Seven Steps to Reading the Bible

by Sheila Evans

This is a very important area of the believer’s life, the matter of reading your Bible. It is just three words: "reading your Bible." It sounds very very simple but many believers find it a problem so this issue is intended to help you in that area. Reading your Bible is very important for spiritual growth and for strength, for joy in the believer’s life. Jesus said, "Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God," and though we know how important it is, somehow we are non-starters, we just can’t get going.

Step One: What is Essential?

Examine Your Motives For Reading The Bible

Motivation is very important. If we read the Bible only as a duty saying "I am a believer, I must read the Bible no matter what," it becomes a dry matter of routine to us, just an exercise to satisfy our conscience. We are going to miss the joy of meeting with God in His word. We need to come to the matter of reading the Bible with expectation and anticipation, expecting God to speak to us and expecting to get instruction from His word. If you look at Psalm 119, and I recommend that you go through it and circle every word that is related to joy, delight or happiness, you’ll be amazed at how it is full of the psalmist’s love for God’s word. "Oh, how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day and how sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth." We can see that God’s law, God’s commandments, God’s judgments are not just a matter of dry duty, like the routine of brushing your teeth, but they are exciting to the psalmist. It is a matter of immersing himself in God’s word and he just loves and delights in it. That is the attitude we want to ask God to help us to have in our own lives, that we will really have a great desire to read the Bible and to enjoy it.

We learn about God and Jesus Christ in the Bible and it is through reading, believing and obeying the Bible that we can develop an intimate relationship with God and Jesus Christ. The Bible is God’s message to us. Some people say it is God’s love letter to us and they make a rather good analogy. If we received a love letter from somebody, we wouldn’t just leave it alone, we would be reading it over and over again and maybe underlining and circling and so on. That is really the way the Bible should be to us. We need to rejoice in what God has to say to us.

The Matter of Prayer

Ask God to open up your mind and to prepare your heart. Prayer reminds us that we are dependent upon God. We can ask Him to help us to understand His truth. Prayer reminds us of who God is and who we are. So before we go to God’s word we need to pray. We need to quiet our hearts and ask God to find for us what we need from His word for that day. Ask Him to help us with different problems, different situations that we have. Again, a verse from Psalm 119. "Open my eyes that I may see wondrous things from your law." There are wonderful things in the Bible. They are written for us so we need to ask God to help us to understand them.

The Matter of the Holy Spirit

Recognize that we do need the help of the Holy Spirit. In I Corinthians 2:14, we read that the natural man doesn’t receive the things of the Spirit of God for they are foolishness to him, nor can he know them because they are spiritually discerned. We really need to have the Holy Spirit to clarify and illumine our minds so we can understand God’s word. We can come to the Bible with a lot of our own ideas and we can be very resistant to the truth because we believe a certain way and are not prepared to let go. We like our way of thinking and only the Holy Spirit can clear away wrong ideas and presumptuous desires so that we can see the truth as God gives it to us. We need to depend on the Holy Spirit.

Set a regular time to read the Bible each day

I suggest that you start with a reasonable length of time. You may find, once you begin (I know because I found this myself), that you become super enthusiastic and think, "I am going to spend an hour and a half every day reading God’s word." In my case I got everything together, sat down to read, prayed a bit and fifteen minutes later I had exhausted my resources for that day. I just wasn’t prepared to make a jump from zero to an hour and a half. It is better to start in a smaller way and then as you get an appetite, you will find that you want more time. So begin with fifteen, twenty or possibly thirty minutes. Try to make it an unchangeable time as much as possible. Everybody’s schedule is different. Perhaps you will say, "Well, 6:30 to 7:00 each morning is a good time for me. That is when I am going to read my Bible and to meet with God." Maybe for you that won’t work; perhaps 1:30 to 2:00 after lunch is a better time for you. It might have to be in the evening but try to keep it an unchangeable time because we are creatures of habit. We get certain routines built in and if you have that time set aside for you, then you will already be psychologically adjusted to sitting down and reading the Bible at that point. Make it part of your life. I think in a way this is one of the biggest barriers to reading the Bible, the issue of time. We know we should have room in our day to study God’s word. We have time for everything else but somehow we can’t find the time. You’ll never find it, you never will. The devil doesn’t want you to find it for one thing, so he is going to keep shifting it away from you, but you need to take the time. You have to determine in your mind that this is important and I will take the time and I will read God’s word. In that way you will put into action what you have already determined. You may find that now you won’t have time to read the newspaper or you will have to cut something else out, but this is more important. Notice what Job said, "I have treasured the words of His mouth more than my necessary food." We wouldn’t go too long missing meals so we shouldn’t really be going for days missing reading the Bible. This after all is our spiritual food. If we do, we will be malnourished and we won’t be making headway. It is vital, it has to have top priority and we need the time for it.

