What We Get Wrong About Studying the Bible

Posted on Dec 10, 2019 Topic : Men's Christian Living, Prophecy, Women's Christian Living
Posted by : Stan Jantz

Too many of us Bible-believing Christians come up short.

We read and study the Bible like it’s some kind of textbook, looking for truth and application. We form classes to study books of the Bible. We go to Bible colleges and seminaries in order to learn more about the Bible.

All of this activity is good and important and helpful in our spiritual journeys. But the way we approach the Word of God is backward.

We treat the Scriptures like a commodity, looking for the benefits. Our reading is structured so that we take in only the parts that appeal to us, avoiding the more difficult sections that end up “exposing us for what we really are.” Basically, we center our reading around us.

When we read the Bible this way, we’re in charge. And the Holy Spirit, whom God used to breathe his thoughts and intentions and plans for a broken humanity into the original writers, sits in the corner waiting for us to ask him to take the lead in our encounters with Scripture.

Only recently have I started to comprehend just how actively and intimately the Holy Spirit wants to be involved in my Bible reading. For a long time I didn’t understand that the Holy Spirit is available to illuminate my mind in real time, as I’m reading, so that the Word of God can cut deep into my “innermost thoughts and desires.”

If I had to do it again, knowing what I am now learning, I would have long ago invited the Holy Spirit to take his proper place in my life as my personal guide and spiritual teacher.

There’s a passage in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church that describes what the Holy Spirit does with God’s Word:

It was to us that God revealed these things by his Spirit. For his Spirit searches out everything and shows us God’s deep secrets. No one can know a person’s thoughts except that person’s own spirit, and no one can know God’s thoughts except God’s own Spirit… When we tell you these things, we do not use words that come from human wisdom. Instead, we speak words given to us by the Spirit, using the Spirit’s words to explain spiritual truths (1 Corinthians 2:10-11,13).

I have read this passage many times, but when I consider it now and think deeply about what it means, it dawns on me that I have been approaching Bible reading and study all wrong.

I’ve been depending on pastors, teachers, books, and commentaries to teach me from the outside in. What I should do is depend on the Holy Spirit to illuminate me from the inside out.