How To Eat An Elephant Blog Series - #5 Deeper Spiritual Disciplines (How To Study The Bible)

DEEPER SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINES: HOW TO STUDY THE BIBLE

Many of us know about anorexia.  The definition for anorexia is a lack or loss of appetite for food. It is an emotional disorder characterized by an obsessive desire to lose weight by refusing to eat.  Then we also know about its wicked counter part bulimia.  Which the definition of bulimia is an emotional disorder involving distortion of body image and an obsessive desire to lose weight, in which bout of extreme overeating are followed by depression and self-induced vomiting, purging, or fasting.  We are a people who suffer from one of these two diseases spiritually. We can be spiritual anorexics in that we never feed ourselves off of the scriptures. We skip this part as a whole.  We come to church and eat on Sunday only and expect that that is good enough.  We check that off our list and carry on.  Or we are spiritual bulimics in that we like to eat… we come to church, we listen to Christian music and radio, we wear the Christian shirt and have a Ichthus decal on our car, we like to hear a good message from a pastor but we never meditate on it, or even think about it about, or apply it to our hearts so that it doesn’t really make a difference in our lives or who we are. We like to eat but we spit it up and it never gives us any nutrients… it’s fake… it doesn’t do us any good!

There was a study done by George Barna once about all evangelicals.  It wasn’t a denominational thing. There were Baptist, Methodist, and Non-Denom’s like us included in the survey.  They asked all people who had come to Christ within one to ten years about their satisfaction with their church. The people that were a part of their church for 1 to 2 years loved their church.  These are the people that even start fights with people about my church is better than your church.  They love it.  They would give it a 10 out of 10.

Then after they had been there for 3-4 years they began to rate there church about a 7 out of 10.  This church that just a few years ago they loved and thought it was amazing, they gave it now a 7 instead of a 10. Every year it declined… Then what happens next is amazing. 

By year 10 they hate their church.  So within 10 years people have completely flipped about their feelings toward their church.  This church where they met Jesus and fell in love with Him and gave it a 10 just a few years before, they hate it now.

I don’t think there church went from awesome to terrible in 10 years.  I think it’s because they were living their spiritual life vicariously through their pastors, and their only spiritual nourishment they were getting was on Sunday morning from the message. THERE IS NO PREACHER THAT TEACHES IS NOT THAT GOOD.  BUT GOD IS! You cannot live off the teaching from a pastor in a service once a week and expect to grow.  This is not how God designed it!  Let me ask you this… if you were to only eat a meal once a week what would that look like?  You would be hungry, tired, weak, and grumpy. We become spiritual anorexics or bulimics just because we get lazy.  People get bored and just move around from church to church because they want something new… That is why we have the term church hopers.  People go from church to church looking for something to draw them closer to the Lord.  But guess what every church you go to guess what?  There you are! 

So we have to teach you how to feed yourselves.  It is not this churches job to teach you everything.  It is our job to feed ourselves. 

Here is the idea, tools not rules. This is a loose system so that at the end of today you can go home and get some things done with the scripture. Please understand this... THIS IS NOT A TEN STEPS TO SUCCESFULLY STUDYING THE BIBLE SEMINAR. I want to give you ideas, tips and thoughts that work for me. You may add a few of these things to what you are already doing.  My hope is that this isn’t overwhelming for you but that this will help you gain ground and success in spending time in God’s Word instead of having an off and on again relationship with God and His Words. We are shooting for consistency and a deeper understanding of who God is so that we fall more and more in love with His Son, Jesus.  So here we go.

