Advice for Better Bible Reading
00:00:00.000 | Nathan writes in to ask, "Pastor John, you mentioned in episode 107 that one of
00:00:08.400 | your seminary professors, Stan Fuller, helped to establish your framework for
00:00:12.360 | how to rightly read and interpret the Scriptures, called arching. I was
00:00:16.240 | wondering if you could give me one piece of advice to help me better read my
00:00:20.040 | English Bible better." Okay, since you just asked for one, here it is. Write down
00:00:29.280 | the text with a pen and paper, not with a computer. Don't type it on a computer.
00:00:36.520 | Copy it out of your Bible with a pen on paper, either just a plain old sheet of
00:00:42.800 | paper or buy yourself a nice moleskin, call this notebook that you just bought,
00:00:47.560 | your written Bible. And here's why. I'm saying write it out. Here's why. When I
00:00:54.520 | was in seminary, 23 years old, so this is 44 years ago, I began to see how when I began to
00:01:02.440 | learn arching from Dan Fuller, which had a step in it of writing every
00:01:08.120 | proposition of every paragraph on a different line and figuring out how
00:01:12.280 | those propositions relate to each other, I discovered that the very writing
00:01:17.240 | caused me to see things. So a few weeks later, after I began to see that, a young
00:01:23.560 | woman came up to me at Lake Avenue Church and she said, "I'm not getting
00:01:27.160 | anything out of my Bible reading. You got any ideas for me?" And I said, "Why don't
00:01:31.120 | you try to write it down? Just make that part of your Bible reading this week." She
00:01:35.860 | came back to me a week later and said, "I can't believe it! I can't believe what I'm
00:01:38.960 | seeing!" And she was so excited. So here's the reason, I think, why that is. Number
00:01:45.000 | one, it slows you down. Most of us read the Bible and everything else too fast,
00:01:50.560 | like sprinting through a rose garden, right? Let's just get through the
00:01:55.520 | rose garden here. I saw all the roses. I really did. Well, you did, but really did
00:02:00.040 | you? So don't sprint through the rose garden. The best way to not sprint
00:02:03.960 | through the rose garden is to write down the rose garden, write down the text. So
00:02:10.000 | it slows you down. Number two, it gives you a way to respond and retain. For me
00:02:16.120 | anyway, when I'm reading often and I feel something, I see something, I get a little
00:02:21.360 | frustrated because I know that if I keep reading, that feeling's gonna go away and
00:02:26.400 | I'm gonna forget what I just saw. And if I'm writing it down, I can circle
00:02:32.400 | the word. I can underline the word. I can draw lines between the two words that I
00:02:37.120 | just saw. I can put a bracket in and scribble what I just observed, close the
00:02:42.280 | bracket and keep writing. So it gives me a way to respond and I have a
00:02:48.200 | sense of, I could hold on to this. I could keep this because there it is now. I
00:02:52.200 | could come back tomorrow and see what I saw again. A third thing is that when you
00:02:57.960 | write the text, it raises more questions and it gives you an immediate way to
00:03:05.040 | preserve them right there. You can just write the question down. You don't have
00:03:08.880 | to answer it right there if you don't have time or you're not able to, but
00:03:12.280 | there they are. And asking questions is the key to understanding. And so anything
00:03:18.600 | that enables you to cultivate and then preserve and then eventually answer
00:03:22.740 | questions, that's gonna go, gonna take you deeper. And one last thing, this all
00:03:27.680 | leaves a record of God's dealings with you and your soul. And that's what we
00:03:32.200 | want. We want to meet God in the Bible. And in my experience, slow, meditative,
00:03:38.800 | commenting, question-asking, reading is where I meet God. I don't meet God when
00:03:48.080 | I'm rushing through a text, when I'm willing to pause. And so get a pen, get a
00:03:56.680 | notebook or a piece of paper, open your Bible and copy out a paragraph. I don't
00:04:02.760 | mean, by the way, all four chapters that you're going to read today and you're
00:04:07.720 | trek through the Bible should be written down. I just mean, let part of your
00:04:12.520 | experience be this, not all of it. Yes, thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for
00:04:17.520 | listening to this podcast. Please email your questions to us at
00:04:20.200 | AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. At DesiringGod.org you'll find thousands of
00:04:24.400 | other free articles and books and sermons and other resources from John
00:04:27.840 | Piper. I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.
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