one is not.  The way we are supposed to communicate is:  we communicate what we are thinking to other people through symbols.  The alphabet is a series of symbols and we have all come to accept that when we put these symbols together in certain ways we can understand the thinking of the person who wrote it.  The thoughts are communicated through the symbols.  The other way is something called intuition.  This way is for the second person to try to guess what the other person is thinking.  In spite of those who would say that there is such a thing as clairvoyance and psychic abilities which are all satanic lies, there are not.  The Bible tells us in 1 Corinthians 2 that no one can understand your thoughts except you.  No one knows your thoughts except the omniscient God and so I can’t read your thoughts and you can’t read my thoughts.  The only way that I can explain to you or make known to you what I am thinking is through symbols.  Speech involves symbols.

Intuition is very subjective, very unreliable, and it is one of Satan’s favorites.  And what he has done is he has called it mysticism.  That’s what historically it is called.  When people by their own intuition, by their own looking inside and trying to guess find truth.  And that is the whole New Age thing today, “look within yourself to find truth.”  That’s just mysticism.  Or if I’m going to try to understand what God wants me to know in the way of if I look inside and use my intuition it’s unreliable and it’s subjective.  The second, symbols, is objective and it is reliable.  And that’s what God has done when He has committed his thoughts to this book.  He has given it to us in symbols.  And so as we try to read the Bible we need to read it according to  the accepted method of interpreting these symbols.  What does that mean?  That means that there is grammar, syntax.  In other words I should not look at a word that’s in the future tense in English and interpret it to be past tense—that’s not going to get me the meaning of the author.  He’s trying to communicant to me with symbols I understand.  Likewise I should take the literal normal meanings of words and not read my own meaning into them otherwise I’m not going to understand what He’s trying to say to communicate to me.  And of course we see literal, grammatical, historical interpretation—the context of the writings.  And so when you read the Bible, read thoughtfully.  Pay attention to the words and the meanings.  Check on meanings you are not sure of.  Look it up in an English dictionary…look it up in a theological dictionary.  Do you have one?  They are very helpful.  Read and interact…ask interpretive questions, search for the intended meaning of the author.  What we want to know is what did God mean by what He said.  And so that’s the process.  The product is to understand what the Bible says, not to support our own opinions and prejudices.  Not to know something that is not even taught in the Scriptures—but we are to know the mind of God and then the result is going to bring forth what is going to happen next and that is to apply the Word of God.

The first goal is to UNDERSTAND WHAT THE BIBLE IS SAYING and let’s approach it with some sanity.  People today approach the Bible with some of the most insane methodologies.  This is a book that God has written so that we can know what His thoughts are.  And then the goal is to  APPLY WHAT GOD IS SAYING.  Colossians 1:9, 10,  “For this reason so since the day we heard of it we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of  his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding.”  Why?  So you can pass a test?  So you can have a notebook full of theologies?  So you can out-duel somebody else?

Listen to why He says…  “SO THAT YOU MAY WALK IN A MANNER WORTHY OF THE LORD TO PLEASE HIM IN ALL RESPECTS BEARING FRUIT IN EVERY GOOD WORK AND INCREASING IN THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD.”  That’s why we want to understand what the Bible says—so that we can live it.  So that we can apply it and be pleasing to Him and bear spiritual fruit and grow in our understanding of Him as a person—that’s the goal.  Jesus said in Luke 6:46-49, when He had that parable about the house on sand or on a rock, He says if you build your life, that is if the decisions in your life about raising your children, about your marriage, about relationships, about growing, about decisions in life, if you make those things based on His Word—it’s like building it on a rock and you will not be destroyed when a storm comes.  So the key to a deeper relationship with God and a deeper understanding of the Bible is to “apply what we read.”

