How to Study the Bible - Week 2 Session 1

All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works. (2 Timothy 3:16–17)

Before we learn how to study the Bible, we must see why God's Word matters—and what it means to truly handle it.

Beginning at the Ground Level

Tonight we begin at what I would call the real ground level, a very foundational approach to studying the Bible. It's called devotional Bible study, and as I share the process with you, you'll probably find it very simple—almost so simple that it becomes difficult, because we often expect studying the Bible to require far more than what I'm asking of you.

I want to start at the very lowest level of studying the Bible so that you can begin using this and have it become something you practice on a regular basis. These are the very same tools I use every single time I open the Scriptures. I'm currently reading through Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians, a chapter a day, using the exact method I'll show you tonight. After you do this twenty-five or thirty times, you no longer write down each step—it becomes second nature. Some of what we'll cover over the next eight weeks will look technical and hard to wrap your brain around, but as you break the text down into propositions and look at how one sentence connects to the next, it will change the way you read and understand the Bible.

What This Book Is

Some of you have seen a Gideon New Testament. In its opening pages there's a wonderful, succinct description of what this book is:

The Bible contains the mind of God, the state of man, the way of salvation, the doom of sinners, and the happiness of believers. Its doctrines are holy, its precepts are binding, its histories are true, and its decisions are immutable. Read it to be wise, believe it to be safe, and practice it to be holy. It contains light to direct you, food to support you, and comfort to cheer you. It is the traveler's map, the pilgrim's staff, the pilot's compass, the soldier's sword, and the Christian's charter... Christ is its grand subject, our good its design, and the glory of God its end. It should fill the memory, rule the heart, and guide the feet. Read it slowly, frequently, and prayerfully.

My hope is that you would become one—sadly among the minority in the American church—who consistently reads through the Bible, hopefully daily, even just a few minutes, so the Word of God comes into your heart. The point is not only to know what the Scriptures say, but to know the God behind the Scriptures.

God Wants to Be Known

I hope you recognize that the God of the universe—the first and the last, the King of kings, the God of all glory—created you and intends to have a relationship with you. He wants to reveal Himself to you, and one of the chief ways He has chosen to do so is through the pages of Scripture. If we want to know what God is like, we must go to the Scriptures regularly.

Jesus said in John 17:3, "This is eternal life, that they might know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent." Stepping into eternal life is not something that only happens after you breathe your last; you begin to experience eternal life now as you get to know God through His Word, His Spirit, and prayer. For some of you the Word is already a daily habit. My hope is that by the end of this class, time with God in His Word will be a regular part of life for the great majority of us—something we desire more than our necessary daily food. For many, fear holds them back; they worry they can't understand it. But the same God who inspired the Scriptures can teach us the Scriptures by His Holy Spirit, which is why we always begin in prayer, asking Him to open our eyes to behold wonders from His Word.

A Bible in Every Language

Several years ago at a conference I picked up a book labeled "Holy Bible," opened it, and found every page blank. It was from The Seed Company, an organization connected with Wycliffe Bible Translators, working to translate the Scriptures into more than two thousand languages that still do not have them. Some of those languages have no written form at all—only a spoken one. Missionaries learn the language and culture, build a phonetic alphabet, and then translate the Scriptures and teach people to read.

Imagine having no Bible in your language—what that would mean for you, your family, your church. Most of us here have more than one copy. I have at least ten Bibles on the shelf behind my office desk. Yet according to Barna research, only about a quarter of Christians in America read the Bible daily. That's not very good. When we look at the problems in our culture and even in our churches—no church is perfect; if you think you found the perfect church, you ruined it when you walked in—one major reason is that God's people have not had God's Word in their lives in a big way. My desire is that the Word of God would become more important to every one of us.

Tools for Daily Reading

I've mentioned the Listening Plan. If you go to thelisteningplan.com, you can subscribe and receive a daily email every weekday with the passage—for example, 1 Timothy chapter 1. You can listen to the passage, speed it up, or click to read it on Blue Letter Bible. There are links to David Guzik's Enduring Word commentary, My Utmost for His Highest, and Spurgeon's Morning and Evening. About 2,500 people use it daily. There's also a Daily Old Testament plan that works the same way, currently going through Hosea, and when it reaches Malachi it simply returns to Genesis and keeps going.

My oldest son recently asked me how many times I've read through the whole Bible. I honestly couldn't give a number, but it's been quite a few times. Certain passages are more well-worn, especially the Epistles. The method I'll teach tonight is most applicable in the Epistles, which make up the largest section of the New Testament.

Profitable for Four Things

Let's return to 2 Timothy 3:16–17. Scripture is profitable for four things: doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness. Doctrine is the plumb line that establishes what is right and true. The moment you set that true line, it exposes—or reproves—everything out of alignment. The Bible is living and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, able to reveal the thoughts and intents of our hearts. That can be uncomfortable, but it is purposeful. God wants to reveal where we are in relationship to Him so that we would be reproved, and then corrected—brought back into right relationship.

God made us to live in connection with Him. Because of the sin of Genesis 3, sin spread to all humanity—proven by the fact that we disobey His commands—and we are separated from Him. He sent His Son to make it possible for us to be brought back. But He doesn't stop at the relationship; He wants to transform us. Romans 12 says God transforms us by the renewing of our minds, so our lives display His good and perfect will, bringing Him praise and glory.

