How to Read the Bible for Teenagers
00:00:00.000 | Here's a wonderful question from a dad of teenagers named Ryan. Ryan is a ministry partner
00:00:09.120 | with us at Desiring God and he and his wife recently joined us in the beautiful state
00:00:12.640 | of Washington. And there you led a few look at the book sessions, Pastor John, which is
00:00:18.800 | where you teach the Bible by drawing on the Bible text on your iPad. After the event,
00:00:23.600 | Ryan wrote us to ask this, "Pastor John, hello. Watching you work through scripture
00:00:28.240 | in lab form is so encouraging to my own soul and my own Bible study. Thank you. As we look
00:00:33.440 | to disciple our teenage children at home, however, we can feel inadequate explaining
00:00:37.200 | passages this way and are concerned that we are either missing the point or worse, teaching
00:00:41.760 | them incorrectly. Do you recommend using techniques like you do in lab when training children,
00:00:47.520 | or do you recommend another technique? How can parents of teens train their kids to do
00:00:52.080 | something lab-like?"
00:00:54.320 | Well, it seems to me that the first thing a parent has to reckon with is whether the
00:01:01.120 | setting has been created in the family or in the church where this kind of teaching
00:01:08.240 | will feel suitable for the young person. So yes, I do think we should try to teach our
00:01:14.480 | young people, but this question of have we created the setting? And what I mean is,
00:01:19.600 | is the family used to having devotions which simply involves, say, the reading of scripture
00:01:25.760 | and prayer? If so, it may feel awkward or strange if we suddenly turn that kind of
00:01:34.160 | moment in our family into a classroom setting with assignments and questions and so on.
00:01:40.400 | So it seems to me that every family has to come to terms with, can we create a time or
00:01:47.040 | a setting in the family or in the church with a fellowship of younger people or just a family
00:01:53.040 | where something like a classroom situation with expectations of rigorous thinking and
00:01:59.520 | questions and answers and analysis and assignments feels natural, even exciting.
00:02:05.840 | The mindset needs to be created that these sessions are meant to inculcate a skill, just
00:02:15.040 | like you would inculcate a skill of cooking into one of your children or a skill of cutting the
00:02:22.160 | grass or tying a knot on a fish hook so that when the big fish gets on there, he won't come off.
00:02:27.040 | The point is not that in every moment of those sessions that you'll experience the fullest
00:02:35.520 | joyful payoff of discovery, but later you get to eat the meal, you get to see the beautifully
00:02:42.320 | cut lawn, you get to catch the fish without losing your hook. You're trying to inculcate
00:02:47.120 | a skill for a lifetime, and so the parent needs to come to terms with, can I create
00:02:52.640 | a setting in the family where the teaching of skill can happen? And then, once you've got that
00:03:01.440 | figured out, which I hope they can, the question becomes, what do you do with that time?
00:03:08.960 | And here's one suggestion. What's guiding my suggestion here is that the goal of this teaching
00:03:18.640 | is a lifelong habit of mind and heart to approach the Scriptures in a certain way. In other words,
00:03:26.160 | being able to do a particular technique is not the goal. So, trying to reproduce Piper
00:03:34.720 | lab experiences is not the goal, but the habits of mind, the habits of heart that you inculcate or
00:03:45.280 | that you build into your children while working through those techniques, that's the goal.
00:03:52.560 | So, I would explain that goal to my children. I'd say, "That's what we're after here. I'm not
00:03:58.400 | trying to make a little John Piper out of you or a little whatever out of you. I just want to build
00:04:03.360 | into you certain habits of mind and habits of heart so that you will approach the Scriptures
00:04:11.040 | fruitfully for the rest of your life." And as a means of that, I'd say, "Well, perhaps assign them
00:04:18.560 | to watch one or two labs a day for a week or two, and as they watch, tell them, jot down the kind of
00:04:26.800 | questions that you see John Piper is asking and answering. Write them down. What is he asking?
00:04:33.360 | What's he after? Be as specific as you can." Or another way to say it would be, "What are the
00:04:38.960 | specifics that Piper is looking for as he analyzes the text? Make a list. Be specific." And this will
00:04:47.600 | be a challenge, especially because oftentimes we don't have vocabulary for what we're seeing. This
00:04:55.600 | is huge. A huge part of learning a skill is being able to talk about what you're seeing. And if you
00:05:03.600 | don't have words for what you're seeing, it becomes very difficult. What if you're cooking a
00:05:09.920 | recipe and it says, "Add oregano"? Well, you don't have a clue what oregano is, so you may be very
00:05:15.760 | skilled in cooking it. But if you don't know the vocabulary, and the same thing with reading a text
00:05:21.600 | or grammar or defining relationships between propositions. So let me, while I'm on that,
00:05:27.280 | let me just say that in my book, Reading the Bible Supernaturally, I have a list of all that
00:05:35.280 | vocabulary that you need in order to, I think it's like pages, I looked it up yesterday, like 397
00:05:42.640 | to 402 or something like that. And the list of all the relationships and all the vocabulary,
00:05:51.280 | the names you need to talk about what I'm suggesting are there. So let me do this. I want
00:05:57.760 | to give you the answer to the question, "What is Piper looking for?" This is what you want your
00:06:02.400 | kids to find, okay? So I have seven questions that I'm asking as I come to a text. So number one,
00:06:11.600 | what is the meaning of a particular word in a context? The same word can have many different
00:06:18.160 | meanings in different settings. So how does Piper decide on which meaning the word has in this
00:06:23.840 | particular setting? And the answer is that he looks at the most immediate context, the sentence
00:06:29.680 | in which the word is used, and then he looks at the paragraph, and then he looks at the book in
00:06:35.120 | which the, that is the, like it's Ephesians or Romans in which the word is used. And then he
00:06:39.840 | looks at the rest of Paul's writings, and then he looks at the whole Bible. So there's a kind of
