Need Help Getting Serious About Bible Study?

I heard the Bible read by my Dad around the dinner table when I grew up. I even started reading in on my own and praying when I was young. Those experiences are so important to me now that I would never want to minimize them.

There are a few things that I have learned since then, though, that you might want to look at. If you're having a hard time going further with Bible study and your relationship with the Lord, check this out. These two go together.

Since your time is valuable, and my ideas are more clear when I'm brief, I will try to be clear and brief. The thoughts here are first about the "mechanics" of Bible study and reading and then about the spirit of the thing.

Here are the mechanics (for lack of a better word.) You need a regular place and a regular time. My time is the morning after I wake up enough and get a bit of hot coffee nearby. Life is changeable, so these things will change, but morning and coffee work for me. Find out what works for you. The place that works for me is our study, down one room from the bedroom. I can shut the door when necessary and tune out the radio that someone else sometimes has on in the bathroom. I always need a pen. You do too. Don't go to your regular Bible reading and prayer without a pen, because you want to underline or circle things that stand out to you. You may want to write a question mark or exclamation point in the margin. The first means "research this further". (Maps, Bible dictionaries, time lines, history books - all these are helpful for research. The very last choice is a commentary. That's ok when you're just starting, but you've got to eventually supplement that. You need to learn to really study and get the big picture.)

The lesson here is what someone said, "The gems of scripture are not going to be mined by the casual Bible reader." If you're going to be serious about Bible study and reading, get serious about a regular place and time. Those are necessary mechanics for me. I imagine they might be that for you.

A couple of things that are simple outgrowths of this are historical, and have huge implications for my next section. It wasn't until I went to seminary that I began to understand the flow of the Old Testament. I had heard of things such as the Babylonian captivity, but I never knew when or how it happened. I never knew what books were related to it. So such things as the prophets just clumped together in my mind like a ball of yarn with glue spilled all over it. They had no definition. Then I learned about the northern kingdom separating from the southern kingdom, and when that was. I learned that the north went into captivity before the south, and I learned about the different military powers who carried off God's people, and the men who were preaching when these things happened. It began to live in my mind like the very true and dramatic story that it was.

When you get beyond being spoon-fed and really do some digging, you begin to see that God's book is real history. And the divine drama that is the Incarnation is all about God's preparation for and actual coming to join the human race to effect our redemption. This is the point when the Holy Spirit jumps on you. You have to respond in worship or go out and find a way to tell someone. This sick world of ours needs something beyond the swill it usually drinks in. The Bible has the real goods. Are you going to really dig in and see if what I'm saying is true?