The Slow Work of Transformation

This is a process. If you've walked with the Lord more than a week, you know you're not where you'd like to be; sometimes we even backslide. I heard a story, possibly from Max Lucado, of an old gardener whose grandson told him he no longer found the Bible interesting. The grandfather handed him a basket and asked him to fill it with water. "It's a basket—it won't hold water," the boy said, but he ran it under the faucet anyway. Three times the grandfather sent him back, and three times the boy returned with an empty basket, frustrated. Finally the grandfather said, "Yes, but it's cleaner than it was when I gave it to you." Having God's Word go through us continually may feel futile, but over time God is cleansing us, even when we don't see it.

I have thirteen years of photos of my children—65,000 of them—and I can scroll through and watch a child grow until my thirteen-year-old son is now taller than me. Day to day there seems to be no change, but the transformation is real. That's what happens in each of us as the Word goes into our hearts and minds. We rarely see it, but an old friend who hasn't seen us in years often does: "There's something different about you." The longer I pastor, the more I realize that far more important than growing in Bible knowledge is that the fruit of the Spirit grows in our lives—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. That matters more to me than any gift of the Spirit, and it comes about by the work of the Word and the Spirit.

Access, in Order to Make Accessible

Why this class? We are learning to access the Scriptures in order that we may make them accessible to others. God wants you to know Him and to make Him known. His commission was given to His disciples—not only the apostles—and a disciple is a follower of Jesus. He has commissioned each one of us to know Him and make Him known.

You don't need to know every answer to every question about a passage. You only need to know what you know through your own study. As you share even the small things, your understanding grows. And we have the added benefit of the Holy Spirit. Jesus said He would not leave us without an instructor; the Spirit guides us into all truth. As we ask God to open our eyes, He begins to make connections between passages—what we call correlation. The Bible is a vast hyperlinked text with tens of thousands of cross-references, and God connects them for us, revealing Himself more fully.

In high school I learned printing and graphics on offset presses, where you combine four colors—CMYK. When all the colors come together, the picture becomes clear. When you pull Scripture together as a whole—the whole counsel of God—Christ's nature and God's likeness become clear to us.

Learning by Teaching

When I was asked in 1999 to teach the junior highers in the room just down the hall, I felt completely unequipped. I said yes mostly out of a nagging sense that God wanted me to do it—greater than anything my youth pastor, Tony, could have said. The first day I taught from Galatians 1, on Valentine's Day 1999, I felt like a complete fool, certain an elder would walk in and accuse me of teaching heresy. None ever did. But about six months later my understanding of the Scriptures had grown bigger than at any time in my life—because I was studying to access the Word for myself so I could make it accessible to others. My early notes are rudimentary, ground-level, and surely borrowed from Chuck Smith and Warren Wiersbe, but I learned the Bible better than ever because I was sharing it with someone else. That's where this class is going—not just so you'll access the Bible for yourself, but so you'll share it with somebody else.

Why We Access the Scriptures

As 1 Peter 2 says, "As newborn babes, desire the pure milk of the word, that you may grow thereby." We grow in faith as we access the Scriptures. Just before that, 1 Peter 1 says it is the Word of God that makes us wise to salvation. You would not have known the reality of who you are as a sinner before a holy God had He not revealed it in the Scriptures. God has given each person a conscience that either accuses or excuses us—we've all felt it—but we needed God's Word to reveal exactly what the problem is and what the solution is. We are born again "not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word of God which lives and abides forever."

Psalm 1 says, "Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly... but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night. He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that brings forth its fruit in its season, whose leaf also shall not wither; and whatever he does shall prosper." If we want blessing, wholeness, holiness, and fruitfulness—and biblical blessing and prosperity are likely different from what your unbelieving neighbor imagines—they are all connected to the Word of God.

Romans 10:17 says, "Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God"—not reading, but hearing. So simply listening to the Listening Plan grows your faith. God also cleanses us by His Word; Ephesians 5 says He sanctifies and cleanses us "by the washing of water by the word." Psalm 119 says, "Your word I have hidden in my heart, that I might not sin against You," and "How shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to Your word." Jesus prayed in John 17:17, "Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth." God's aim is that you and I would be transformed and sanctified by His Word.

Rightly Dividing the Word

What are we seeking to do? Open to 2 Timothy 2:15: "Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth." The King James says "study to show yourself approved," and the NIV says "correctly handling the word of truth." The person who correctly handles the Word is a diligent worker who studies it. It takes labor; it doesn't come easy. But as we invest the time, we grow in understanding so that we may make the Scriptures accessible to others.

Doers, Not Hearers Only

We are not merely seeking head knowledge. I have met people who knew the Bible far better than me whose lives were wretched. It is entirely possible to be an expert in New Testament or Old Testament studies, even to quote the original languages, and not be a Christian. Read the blog posts of Princeton Theological Seminary—considered one of the greatest seminaries in America—and you'll find many people who know the Bible and don't know God. It is possible to know the message and miss the One who inspired it.

The difference is found in James 1:22: "Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves." The hearer only is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and immediately forgets what he looks like. But "he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it... this one will be blessed in what he does."

Jesus said in Matthew 7:24, "Whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock"—and when the storm came, it did not fall. Luke 11:28 says, "Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it." John 13:17 says, "If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them." And 1 John 2:3 says, "By this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments." So we endeavor to become workmen and workwomen of the Word who rightly divide it—not merely to know who Daniel or Nebuchadnezzar or Nimrod was, but so the Word becomes part of who we are and transforms how we live.

Exercised in the Word

The author of Hebrews says something striking in chapter 5: "For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God... For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil." Some have been Christians for decades and ought to be teachers, yet still need the basics. God's focus is that we become those exercised in using the Scriptures—people who know how to do the Word.

With all of that, we now move from the why to the what to the how. After our break, we'll get into devotional Bible study—a very practical method for simply consuming the Scriptures so that they become part of our lives and our lives are transformed more and more into the likeness of Jesus Christ. That is what God wants to do for us.