§     YOU NEED A CONSITENT TIME AND PLACE.  If you don’t schedule it, it will not happen. Good intentions don’t really get us anywhere. I know if I do not have it on my calendar and schedule it like I would any other meeting it does not happen no matter what. What if your boss told you he wanted to meet with you Monday morning and that it was very important.  YOU WOULDN’T MISS IT!  What if the President of the United States called you and said he wanted to meet with you?  YOU WOULDN’T MISS IT!  Guess what… the CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE WANTS TO MEET WITH YOU DAILY! I am a firm believer in doing it in the morning.  Schedule it when you are at your best. I study the Bible in the morning because I do not want Jesus to get my leftovers.  I want Him to have me at my best.  Jesus always woke up early in the morning to go and pray as the Bible tells us.  So if it’s good enough for Jesus its good enough for me.

§     YOU NEED YOUR SPOT. This is more important than you think.  Find a place where you are comfortable.  Maybe it’s in your house in your favorite chair.  Maybe it’s your office.  It needs to be somewhere quiet where you enjoy being. You need to unplug! So turn off the cell phone and emails.  They can wait.  The world will still revolve without you for a few minutes.  It also needs to be a place where all your materials that we will talk about in a minute are or can be brought to that place easily.

§     YOU NEED A BIBLE. There are all kinds of Bibles!  You can have your Bible on your phone, they’re also online, and you can even have people read the Bible to you via CD/MP3 player.  But I am talking about you need a hard tangible copy of the Bible.  All these other options are great… but not for study. There are different versions or translations of the Bible.  Let me help you understand this.

o There are WORD FOR WORD TRANSLATIONS: These are literal translations, the translators made a special effort to carefully interpret each single word from the original Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic into English.  Word for word translations are usually at a high school reading level.  And they tend to be the best for studying because of their accuracy.  Examples of Word for Words translations are KJV, ESV, NKJV.

o There are THOUGHT FOR THOUGHT TRANSLATIONS: which attempt to convey the full nuance of each passage by interpreting the Scriptures entire meaning and not just the individual words. Examples of Thought for Thought translations are NIV and NLT.

o There are PARAPHRASE TRANSLATIONS: Paraphrase translations pay even less attention to specific word meanings than thought for thought in an attempt to capture the poetic or narrative essence of a passage. Examples of Paraphrase translations are The Message, The Living Bible, and Amplified Bible.

When you get down to the study you need to get a word for word.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of these translations.  I regularly read the Amplified version, Randy reads the NIV.  If you are just casually reading, paraphrase or thought for thought will be just fine.  But when you are studying and you really want to dig deeper and dig with accuracy you need a Word for Word Bible. I use the ESV and really love mine a lot.  Honestly, If you are just starting out reading the Bible and are having trouble understanding the Words then use children’s Bible. Seriously… it is ok at first if you need to get a children’s Bible. God can speak to you just as clearly with that as anything and that is fine as long as you are reading.   

§     YOU NEED A PEN AND A HIGLIGHTER. First, let me say this.  It is perfectly ok to write in or highlight in your Bible.  It is not disrespectful or irreverent to do so.  There will be certain verses when you are reading that jumps off a page at you.  Have you ever had that happen to you? Who do you think that is when that happens?   That is the Holy Spirit!  He is saying, “Hey this one is for you!” Immediately highlight it or underline it. I use a coloring system with my highlighters but I am super OCD.  I highlight with Green everywhere in the Bible it talks about worship, yellow for prayers, blue for good stuff, dark UK blue for stuff that blows my mind, orange for places where people are healed and so on.

§     YOU NEED A READING PLAN. There are 926 chapters in the Old Testament and there are 260 chapters in the New Testament. Which means there are 1,189 chapters in the Bible.  There are 23,145 verses in the Old Testament.  And there are 7,957 verses in the New Testament. Which means there are 31,102 verses in the Bible (I counted them yesterday).  If you read 3 to 4 chapters a day you could read the entire Bible in a year.  If you read 10 chapters in a day you can go through the whole Bible in 120 days.  So you could read the Bible three times in a year. If you were to read 100 chapters a day you can read the whole Bible in 12 days.  You need to be on vacation or something like that because it would take about 10 hours a day to do that. I say all this to say that you need some kind of READING PLAN.