Step 2: What should I read?

What kind of Bible?

This is a problem for some people particularly in our part of the world. There are so many Bibles. You can have pink ones and red ones, you can have ladies’ ones, men’s ones and young singles ones. Every kind of Bible! What should you read? It is best to use one dependable translation regularly for reading so you can become really familiar with that particular translation rather than jumping from one to the other. A modern translation is better for most people. You need a Bible that you can understand, one that is accessible to you. God’s word is intended to be understood so the New King James or the New International or the New American Standard are good. Beware of paraphrases that expand on the scripture. They have their place and they have their purpose. But for daily Bible reading it is better to keep to a dependable translation of God’s word. When you are doing study, which is something a little bit different, then you might want to consult more than one translation.

You need a plan

You need an orderly approach to your reading. If you jump here and there through the Bible, you miss the context. If you are in Hebrews one day and you are in Exodus the next, you miss the connections. You miss the logical things that go together and you will have a little bit of everything but nothing that is really building a solid foundation for you. Some people concentrate on a very limited part of the Bible but God gave us all of His word for a reason so ultimately we should aim to read all the Bible. There are 1,189 chapters in the Bible. If you read three or four chapters a day you can read through the Bible in a year, but for daily reading I suggest smaller portions. Ten to fifteen verses is a good amount for daily reading. You may say, "This is not going to get me through the Bible in a year." One approach is to begin with a smaller reading and perhaps later in the day or maybe on a Saturday or a Sunday read longer portions. What I do is to have my devotional time in the morning reading a smaller passage and then in the evening I try to read three or four chapters just reading along.

Get God’s Word Into Your Mind

What we want to do is get God’s word into our minds, into our thinking and into our doing so that we are really acting biblically in everything. I suggest that you begin with the Gospels, Acts, Genesis or Exodus. These are straightforward passages. They are narrative and factual. Later when you are more accustomed to the Scripture and you know more, then you can try some of the harder books. Leviticus is usually a stumbling block for some. It is difficult to see what it has to do with your life today and there are other books like that which might require some study before you read them devotionally. I suggest that you begin with Matthew, Mark or Luke, one of the Gospels, and move on from there. It is important for the Bible to go through you, not just for you to go through the Bible. Some people will say, "Well, I have read the Bible three times," yet you don’t see much evidence of it in their life. That is not what we are aiming for: we want the Bible to have an effect on our life. Just the going through it isn’t important in itself, the real issue is familiarizing yourself with what is in the Scripture and putting it into practice in your life.

Step Three: How should we read the Bible?

First of all read it as you would read other books

The Bible is written in human language. It was written by human authors. They were inspired by the Holy Spirit to give God’s word but they were human beings and they wrote in human language. The rules of grammar are the same. We don’t have to learn some special techniques for reading the Bible. A noun or a naming word is the same in the Bible as it would be any other place. A verb or an action word is the same as it would be in any other place, it doesn’t change. So this verse, "Now Peter and John went up together to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour" means that two men, one called Peter and one called John, did walk into the temple at a certain hour. In other words this is factual. It doesn’t mean that they had some kind of mystical journey in their minds. The Bible isn’t a book of magic from fairyland. As you read what is on the page, understand it as you would understand other books.

It is the Word of God

The Bible is human and it is divine so it is a supernatural book, it is God-breathed. When Peter said, "Silver and gold I do not have but what I do have I give you in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk," and he took the lame man by the right hand and lifted him up and immediately he could walk, you can believe that the man really did get up. Later when it says he went leaping and praising God through the temple, He really did do that. You might say, "Well, that doesn’t obey the rules of science, you know. If you are lame you can’t do that." But this is an account of the supernatural actions of God. We read about miracles in the Bible and we should believe them. Sometimes we read things in science fiction and we can’t accept them, we know that they just can’t happen. Yet the Bible is different. Ultimately the Bible has one author and that is God Himself. We can be sure that one part of the Bible will not contradict another part. Now, sometimes it may seem to us that one thing is going against another but that is because our minds are limited and we do not have the whole picture, we can’t see everything as God sees it. We should have faith that there are not contradictions in the Bible. We can believe that what is there has a unique unity. Because it is unlike any other book we should let Scripture interpret the Scripture. The Bible really is the most reliable commentary on the Bible. Other commentaries can be useful but we need the Bible to interpret itself, so read it as the word of God.