James says it this way, “Be doers of the Word and not hearers only deceiving yourselves.”  THERE IS A LOT OF CHRISTIANS THAT ARE DECEIVED.  A LOT OF EDUCATED FOOLS IN THE CHRISTIAN WORLD AS WELL AS EVERYWHERE ELSE BECAUSE THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND THE GOAL OF THEIR BIBLE STUDY IS TO LIVE A LIFE THAT IS PLEASING TO GOD.

HAVE THE PROPER PRIORITY

Everyone talks about priorities today, but how many have really set priorities for their life and lived by them.  Do you?  Well you may not have set them down consciously, but your activities and your habits show your priorities.  They may not have ever been written on a piece of paper but they are very obvious by what you live.  When we think about priorities with regard to the Word of God, if we’re going to understand the Word of God and prophet from it then two priorities are necessary.  The first is we must read the Bible before we read other books.  I’m not saying other books are necessarily bad or evil. Some of them are very helpful—some are quite wonderful and can enrich your life, but there’s not one book other than the Bible that can truly change your life.  You may hear some different testimonies on talk shows today…people talk about how this diet changed their life and this book changed their life—that’s only on the surface.  Nothing changes your life from inside except God’s Word.  And so what of a priority shouldn’t it have in our life?  We should saturate our minds and our hearts with God’s Word—knowing God.  That’s the goal of life and it requires diligence.

“I used to teach the Bible in a Bible Institute and the classes were made up of all kinds of young folk.  Among them were a few very pious individuals and I understood these young people very well after a period of time.  I confess I didn’t understand them at first.  Their pious façade I found covered up a tremendous ignorance and vacuum relative to the Word of God.  Some of them would not study the night before an exam.  They would always have an excuse that they were busy in a prayer meeting or a service somewhere.  I had the feeling that some of them believed that they could put their Bibles under their pillow’s at night and as they slept there would come up through the duck feathers the names of the kings of Israel and Judah.  Believe me it won’t come up through the feathers.  We have to knuckle down and study the Word of God.  A fellow student in a Bible class when I was in college said when I was a you have assigned us a section that is very dry.  The professor without even missing a step said to him, “Well son then dampen it a little bit with the sweat of your brow.”  The Bible should be studied and it is very important to see that.  THERE IS A CERTAIN KNOWLEDGE THAT GOD IS NOT GOING TO GIVE LAZY PEOPLE.  After all, you never learn geometry or Greek by just reading a chapter before you went to bed at night”.—Jay Vernon McGee

There is a lot of wisdom is what he is saying there.  There is nothing worth pursuing in life that doesn’t take time and doesn’t take diligence.  Now, as to other books there are really only two kinds of books in the world—there are those that support the Word of God and there are those books that supplant the Word of God.  If you doubt that stop and think about it.  There are those who support the Word of God and there are a lot of good books about the Bible, about Bible truths and they can be extremely helpful but they should never be put on the same level as the Bible itself.  Choose wisely what you read.  Jesus said what you listen to that’s what you become.  And there are basically three types of books, Christian books that support the Word of God they are:

  1. Doctrinal Books
  2. Biographical Books
  3. Books about relationships 

Today you just see tons of books about relationships…dysfunctional relationships—relationships that don’t work and how to make them work.  And that’s important but to understand how to relate to people first of all you have to understand something about doctrine, about what the Bible says about us as people.  I would say PUT DOCTRINE HIGH ON YOUR LIST and biographies and the relational lower down.