Just waking up in the morning for most of us saying, “I am going to open the Bible and read it” isn’t going to just organically happen. Most of us probably wake up and do the whole close our eyes and point to a scripture and read it thing...  then we land on Numbers 5 and say forget it... In a reading plan and there are tons of them; lets you know what you are going to read day by day. The other great thing about this is it will send you to places in God’s Word that you wouldn’t normally read… especially the Old Testament. No one says I am going to hit up Leviticus today! But the Old Testament is so rich and amazing to read. We would really miss out to think that we don’t need to read that.  It is so important that the Old Testament was what Jesus used to teach from.  Have you ever thought about that?  He didn’t have the New Testament.  It is all very important to read.

§     YOU NEED A JOURNAL. This isn’t a “Kristy was mean to me today” thing.  It isn’t a diary!  This is where you can use the SOAP method. This is a place where whatever verse popped off the page at you, you write it out the whole thing, the whole verse.  Then I want to write out my observations about what I just read. Then take a few moments just to breath and sit there.  Let the scripture sink in.  Then we can move on to application. What do I do to move this scripture to add this to my life? Write this out in detail about you.  If you are ambiguous about this then it will not work.  What is going on in your heart?  If you read something and it is about anger you need to seriously ask yourself… What has created the anger in your heart? What steps need to be taken from then on…

§     YOU NEED A BLANK PIECE OF PAPER. Studying and reading God’s word is a spiritual matter, it isn’t just a mind thing, it isn’t just obtaining knowledge… let me grow in knowledge.  Everything inside of us and outside of us wants to rebel against it. You can read anything… any kind of book… Harry Potter, Danielle Steele, even those books for 99 cent books in Wal-Mart with Fabio on the front… You can read a magazine. But you never ever even think about cleaning the garage until you read your Bible. You sit down to read and study God’s word and think… “Man I should clean out the garage soon.  Or oh I cannot forget to call so and so.” Isn’t that crazy!  That is how bad Satan doesn’t want us to read and study the Bible.  But if you are prepared… then that distraction can be taken away. If I think of something I have to remember to do I can just write it on a blank sheet of paper and be done with it until I am finished reading my Bible and then I can go back to it later. Because everything is against you reading your Bible.

§     YOU NEED TO PREPARE YOUR HEART BEFORE YOU START. Pray and ask God to speak to you before you start.  Ask Him to speak to you and open up your eyes for understanding and revelation.  Ask Him to speak about what ever He wants to talk to you about. Take your time, don’t rush through this time. I would encourage you to even write out your prayer in your journal or notebook. Make sure to take some time in confession of sin and acknowledging who You are/were without Jesus.  That way you enter into your study time peacefully and without anything that could block or hinder your time with God.

§     YOU NEED RESOURCES TO HELP YOU INTERPRET GOD’S WORD.

A key foundation for studying the Bible is interpretation, which is technically known as HERMANEUTICS.  These tools help us understand the CONTEXT for what we are reading.  This means that when we are reading God’s Word we must keep in mind not only the immediate context such as the cultural context of when the book/letter was written but also the literary context as well. Make sure you are interpreting with the author’s original intent in mind.  Don’t read into a text what is not there.  Seek to draw out only what is intended from the specific passage.

o   Bible Dictionary: Have you ever been reading a scripture and you come across a word and you have no idea what it means?  This is what can help you understand bigger words or words that you do not understand.  It also provides you with more biblical understanding on the word.

o   Bible Concordance: Most Bibles have these in the back. But if yours doesn’t you can buy a more exhaustive one at the Christian Bookstore or online.  This is an alphabetical list of the words (especially the most important ones) present in the text, usually with citations of the passages concerned.  This is very helpful if you want to do WORD STUDIES. So if you are really struggling with FAITH one day.  You can look up FAITH and it will give you every verse on FAITH and you can jump right to them and read them.