Read it with a responsive heart

The Bible is our standard for life and for belief so we mustn’t read the Bible, set it aside and then do nothing about what we have read. In fact that is very dangerous because our hearts will grow hard and after a while we won’t be able to respond. We have to be very sure that we are responding to what we have read. We may not like it but still we have to respond to what we are reading. We can put other books aside and take them or leave them according to what they have to say but where the Bible is concerned, we have to act on what we have learned.

Step Four: What shall we do first?

Consider the context of the passage

When you first came to know the Lord you were told to read the Bible. How do you begin? First plan which book you will read. Suppose you decide to read the book of Philippians. Each book of the Bible was written at a certain time in history and for a certain purpose. It has a structure to it and it would be helpful for you to inform yourself about that book before you begin reading. Looking at the book of Philippians you will find that Paul and Timothy, mainly Paul, wrote this to the believers in Philippi. If you have been reading the Bible you will know that Paul made a journey to Philippi. You will read about that in Acts 16. A Bible handbook or notes in a study Bible will help you to find out some more information about Philippi at that time and other relevant background. That will prepare you for reading the book of Philippians. It is also helpful to read through the book in one sitting. You might say, "All at once?" but actually the book of Philippians can be read through in about fifteen minutes. If it were the book of Genesis you might want to split it up into parts. By reading through you get an overview and you know how to relate the different things that you are reading. If you are not able to fit this kind of preparation into your schedule, don’t let that stop you from reading the Bible daily. This is something you might do the night before. If you can’t get it done don’t say, "Oh well, I guess I just can’t read the Bible then." Don't worry about it, just start!

Read the passage

Let’s look at Philippians 1:1-11. We are going to read through the passage prayerfully and stop at a natural break in the passage where a thought or an event seems to end. Usually, this would be ten to fifteen verses. So we read:

Those last three verses speak particularly of Paul’s prayer. So read through prayerfully, thinking about it as you go.

Read the passage again looking for main ideas and key words

Usually on the second reading you see more than you did on the first. Then think about it, consider perhaps what you have read the day before. In this case you are starting right at the beginning of Philippians so that wouldn’t be applicable but if you were reading Acts 3, for example, you would look back at Acts 2 and say, "Oh yes, on the day of Pentecost many were saved, over 3000 as a matter of fact, they were sharing their possessions, they were praising God. Now we see Peter and John going up to the temple and seeing the lame man." We want to see what the connections are between the different parts of the Bible. Then look for the main ideas and the keywords. Ask yourself what is happening in the passage, who is speaking? Here we have in Philippians the words of Paul who is bringing certain things to mind. Who is responding? What truths are being presented in this passage? You are asking yourself questions because you do not want the words just to zip through your mind, you want to have your mind thinking about what is going on in that passage.

Step Five: What special guidelines do I need to keep in mind?

God’s revelation is given in different forms

The book of Genesis is narrative history, the beginning of man’s history in this world. In it we are introduced to Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph. We are told of events, things that are happening, and we see how God is working and how people are responding to what God is doing. In the book of Psalms we have something very different, we have poetry. The Psalms give us truth in a different literary form. They address our emotions as well as our mind—so we have the Psalmist saying, "Why are you cast down O my soul?" In another place, "Bless the Lord O my soul and all that is within me." We find that he praises the Lord, that he rejoices, that he gets very discouraged and wets his pillow with tears. Other Psalms speak about the Messiah but there is an emotional dimension there that isn’t so obvious in the narratives. There are also prophetical books. We have the gospels which are really quite unique. Here we have four different perspectives on the life of the Lord Jesus Christ and his teachings. Then we have the epistles which are letters to churches and individuals, a category which the book of Philippians fits into. It is a letter that Paul wrote to the believers who were in Philippi. Here we find doctrine or teaching being applied to our lives. We know what Jesus said but how is it being worked out in the lives of the early church? We have the wisdom literature like the book of Proverbs with different proverbs in each chapter. The books of the Bible are not all written in the same kind of form. They are all the truth, but they have different dimensions and we have to adjust our reading to what we are seeing there.

