Reading Is Agonizing for Me — How Can I Study the Bible in Small Bits?

00:00:00.000 | Well, if you enjoy reading books and reading for an extended period of time and getting

00:00:07.520 | lost in a story, thank God for this gift, because it is a gift not all Christians can

00:00:13.000 | enjoy.

00:00:14.120 | For many believers, reading is made painfully hard by dyslexia, as is the case for a podcast

00:00:18.840 | listener named Henry, who writes in to us today.

00:00:22.520 | "Hello, Pastor John.

00:00:23.960 | I recently discovered that I suffer from a learning disability that impairs my reading

00:00:28.120 | ability.

00:00:29.120 | I can only read a short amount of material, I lose my concentration after a few minutes

00:00:33.440 | and then develop serious headaches from reading on past that.

00:00:37.420 | At first I thought I was just lazy, but it is actually a learning disability I have had

00:00:42.080 | almost my entire life.

00:00:44.360 | I want to read the Bible and read it fully, but I find it incredibly difficult.

00:00:49.720 | At times it's almost impossible.

00:00:52.300 | How can someone who can only read for a very short amount of time read the entire Bible

00:00:56.800 | and glean truth from it?"

00:00:59.280 | "I recently wrote an article that I called 'Sanctification and Senility.'

00:01:07.040 | The question I raised was, 'How do you fight for faith and the obedience that comes from

00:01:14.280 | faith when your memory has weakened to the point where you don't remember the promises

00:01:20.500 | of God after you read them?'

00:01:24.040 | And part of my answer was that we should see senility and the loss of memory, eventually

00:01:31.600 | loss of eyesight and the ability to read and loss of hearing and ultimately perhaps being

00:01:37.880 | in a coma, we should see all of this as a progressive state of disability."

00:01:45.080 | Henry's drawing attention to disability.

00:01:47.640 | "And that we not be passive, but that we multiply our personal efforts as much as we

00:01:56.440 | can and make up the difference for what we're losing.

00:02:03.600 | And finally, that we involve other people, the precious friends in the body of Christ

00:02:09.360 | to do for us what we can no longer do for ourselves, like bending over us in our final

00:02:16.000 | coma and with a loud voice," I remember doing this with my grandfather, "with a loud

00:02:22.560 | voice shouting into our ear, 'Even to your old age I am He, and to gray hairs I will

00:02:31.160 | carry you.

00:02:32.400 | I have made, and I will bear.

00:02:35.480 | I will carry and will save.'"

00:02:38.560 | Everybody thought my grandfather was gone.

00:02:41.760 | He wasn't even there.

00:02:43.760 | He probably weighed 90 pounds and curled up like a fetus and wore a diaper and hadn't

00:02:48.680 | spoken for weeks, and his eyes were all crusty.

00:02:52.080 | And when my father and I got done shouting our prayer in his ear, his whole body convulsed

00:02:58.480 | and he said, "Amen," which so shocked me, I've never, ever ceased to pray and read

00:03:06.240 | into a comatose ear.

00:03:08.440 | So all that to say, if it gets that bad, don't even give up hearing the Word of God then.

00:03:16.400 | Surround yourself with people who can help you.

00:03:18.280 | So maybe I need to make explicit an assumption about the importance and means of sanctification,

00:03:26.000 | because I don't know where Henry is on that.

00:03:29.280 | Henry may be only asking about how he can read the whole Bible as a kind of spiritual

00:03:35.160 | discipline, but I want to stress that hearing the Word of God from Scripture, by whatever

00:03:41.680 | means we can, is not a mere spiritual discipline.

00:03:45.200 | It is a matter of life and death.

00:03:47.780 | We live by faith, or we don't live at all.

00:03:51.780 | And faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.

00:03:54.760 | Romans 10, 17.

00:03:56.120 | "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of

00:04:01.400 | God."

00:04:02.400 | Matthew 4.

00:04:03.400 | Jesus said all of that and more about hearing and depending on the Word of God.

00:04:10.480 | Faith, however, cannot be sustained without the Word of God.

00:04:17.680 | And holiness comes from faith, and holiness is essential for salvation.

00:04:23.680 | Like it says in Hebrews 12, 14, "Strive for the holiness without which we will not

00:04:28.680 | see the Lord."

00:04:29.680 | So you can see, Henry, that for me, the question you're raising is not peripheral, it's

00:04:37.920 | not marginal.

00:04:38.920 | It goes right to the heart of what it means to be a Christian and how to sustain faith.

00:04:46.400 | And there are huge obstacles standing in the way of hearing the Word of God, and those

00:04:51.120 | huge obstacles are there for all of us, not just those with learning disabilities.

00:04:56.560 | The big ones are sin and indifference and love for the world and spiritual blindness

00:05:01.840 | to the glory of Christ.

00:05:03.560 | These are all huge obstacles to hearing the Word of God.

00:05:07.740 | But there are also obstacles like senility and, in Henry's case, a learning disability.

00:05:15.720 | So I take Henry's question very seriously.

00:05:19.920 | How do you, Henry, maintain faith, what Paul calls fighting the good fight of faith, and

00:05:27.200 | how do you fight for holiness, which comes through faith, when there's a learning disability

00:05:33.680 | standing between you and hearing the Word of God?

00:05:36.000 | And let me just make four suggestions.

00:05:39.200 | Number one, be sure that your mindset is not simply to put a certain amount of time in

00:05:46.360 | on the Bible or read a certain amount of the Bible, but to feed your faith on the blood-bought

00:05:54.400 | promises of God.

00:05:56.080 | Faith lives by standing on the gospel and trusting the promises.