So there are those that support the Bible and then there are those, the rest of them, that SUPPLANT THE BIBLE.  And Christians today increasingly seem to read these kind of books.  They either contradict or they replace the Scriptures.  Some of the biggest offenders are:

  1. CHRISTIAN FICTION.  There’s nothing wrong with fiction.  You go into the bookstores today and you will see row after row after row of Christian fiction.  There’s a lot of money to be made in writing Christian fiction.  But Christian fiction assumes a lot of doctrine and it communicates a lot of doctrine and people say “well it’s just fiction.”  Yes, but Christians believe it.  That’s why I have such a problem with the first couple of books by Frank Peretti.  I know that those books supposedly open our eyes to the spiritual realm (as though the Word of God never did that?), and it also should teach us to pray about the spiritual warfare that’s going on(that’s fine).  BUT THERE ARE SO MANY BAD DOCTRINES THAT ARE TAUGHT IN THOSE BOOKS EVEN THOUGH IT’S JUST FICTION.  And this is the kind of thing that Christians are spending all of their time on.  You go to there home and they have rows of books on Christian fiction, but when was the last time they just read their Bible.
  2. POP PSYCHOLOGY.  All the self-help books that are in the Christian bookstores when I thought that the Scriptures were given to us in order to help us and to change us.
  3. MAGAZINES.  There are so many magazines today that you can’t even count them.  There’s nothing wrong with them, but just be careful about your priorities.  Sit down and analyze what kind of things you read and how much you read and the Bible should be the first place.

READ THE BIBLE COMPLETELY

Acts 17:11, we read this verse all the time about the Thessalonicans.  They were more noble than the Bereans, they were more noble than those in Thessalonica for they received the word with great eagerness examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things are so.  Don’t read God’s Word haphazardly.

There are a couple of methods that people use.  One I call the “hatpin method.”  Before I was saved I went to the racecourse a number of times with my friends and one time we saw an  old lady sitting in front of us taking the racing form with all of the races and the horses and stabbing it with a hatpin.  And she opened it up and we asked her what she was doing and she said that the horses that are stuck with the hatpin—I bet on them.  Well, sometimes Christians read the Bible that way don’t they?  You take the Bible and you say “Lord what have you got for me today?”  And so you say, “There it is!”  I mean, God doesn’t want  to work that way….and that is not going to give you an understanding of the Bible.  Another one is you favorite portion—where people have a half a dozen portions that they love to read and that’s great but they never get out of those and they never know what else the Bible says.

The third is devotional readings—devotional readings are fine, but I would encourage you not to make your reading of the Bible simply devotional readings or you’ll never see the whole picture.  Can you imagine reading a novel that way?  You have this novel and you say “Well today I’m going to read this page…”  Then the next day you come back and say, “Well, I think I’ll read this page…”  How do you read a novel like that?  You’ll never understand it.  And this book (Bible) is a book that is God’s story about His love for you and I and how He sent His Son, His Son’s atonement, His Son’s return, His Son’s reign and your eternity with Him—that’s this book…that’s worth reading!  And it’s worth reading completely.  Well, how do you do that?  Read some every day but plan to read it all.  Read a book at a time.  Go and read Daniel and don’t stop until you finish it.

Many years ago Lydia Roberts published an article in “The Globe,” a well-known Boston newspaper on how to get time to read a book.  And here are some of her suggestions.  This a person that’s talking about secular books so  I think we can apply this to the Bible even more.

  1. Talk less.  If you talked less you might have more time to read.
  2. Carry a book in your bag.
  3. Wake up fifteen minutes earlier every morning and read.
  4. Take a book along with you to the doctor… or wherever—why read their magazines?
  5. Keep a book in your car in the case of a traffic jam or a delay of some kind.
  6. Never go on a journey without a book.  A book in the hand it worth two in the bookcase—always carry a book.

We can carry a Bible a lot of places can’t we?  You can put a Bible in the car, in your bag….  Find time to read your Bible.  The only other thing you can do to increase your understanding of God’s Word is to share it with others.  You can become so saturated with what you understand from God’s Word that then you need to share it with someone else and that will just reinforce it to you and it will bless the person you share it with.  The Scriptures, the Bible—God’s love letter to us.  He has, in this book, revealed His mind to us.  Let us read it and understand it.

Note* be aware of new Bible versions that have been changing the Word of God and always refer back to the King James original version for accuracy. (See TEV error here; The Messageis a New Age version.)

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