Getting Started in Bible Reading

Hearing and responding to God's Word is vital to a relationship with God.

At the beginning of this year, we looked at Hebrews 3:7-4:13 in a sermon and considered how we can be "good listeners" to God.  If we want to enter the rest God has made available to us and invites us into, we need to respond with trust and obedience when we hear him speak (see that message here).

So how does God speak to us today?  Here are three ways:

1. Through his written Word, the Bible
2. Through other believers who have his Spirit within them
3. Through his Spirit inside you

All three are important.  If you want to hear God's voice in your life, you need to take time to read the Bible, allow other believers to speak into your life, and keep in step with the Spirit's leadership inside you.  This is why we do Gospel Fluency Groups made up of 2-3 men or women who read and respond to God's Word together.  They combine all three ways of hearing God.

Perhaps Bible reading is new to you and you aren't sure where to get started.  It's an ancient book that takes place in a culture different from yours so that makes some parts hard to understand.  Some parts are just deep and complex so they take some critical thinking to make sense of.  This is why personal Bible reading cannot be our only way of engaging God's Word: we need each other to make sense of the Bible.  We need teachers who devote time to deep study of God's Word in order to help us make sense of the grand story and foreign cultural context.  We need to meet with other believers to work through the argument and implications of weighty passages.

While Bible engagement is important in community, we also need to engage the Bible on our own.  If we only ate one meal a week, we would be malnourished.  Deuteronomy 8:3 compares Bible reading to eating: "man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD."  Reading and reponding to God's Word is spiritual nourishment for us and that means we need a regular diet.

Here are two suggestions for reading the Bible this year:

1. Follow a reading plan to read through the Bible.  Typically, you pick how long you want to take to read through the Bible such as 1 year, 2 years, 6 months, etc, then the reading plan assigns how many chapters you need to read each day to complete it in that amount of time.  Now, often people start a "read the Bible in a year" plan and they do fine with the first two books of the Bible, Genesis and Exodus, because those are mostly stories.  But halfway through Exodus, you get chapter upon chapter of laws and then by the time you hit Leviticus, it's all laws and most people stop their reading plan because that is difficult reading even for a pastor.  My suggestion is to try out the F260 reading plan.  This is a 1-year reading plan but it only assigns readings for 5 days a week and its goal is to hit the foundational passages in the Bible.  That means you don't get bogged down in the codes of laws or the genealogies of lists telling you "so and so begat so and so."  You can print off a paper copy of the reading plan or follow it digitally using the YouVersion Bible app, which by the way is a great resource to download if you don't already have it!  It's an app that puts tons of Bible translations and reading plans right on your phone.  When you can't fall asleep or are bored in a waiting room or waiting in line, pull up your Bible app rather than your facebook or instagram app.
2. If you aren't ready to commit to a long Bible reading plan, make this simple goal instead: read your Bible once a day.  Whether that's a whole book, a chapter, a verse, a couple sentences, just make it your goal to open your Bible once a day.  If you get 30 minutes in the morning for deep reflection, that's great.  If it's been a crazy day and you are laying down at 9:45pm and realize you haven't read your Bible, take 2 minutes to pull it up on your phone and read a verse.  That's great too!  The important part is forming the habit of engaging the Bible on your own.

LifeWay Christian Resources did research around which spiritual disciplines are the most impactful.  They found that engagement with the Bible was the spiritual practice that leads to an increase in all the others (see an article about it here).  It's like a key that unlocks growth in many other areas and it makes sense because God's Word is food for our spiritual lives.