00:06:44.480 | concentric circles as he moves out from those immediate context, and the most immediate context
00:06:51.280 | would have the greatest force or power, authority in defining a word. Second, what are the
00:06:57.840 | propositions that the author has created by putting words together? Propositions are the
00:07:03.840 | basic building blocks of meaning. Words get their meaning from their use in propositions,
00:07:09.920 | and propositions are the most basic assertions. They usually have a subject and a verb with some
00:07:15.520 | modifiers. So we might be looking at Romans 1:16, and the word we want to define is "gospel,"
00:07:21.920 | and the proposition in which it stands is "I am not ashamed of the gospel." That's what I mean by
00:07:29.280 | words and propositions. Third, how are the propositions related to each other? Does the
00:07:36.400 | proposition start with "because," or does it start with "therefore," or "in order that," or "although,"
00:07:43.520 | or "when," or so on? It really helps to have names for all these relationships, and that's what I was
00:07:52.720 | referring to on pages 396 to 401, I think it is, in reading the Bible supernaturally. This is the
00:07:59.920 | way an author communicates his meaning. He puts words together in propositions, then he puts
00:08:05.280 | propositions together in certain logical relationships. So, for example, we notice in
00:08:10.640 | Romans 1:16, "I am not ashamed of the gospel," and that has a relationship to what's in front and
00:08:17.200 | what's behind. It says, "I am eager to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome because I am not
00:08:24.800 | ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God unto salvation." So you have three links
00:08:32.320 | in a chain of argument. When I began to see that as a 22-year-old, my world exploded with excitement
00:08:39.440 | and insight. Number four, what's the flow of the argument as these propositions with their
00:08:46.560 | relationships pile up, and what's the main point in this flow? Number five, what are the similar
00:08:55.840 | flows of thought elsewhere in the Bible? For example, in this "I am not ashamed of the gospel"
00:09:02.080 | flow in Romans 1, we might go over to 2 Timothy 1:12, where Paul says, "I'm not ashamed because
00:09:09.040 | I know whom I have believed," and asked, "What's the relationship between the flow of thought in how
00:09:15.600 | shame is overcome in 2 Timothy and how shame is overcome in Romans 1?" And when I make comparisons
00:09:24.000 | like that, similar flows of thought compared side by side, insights multiply. Number six,
00:09:30.320 | what's the actual reality—this is so important—the reality behind the words and propositions and
00:09:38.240 | flows of thought? Lots of young people and older people, when they're getting excited about
00:09:42.560 | seeing the meaning of words, seeing how propositions work, seeing how logical flows of
00:09:47.680 | thought develop, they get all excited about words and logic, and suddenly they're playing a game,
00:09:54.800 | and they're forgetting that there's heaven and hell and life and death and God and Satan. Massive
00:10:04.000 | realities are behind these words, and so I want to push myself through words into reality. That's
00:10:11.920 | number six. What's the reality? And finally, number seven, what are the personal applications
00:10:19.040 | that I can make of the author's meaning to my life and the world around me? And in all seven
00:10:25.120 | of those questions, the most helpful tool is the concordance—that is, the book or the computer
00:10:32.720 | program that enables you to see all of an author's use of a particular word, every place it's used.
00:10:39.760 | This is my most commonly used tool in Bible study. Commentaries don't even come close. Bible
00:10:47.760 | dictionaries don't even come close. What issues all the insight, almost 90-plus percent, are
00:10:56.480 | looking up words that put me onto the trail of trains of thought in an author's mind.
00:11:06.560 | And once you have helped your children identify those seven kinds of questions,
00:11:11.360 | you simply want them to form the lifelong habit of asking and answering those questions. And you
00:11:18.880 | can't do it for them. They have to do that for themselves, and you can do that by working through
00:11:25.600 | texts with those questions. You can do it together. You can assign them to do it, and over and over.
00:11:32.960 | One last suggestion. Writing down the answers for every text to those seven questions is vastly more
00:11:41.760 | fruitful than trying to do it in your head. So, keep in mind that the aim is not to master a
00:11:49.280 | technique like arcing or lab work with John Piper. That's not the aim. The aim is lifelong
00:11:56.960 | habits of mind and heart that humbly, eagerly ask and answer questions from the Bible.
00:12:04.240 | What a great little outline of how you attack a text, Pastor John. Thank you.
00:12:09.200 | And I hope that's helpful for you, Ryan, as you train your teenagers at home.
00:12:12.960 | For more on how Pastor John reads his Bible, see that book, Reading the Bible Supernaturally. You
00:12:18.240 | can download the entire book free of charge at our site, DesiringGod.org/books, and look for
00:12:24.080 | the title, Reading the Bible Supernaturally. And for examples of Pastor John teaching the Bible
00:12:29.680 | by writing and drawing over the text itself, go to DesiringGod.org/LABS, DesiringGod.org/LABS.
00:12:38.720 | Thanks for listening to the podcast. Over at our online home, you can explore about 1,300 past
00:12:43.600 | episodes. You can scan a list of our most popular ones, read full transcripts, even send us a
00:12:48.080 | question of your own. Go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Also, be sure to subscribe
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00:13:00.560 | at DG Books and Labs and podcasts, all made possible by our ministry partners like Ryan
00:13:05.200 | and his wife and many others out there who support us. We thank you for your support.
00:13:10.480 | We break for the weekend and return on Monday to talk about a multi-billion dollar industry
00:13:14.960 | in the states called fantasy sports gambling. Is it sinful to gamble on fantasy sports?
00:13:21.360 | That's next week. That should be very interesting. I'm your host Tony Ranke, and we'll see you then.
00:13:25.440 | [END]
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