As a pastor, I love it when people walk into my office and ask how they should study their Bible. I love it even more when they tell me how they have been studying it already and ask if I have any suggestions. Many people come into my office looking for THE way to study their Bible with a fear that they might somehow do it wrong or break something.
While I do beleive that there are ways of studying the Bible that are better than others, I am convinced that doing something is better than doing nothing and that God is powerful enough to speak through his word even when we do not read it in a way that may be deemed proper. Before you worry about the best way to study your Bible, you should focus on studying it. Are you reading your Bible consistently? If the answer is yes, then you can begin to focus on how to do it most effectively, but the first step in effective Bible study is consistency.
[bctt tweet=”The first step in effective Bible study is consistency.”]God called me to the ministry through the Bible. He used Isaiah 42:1-4 to show me his will very plainly at the age of 17. In his goodness, he continued over the course of the next year to reaffirm his will to me even in my disobedience. I was completely convinced that God had called me to vocational ministry, but I was not walking in obedience to that command. Over a period of months I used my Bible like Gideon’s fleece. Rather than reading through the Bible in a noticeable pattern, I went for the drop and reveal method. I would drop my bible open and read the passages where it landed. In his grace, God used even that method to continue to affirm his call in my life on multiple occasions. Once as I prayed for God to “reveal” his will (as if he had not already done so) my Bible actually fell open to the concordance and the first words i saw were “call, called, calling.” But, even then, I wrote it off as a coincidence.
But what of properly studying God’s word? In light of the illustration above I want to encourage you to focus first on studying it and second on obeying what God shows you through his word. There is a place for inductive studies and journalling and deep exposition, but the first thing for you to focus on is not how you are studying it but whether you are studying and applying God’s word.
Study God’s word. Study it in context and systematically, but focus first on studying it and obeying it. There is power in the Word of God and if you are reading it, even if you are reading it wrong, God can use his Word to change you.