We need to be aware of special uses of language

In Psalm 86 we read, "Bow down your ear, O Lord, hear me for I am poor and needy." People will say, "God is a spirit. How can He have an ear if he is a spirit?" You see, if you took it literally and didn’t recognize that this is poetic language, you would be in trouble because we also find out that God has an arm, and He has feet, and He has eyes. But God is speaking to us in ways that accommodate our understanding. We need to recognize those special uses of language. Matthew 5:30 says, "If your right hand causes you to offend," here Jesus is speaking, "cut it off and cast it from you." Some people have taken that literally. I heard of someone who was stealing, he just couldn’t seem to stop, so he actually cut off his hand. But is that what Jesus really meant? No, He is speaking very strongly against sin and saying that you must deal with your sin very strongly. This is a special use of language. When we see something rather unusual like that, the red light should go on. Are we supposed to take this exactly the way it seems to be written or is there another way that we should be thinking about it? In Isaiah 55:12 it says, "The mountains and hills shall break forth into singing before you and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands." Well, I have never seen a tree with hands clapping like this and I have never seen hills singing either. Again, this is poetry, and we have a picture of such great joy that even nature is rejoicing. Can you really say that the Bible is lying because it has trees of the field clapping? No, it is just another way of using language. In John Chapter 6 Jesus is speaking to the people around Him, and He says, "Most assuredly I say to you unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you." Is Jesus suggesting that we should be cannibals, that we should actually be eating the flesh and drinking the blood? As we read through the passage, and as we understand Scripture we realize that Jesus is using this language in a very special way to indicate an intimate relationship with Himself, that He is not just an attachment to our life, but that He is to be a true part of our life even as food is.

You need to be aware of special uses of language. Most of the time we know when this is the case. For example, in Philippians 1 Paul says, "I have you in my heart" but we know he doesn’t mean a literal heart. We know he is speaking of having a great love and affection for them. Actually, our language, even our everyday language is full of expressions that we naturally adjust to but we need to remember that when we are reading the Scripture also.

Step 6: How can I help myself concentrate and remember?

Use a notebook or diary

I suggest you use a notebook or a diary. If we take things in through our eyes we remember a certain proportion but if we actually write them down then we have a better chance of remembering. Also we focus our thinking through writing because we have to think in order to write something down that has to do with the passage. So get a notebook or diary. The advantage of a diary is that the dates are at the top of the page already and you will see when you miss a day. But you can use any notebook, preferably something that is fairly small. If you get something big then you will feel you have to fill each page and that will be a big chore. At the top of the page you put the date and you put the passage that you are reading for that day. Then, as a sort of heading, write down a key thought from that passage. Use your note book to keep a record of where you have been so to speak, what you have been studying and what you have learned. Keep it simple. This isn’t an essay. This isn’t something you are going to hand in for examination.

Write down three or four main points

Write down three or four main points from what you are finding in the passage. Don’t try to write down every detail or again you will find you have written too much. This should all fit onto one page. Just keep to the most important things. For example in our passage in Philippians 1:1-11 my first point is: Paul is thankful for the fellowship he has had with the Philippian believers and he prays for them with joy. The second point: he is confident that God will complete what he has begun in them. A third point: Paul loves them. He says they have supported him as he has proclaimed the gospel and while he has been in jail. Then the fourth: he prays that their love will increase, that they will look for the best, that they will have integrity and that they will be filled with the fruits of righteousness.

Try to put these points down in your own words if you can, so that you have to think about the meaning. "How can I express it so that it has meaning for me?" As you do that you will find that your mind is engaged. I’ve found over and over again that I will read through the passage and I will think "I have read this many times before." But when I read it again and then write down the main points I am quite amazed at what becomes obvious and apparent to me in the process of writing those ideas down. The writing doesn’t have to be in great English, in fact if you don’t have English as your first language do it in the language you are most familiar with. It doesn’t have to have great sentence structure or anything like that. You are just putting down the main points because you want to note what is in that passage and what is going to be important to remember.

Consider what the passage meant to the original readers

In this case I would write down that Paul is praying for the Philippians. He hasn’t forgotten them, he encourages them and he reminds them of what is important. So I would write the things that I think were intended for the original readers of that passage down at the bottom of the page. In this way I concentrate on the passage and I am better able to remember what I have been reading. I am not talking about something that will take hours and hours, you can read and note things down in about fifteen to twenty minutes depending on how many verses you choose.