00:06:02.060 | The goal of reading the Bible is to know God, what he's done for us in Christ, and what

00:06:08.200 | he has secured for our future, whether it's five hours or 5,000 years from now.

00:06:15.340 | And we need to see the beauty and the glory and the certainty of spiritual things in the

00:06:22.520 | Bible.

00:06:23.520 | So the goal is not just to put in a certain amount of time or to cover a certain amount

00:06:27.600 | of material.

00:06:29.240 | The goal is to see and savor God and his ways and his promises.

00:06:34.720 | The goal is to fight for faith and to walk in obedience by faith.

00:06:41.600 | So be sure to keep that mindset.

00:06:45.360 | Go to the Bible to get food for your faith.

00:06:49.960 | Now here's the second one.

00:06:51.280 | Earnestly ask God to help you, to give you wisdom in dealing with your learning disability

00:06:58.720 | or whatever the obstacle may be.

00:07:02.040 | Ask him for supernatural help.

00:07:05.520 | I'm dismayed at how many Christians are fatalistic, materialistic, humanistic when it comes about

00:07:13.400 | their disability, when it comes to do with their disabilities.

00:07:18.120 | That is, don't just think in terms of medicines.

00:07:22.200 | Don't just think in terms of therapy.

00:07:25.280 | Don't just think in terms of human discipline.

00:07:28.360 | Those are all important.

00:07:30.280 | Think in terms also of what a sovereign God can do if he acts on your behalf supernaturally.

00:07:39.160 | He may not take away the disability.

00:07:41.320 | He usually doesn't.

00:07:43.820 | But who knows what he may do if you ask him in regard to reading the Bible with your disability.

00:07:52.200 | Here's number three.

00:07:53.880 | Feel it, that with a disability, you're going to have to work harder than most people to

00:08:00.600 | attain the same ends.

00:08:02.320 | All of us have weaknesses that are different from other people's strengths.

00:08:07.880 | And if we spend our time in self-pity, treating those weaknesses as excuses, we will waste

00:08:14.960 | our lives.

00:08:17.120 | There are some strengths we'll never have and some things we'll never accomplish.

00:08:23.800 | But oh, oh, what amazing things people with disabilities have accomplished by refusing

00:08:34.280 | to be dominated by the negative implications of their weaknesses.

00:08:40.200 | It's amazing.

00:08:41.920 | For example, instead of reading the Bible for half an hour, you may need to read the

00:08:47.880 | Bible three minutes, ten times a day by setting the reminder on your smartphone.

00:08:55.600 | Or you may work harder to memorize scripture so that you have it in your mind and heart

00:09:01.560 | when you're not reading because of how hard it is to read.

00:09:06.040 | Here's number four.

00:09:07.640 | Don't neglect the use of audio Bibles.

00:09:11.300 | They are a glorious gift of modern technology.

00:09:15.960 | You may discover.

00:09:17.200 | Try this.

00:09:18.200 | You may discover that turning on the audio of your Bible on your iPad or smartphone or

00:09:24.640 | CD player and following the text with your eyes, that kind of reading may actually overcome

00:09:34.840 | some of the negative effects of your disability.

00:09:38.120 | I do that when I'm especially tired.

00:09:40.880 | I let the audio read for me while I read with my eyes.

00:09:48.320 | Or you can just shut your eyes and listen.

00:09:50.100 | Or you can listen in the car.

00:09:51.720 | Or you can listen while you're making dinner.

00:09:54.200 | Or you can listen while you're going to sleep or while you're waking up.

00:09:58.200 | I think that's really important.

00:09:59.920 | Go to sleep and wake up to the Bible instead of goodness knows what else people use to

00:10:04.520 | go to sleep on.

00:10:06.880 | And lastly, I would say, by all means, spend a lifetime cultivating deep friendships in

00:10:15.360 | the body of Christ and in your family if you can, so that when you're old and can do hardly

00:10:23.080 | anything for yourself, others will be there for you to read to you and to perhaps in that

00:10:30.400 | last comatose hour say glorious words really loud into your seemingly deaf ear, even to

00:10:39.560 | your old age, I am he, into gray hairs, I will carry you.

00:10:43.600 | I have made and I will bear.

00:10:46.880 | I will carry and will save.

00:10:49.720 | Amen.

00:10:50.720 | That is a good and helpful word for struggling Bible readers.

00:10:54.040 | Thank you, Pastor John.

00:10:55.120 | And if you have a question about Bible reading, please send it to us.

00:10:57.680 | There's not many more precious questions to us than questions about how to read the Bible

00:11:01.680 | better.

00:11:02.680 | So keep those questions coming to us.

00:11:04.400 | And thank you for listening and making the podcast part of your day and a part of your

00:11:08.000 | commute.

00:11:09.000 | It's an honor to tag along with you and to be part of your day.

00:11:12.800 | Three times a week we publish and you can subscribe to our audio feeds, search our past

00:11:16.000 | episode archive, even reach us by email with a question you may be facing about the struggles

00:11:20.380 | you face in Bible reading like this one today from Henry.

00:11:23.160 | It is a very good question.

00:11:24.880 | Thank you, Henry.

00:11:25.880 | We do all of those things through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

00:11:32.840 | Well what is the difference between unholy anger and holy anger?

00:11:38.060 | And does this difference have any real application in our own lives?

00:11:41.160 | It is a question that will lead us into a deeper discussion on the dangers of anger

00:11:46.080 | in our lives and anger in our marriages.

00:11:49.240 | That's when we return on Friday.

00:11:51.400 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke, and we will see you then.

00:11:54.080 | [End of Audio]

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00:12:01.080 | (Session concluded at 4pm)

Reading Is Agonizing for Me — How Can I Study the Bible in Small Bits?

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