o   Biblical Survey Books: This is a resource that I have found super helpful.  These types of books give you a really intense over view on a specific text.  It goes into great detail, with maps, images, history and much more.  I think this is an amazing resource.

o   Bible Commentaries: Commentaries are amazing and I love mine and use them daily! But you have to be careful with what you read and who wrote it.  A commentary is someone else’s interpretation on a specific book of the Bible.  So if you have a commentary you have to read it with a grain of salt.  You cannot take what someone else says and label it as absolute truth.  But they can be very helpful to gain insight on a specific book of the Bible.

o   Original Language Lexicons: Lexicons provide definitions and meanings in the original languages of the Bible. This amazing resource helps us understand the origins and root meanings of the ancient language. Some even give KEY NUMBERS over top of specific words so you can easily see how it was translated.  // GIVE EXAMPLE USING WORSHIP // For instance... we in our English language has two words that I use a lot. Praise and Worship.  Those two words a used a lot in our Bibles. But those two words can be translated to literally over 60 different words in Hebrew alone.  And those words have different literal meanings and actions with them.  So for instance we read PRAISE but in my original language lexicon I can look up a specific word and verse and it will tell me the original word, which might be BARAK, which translated means to kneel or bow, to give reverence to God as an act of adoration.  I could read another verse and we read PRAISE.  I got to my lexicon and is translated HALLAL where we get our word??? Hallelujah.  Which means to praise, to make a show or rave about. To act clamorously foolish. How many of us did that this morning? This tool helps us understand what the Bible’s literal intent and meaning was for the words chosen.  PRETTY AMAZING HUH?

So in studying here is what we look for...

1.)           First, We are looking to be edified by God’s Words. We are looking to be growing in our faith as a Christ follower. We are not in this to score points with God. Seek to be edified by the Bible so that you and I can edify others.

2.)           Secondly, engage the reading. This means that you want to be actively involved in what you are reading, studying, looking for what God might want to teach you. Memorize a verse to take it with you.  Meditate on a verse or passage through the day. Psalm 1:2 says, “Happy (blessed) is the man who delights in the LAW (God the Bible) of the Lord.” He’s not under the Law, it’s not burdensome. He meditates on the law. The Hebrew word for meditate is HAGAH.  Which is this beautiful picture of a cow chewing its cud.  It eats some grass, re-chewing, re-working it.  It swallows it and later brings it back up again to gain every possible ounce of nutrition out of it.  This is what this time is for us.  We eat God’s Word, we think it through, pray on it, study it, chew it, bring it back up later in the day, next week, next year, make application in our daily life for it.

3.)           Thirdly, this time equips us to face the challenges of our daily life. Look to God’s Word to nourish you and prepare us to serve Jesus throughout our day.

4.)           Lastly, this time should prepare us for evangelism. This doesn’t mean God is calling us to get a bullhorn and be a street preacher but it does mean that naturally as we read and study this book we will fall more and more in love with the person of the trinity and when we are in love we cannot keep our mouths shut.

In closing I want to say this if you start out at an hour-long personal Bible study time you will fail.  Maybe you should do 20 minutes.  Pray 5 minutes, read five minutes, journal five minutes and application steps five minutes. Believe me if you commit to doing that you will be a different person a year from now, six months from now.  I promise you, you will want more time with your Bible after you get started doing this. What happens is we grow and grow and grow and then one day we surprise ourselves. You aren’t going to get a six-pack over night.  This works the same way. You can’t do this in a week. But you can do this!  Don’t get discouraged because you aren’t a Bible whiz in a week, because this isn’t about becoming a Bible whiz any way. Don’t say, “For the rest of my life I’m going to commit to read”…. Say this… “Tomorrow I’m going to read”… and then the next day say the same thing.  Then when you miss a day of reading you just start over the next day. And any time you feel guilty for missing a day… confess that because all that is you trying to earn grace and mercy. You do not get Holy gold stars for reading!  You aren’t reading it for God... He already knows it!  You are reading it for you!