In this passage of Philippians the prayer at the end, the last three verses, most likely would have been good for a reading on another day because there is so much in that prayer.

Step Seven: How can I make sure the Bible is affecting my life, my thinking and my doing?

Turn over in your mind what the passage is saying

This is where I think many of us have a problem. We read and we write but we don’t think about it. The word "meditate" is a word that is somewhat lost in our fast society. Everything has to come quickly. Even if you meditate for just two or three minutes over what you have read it will help the truths sink deeply down into your mind. In this case think of Paul’s love. Over and over again we can see how much he cared for the Philippians. He hadn’t seen some of them for quite a while but he hadn’t forgotten them. Think of Paul’s prayer and think of Paul’s thanksgiving; the fact he rejoiced that he had worked with them. I am sure there had been difficulties in their relationship just as we may have in ours, yet he was thankful for that fellowship and he said, "from the first day until now you haven’t deserted me, you have stayed with me."

Write down what the passage is saying to you

Let those things sink down into your mind then write down what the passage is saying to you specifically. Now here there might be many possibilities because we are different people and different individuals and although there is one meaning to a passage there can be many applications. "How do I feel about my brothers and sisters in Christ, particularly those whom I work with? Do I pray for them? How do I pray for them? Do I just pray for material things which are important or do I pray for the spiritual things?" In this case I wrote down my resolution. I resolve to pray for those who work with me in the ESL Bible Study at least twice a week. This is how we interact with what we have read. Resolve in some way to react to the passage and write it down, so that when you are going back through your book you’ll come across it. "Oh yes, I said I would pray for them twice a week. I wonder if I have really been carrying that into action." Writing it down is a sort of commitment to yourself to actually put your resolve into practice.

Remember the passage during the day

Then think of the passage during the day. Usually when I am driving into work I say, "Now what did I read this morning" and I try to bring it back into my mind. Sometimes I am rather appalled that I can only remember a little bit but at least I remember something. Then maybe after lunch when you get back to your desk or at some quiet moment in your day think, "what did I read this morning? What was I thinking about?" Then in the evening go over it again. In other words try to keep it present in your mind so it doesn’t fly away. Keep it as part of you and in this way it will help you to remember what you are reading. It will be putting it into your mind so that it will really stay.

Put it into action

Then put into action what you have learned. It is good to meditate. It is good to recognize what is there, to understand and it is very, important that you actually put these things into action, that you actually put them into practice. You will find that this will become very, very important to you and that this will become a very exciting part of your life. I am not saying every day will be exciting because we are up and down aren’t we? Some mornings seem to be very dry but still we are putting God’s word into action in our life.

Some lessons need to be repeated

You will find that some areas of the Christian life are being brought before you on a very regular basis. Sometimes we think, "Oh, I know that, I don’t need to think about that anymore." But humility, forgiving other people, being kind, being hospitable—these kind of things do need to be brought to our attention over and over again because in reality we are very careless learners. We go along for a little while and then we forget. These basic truths of the Christian life come to us over and over again and we need lots of repetition. When you are teaching young children you have to go over things again and again. We need lots of repetition before a certain way of thinking and a certain way of acting become part of us. So we need to read our Bibles. We need to have time set aside for that. We need to have a plan of how we are going to do it and we need to have a pattern of what we are going to do when we

do sit down and read our Bibles. And we need to respond. This reading of a short passage and recording it is not our only Bible reading, as I mentioned before, but it should be a substantial part of our Bible reading. There are Bible reading plans available. M’Cheyne’s Calendar for Daily Readings has a plan for reading parts from different parts of the Bible each day. For example, on January 1st, Genesis, Matthew, Ezra and Acts. What I do with something like this is read a short passage from Acts in the morning and then at night I try to read the Ezra, the Matthew and the Genesis chapters. There are several plans you can use. The important thing is to plan. You can make up your own plan but decide how you are going to begin and how you are going to progress through the Bible and put it into action.

At the end of this article is a plan with a few outline comments for reading the book of Mark through in a month. You may want to begin with this.

Mark in a Month

Miss Sheila Evans is Professor of English Literature and Christian Education at Toronto Baptist Seminary and Bible College. This article was originally published in full form as a special Gospel Witness issue. The method presented in this article is adapted from a presentation given by Andrew Young which was later published as Daily Bible Reading by Andrew Young and Andrew Fountain.

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