How To Study the Bible

 

As a pastor, one of the top questions I get from people is what they need to do to study the Bible better. I think it’s a fair question; we all should want to know how to better dive into God’s Word and go deeper with our understanding of His message to us. The problem is that most people get overwhelmed by the Bible and don’t know where to start. Or if they start, they don’t stick with it because they don’t have a process or a strategy. 

One of the worst things you can do to try and study the Bible is take what I call the “roulette approach.” By that, I just mean that you randomly select verses or passages to study each day (or just whenever you study the Bible). This is such a poor strategy because it doesn’t create any cohesiveness in your Bible study and you end up only getting snippets of Scripture without ever seeing the whole picture. 

The Bible is one cohesive story. It’s God’s love letter to us, His children. Cherry-picking verses deprive us of the entire message that the authors were trying to convey when they were inspired by the Holy Spirit. Each book of the Bible is a message that needs to be studied as a whole, not individual verses that need to be studied separately, which leads me to the way I believe you should study the Bible: book by book.

Let me explain what I mean by studying the Bible book by book. I don’t mean that you have to read and study an entire book of the Bible in one sitting or at one time. I mean, you’re more than welcome to do that if you have the time or the drive, but most of us just don’t. When I say you should study the Bible book by book I just mean that you stay in a book and study it verse by verse until you finish it, no matter how long it takes. Maybe one day you read and study an entire chapter. Maybe the next day you only make it through a few verses. You’ll have to gauge your own pace depending on your comfort level and the amount of time you have available, but when you study the Bible this way you’ll start to see it in a whole new way, and you’ll begin to understand the message the authors intended. So pick a book of the Bible, sit down and make an outline (you can find plenty of outlines and reading plans online), and stick to it.