How Do I Study Bible Verses and the Bible Storyline Together?

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00:00:05.000 | Pastor John, my name is Jeremy and I am a college student living in Arlington, Texas.

00:00:10.000 | I love the Word of God and it often takes me a long time for me to read through a book of the Bible.

00:00:15.000 | In episode number 127, you mentioned slowing down in the rose garden,

00:00:19.000 | which has been so beneficial and wonderful.

00:00:22.000 | However, as a Christian who did not grow up in the church, I'm not familiar with all the Bible.

00:00:27.000 | So how do I both stop and enjoy God's truth one verse at a time,

00:00:32.000 | but also satisfy this desire to know the Bible as a whole?

00:00:37.000 | Pastor John, what would you say?

00:00:39.000 | I love the desire. Amen. Amen.

00:00:45.000 | I have something to suggest to Jeremy, but first let me say a word about depth and breadth.

00:00:52.000 | Because we all struggle with this. The balancing, if that's even the right word,

00:00:58.000 | between going deep with the Bible and going broad with the Bible.

00:01:03.000 | What do we even mean by that? I want to just say a word about that and then give a concrete piece of advice.

00:01:09.000 | Take depth. What do I mean by depth? Let's give an example.

00:01:12.000 | Here's 2 Thessalonians. So you're reading along, pretty good clip, trying to get through a chapter or two in the morning,

00:01:18.000 | and you read 2 Thessalonians 2.12, which says, "They did not believe the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness."

00:01:26.000 | And as you're moving along real quick, what registers is, okay, those are two things to avoid.

00:01:31.000 | Don't be disbelieving in the truth, and don't take pleasure in unrighteousness.

00:01:37.000 | On to the next verse. And what I mean by depth is that you stop.

00:01:43.000 | You don't go on to the next verse. You stop and you ask—this takes time, right?

00:01:49.000 | You can't be reading the next verse when you do this.

00:01:51.000 | What's the relationship between not believing the truth and taking pleasure in unrighteousness?

00:01:56.000 | Why did Paul make them alternatives? Why didn't he say, "They did not believe the truth, but believed a lie"?

00:02:03.000 | He didn't say that. Why didn't he say, "They did not take pleasure in righteousness, but in unrighteousness"?

00:02:09.000 | Why didn't he say that? He didn't say that. He said, "They did not believe the truth, but," as though it were an alternative,

00:02:16.000 | "took pleasure in unrighteousness." Odd. Why juxtapose unrighteousness and truth and belief and pleasure?

00:02:22.000 | What's going on here? I mean, this is what I mean by depth.

00:02:25.000 | And I think you say, "Hmm, hmm. Didn't I just read the word 'truth' back in verse 10?"

00:02:30.000 | You go back, pick up verse 10. "They refused to love the truth."

00:02:33.000 | Oh, now you've got love the truth, not just believe the truth. And love sounds sort of like taking pleasure in so.

00:02:39.000 | And now you're into a series of thoughts that take you down deep into the very nature of faith,

00:02:46.000 | which has to do with what you rest in, what you embrace, what you treasure, and not just what you think is true.

00:02:55.000 | Now, that may take you 10 minutes to do what I just did there, or longer.

00:03:00.000 | And you might jot it down in your journal, and as you're writing it in your journal,

00:03:03.000 | two new thoughts about pleasure and unrighteousness come to your mind,

00:03:06.000 | and suddenly you've filled up your morning half hour, and you've read one verse.

00:03:11.000 | So there's the struggle, right? If you're going to do that every day, it'll take you 80 years to read your Bible.

00:03:18.000 | Right, exactly.

00:03:19.000 | Or more. So I'm a great believer in slowing down and thinking, thinking, thinking.

00:03:26.000 | However, on the other hand, I believe in breadth. I mean, all Scripture is inspired by God.

00:03:36.000 | And here's an example. By breadth, I mean reading broadly enough so that you take in the entire 500-year period,

00:03:47.000 | say, of the divided kingdom in Israel, from Rehoboam right down to the end of the exile.

00:03:57.000 | And 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, king after king after king, rising, falling, succeeding, failing,

00:04:07.000 | good, then evil, evil, then good, a rotten father followed by a good son,

00:04:12.000 | a good father followed by a rotten son, and on and on.

00:04:17.000 | I don't know of any other way but reading through those books broadly to get the profound sense

00:04:27.000 | of both the repeated failure and rebellion of God's people over centuries,

00:04:32.000 | and the extraordinary mercy and patience of God.

00:04:37.000 | I mean, you can read the sentence "great patience of God" in the New Testament,

00:04:42.000 | and you'll have certain affections and feelings and responses,

00:04:45.000 | but when you take a month to read these four books—1 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles—

00:04:51.000 | you just come away saying, "Good night! How in the world did God tolerate such rebellion?"

00:05:00.000 | And then you realize, "Oh, look in the mirror, and how many times—"

00:05:05.000 | There's just no other way quite to get what God has to give us if we ignore the broad,

00:05:14.000 | doing only the deep that I described earlier.

00:05:17.000 | So my answer to Jeremy is mix deep and broad in various ways that suit your mind and your life.

00:05:28.000 | So here, concretely suggestion. What about this, Jeremy?

00:05:32.000 | Set aside a block of time in the morning to go deeper.

00:05:37.000 | You'll take a smaller passage of Scripture, and you'll perhaps memorize one of the verses in the Scripture.

00:05:44.000 | You will open a journal, and you'll write down some thoughts about what you saw in the verse you memorized,

00:05:51.000 | or some other verse.

00:05:53.000 | This may mean that you only cover a paragraph in the morning or two verses in the morning,

00:05:58.000 | and the encouragement is you're going to have grown remarkably when you do that.

00:06:03.000 | You will. You will.

00:06:04.000 | Then, here's my suggestion, set aside a time maybe just before you go to bed,

00:06:10.000 | because it's okay to fall asleep at the end of this, or maybe halfway through.

00:06:16.000 | Set aside some time in the evening to do the big block reading.

00:06:20.000 | And here, you don't have your journal open, and you're not trying to memorize anything.

00:06:25.000 | You're just trying to get the sense of the whole as you read more quickly and more broadly.

00:06:31.000 | That's one possible way of mixing up the deep and the broad.

00:06:35.000 | Another would be to take a month and do only deep, or a month and do only broad, or a year.

00:06:43.000 | You might say, "This is the year I'm going to get through the whole Bible, so four chapters a day.

00:06:46.000 | I'm not going to worry about depth. I'm going to get the whole thing read."

00:06:51.000 | Or you might take a whole year and say, "All in Philippians," or "All in Romans," or something like that.

00:06:58.000 | And so I might mention one other thing.

00:07:01.000 | If you're not familiar with the Bible—it sounded like Jeremy might have come out of a background where he's just not familiar with the stories—

00:07:08.000 | two suggestions. Get a book like, say, Vaughan Roberts' God's Big Picture,

00:07:13.000 | or get a good study Bible like the ESV Study Bible,

00:07:17.000 | and walk through the whole Bible reading the introductions to the biblical books,

00:07:22.000 | or reading some of those really good essays that summarize the whole Bible.

00:07:27.000 | So don't think that you have to do everything inductively, that just reading it for yourself.

00:07:33.000 | Do that, by all means, but there are great helps out there.

00:07:36.000 | And just always remember, whatever you do, never, never stop reading.

00:07:41.000 | This is God's very Word, broad or deep.

00:07:47.000 | It is His transforming voice.

00:07:50.000 | And speaking of slowing down and thinking slowly about one particular text,

00:07:55.000 | Pastor John is doing this very thing every week.

00:07:58.000 | It's something we call "Look at the Book."

00:08:01.000 | If you're not familiar with "Look at the Book," you should check it out.

00:08:04.000 | Pastor John marks up a text on a screen right before your eyes,

00:08:07.000 | and you can watch him as he draws circles and lines and makes connections in the text at a granular level.

00:08:13.000 | You can find those videos online at DesiringGod.org/labs.

00:08:19.000 | Tomorrow we close out the week with a listener who wants to know how much of our decision-making is emotional in nature,

00:08:25.000 | and should we be concerned by that.

00:08:27.000 | Pastor John will answer that tomorrow on the Ask Pastor John podcast.

00:08:31.000 | Don't miss this episode.

00:08:32.000 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.

00:08:35.000 | [music]

00:08:37.000 | [music]

00:08:39.000 | [music]

00:08:41.000 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

How Do I Study Bible Verses and the Bible Storyline Together?

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