(Music) Pastor John, my name is Jeremy and I am a college student living in Arlington, Texas. I love the Word of God and it often takes me a long time for me to read through a book of the Bible. In episode number 127, you mentioned slowing down in the rose garden, which has been so beneficial and wonderful.

However, as a Christian who did not grow up in the church, I'm not familiar with all the Bible. So how do I both stop and enjoy God's truth one verse at a time, but also satisfy this desire to know the Bible as a whole? Pastor John, what would you say?

I love the desire. Amen. Amen. I have something to suggest to Jeremy, but first let me say a word about depth and breadth. Because we all struggle with this. The balancing, if that's even the right word, between going deep with the Bible and going broad with the Bible. What do we even mean by that?

I want to just say a word about that and then give a concrete piece of advice. Take depth. What do I mean by depth? Let's give an example. Here's 2 Thessalonians. So you're reading along, pretty good clip, trying to get through a chapter or two in the morning, and you read 2 Thessalonians 2.12, which says, "They did not believe the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness." And as you're moving along real quick, what registers is, okay, those are two things to avoid.

Don't be disbelieving in the truth, and don't take pleasure in unrighteousness. On to the next verse. And what I mean by depth is that you stop. You don't go on to the next verse. You stop and you ask—this takes time, right? You can't be reading the next verse when you do this.

What's the relationship between not believing the truth and taking pleasure in unrighteousness? Why did Paul make them alternatives? Why didn't he say, "They did not believe the truth, but believed a lie"? He didn't say that. Why didn't he say, "They did not take pleasure in righteousness, but in unrighteousness"?

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, "took pleasure in unrighteousness." Odd. Why juxtapose unrighteousness and truth and belief and pleasure? What's going on here? I mean, this is what I mean by depth.

And I think you say, "Hmm, hmm. Didn't I just read the word 'truth' back in verse 10?" You go back, pick up verse 10. "They refused to love the truth." Oh, now you've got love the truth, not just believe the truth. And love sounds sort of like taking pleasure in so.

And now you're into a series of thoughts that take you down deep into the very nature of faith, which has to do with what you rest in, what you embrace, what you treasure, and not just what you think is true. Now, that may take you 10 minutes to do what I just did there, or longer.

And you might jot it down in your journal, and as you're writing it in your journal, two new thoughts about pleasure and unrighteousness come to your mind, and suddenly you've filled up your morning half hour, and you've read one verse. 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.

Right, exactly. Or more. So I'm a great believer in slowing down and thinking, thinking, thinking. However, on the other hand, I believe in breadth. I mean, all Scripture is inspired by God. And here's an example. By breadth, I mean reading broadly enough so that you take in the entire 500-year period, say, of the divided kingdom in Israel, from Rehoboam right down to the end of the exile.

And 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, king after king after king, rising, falling, succeeding, failing, good, then evil, evil, then good, a rotten father followed by a good son, a good father followed by a rotten son, and on and on. I don't know of any other way but reading through those books broadly to get the profound sense of both the repeated failure and rebellion of God's people over centuries, and the extraordinary mercy and patience of God.

I mean, you can read the sentence "great patience of God" in the New Testament, and you'll have certain affections and feelings and responses, but when you take a month to read these four books—1 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles— you just come away saying, "Good night! How in the world did God tolerate such rebellion?" And then you realize, "Oh, look in the mirror, and how many times—" There's just no other way quite to get what God has to give us if we ignore the broad, doing only the deep that I described earlier.

So my answer to Jeremy is mix deep and broad in various ways that suit your mind and your life. So here, concretely suggestion. What about this, Jeremy? Set aside a block of time in the morning to go deeper. You'll take a smaller passage of Scripture, and you'll perhaps memorize one of the verses in the Scripture.

You will open a journal, and you'll write down some thoughts about what you saw in the verse you memorized, or some other verse. This may mean that you only cover a paragraph in the morning or two verses in the morning, and the encouragement is you're going to have grown remarkably when you do that.

You will. You will. Then, here's my suggestion, set aside a time maybe just before you go to bed, because it's okay to fall asleep at the end of this, or maybe halfway through. Set aside some time in the evening to do the big block reading. And here, you don't have your journal open, and you're not trying to memorize anything.

You're just trying to get the sense of the whole as you read more quickly and more broadly. That's one possible way of mixing up the deep and the broad. Another would be to take a month and do only deep, or a month and do only broad, or a year.

You might say, "This is the year I'm going to get through the whole Bible, so four chapters a day. I'm not going to worry about depth. I'm going to get the whole thing read." Or you might take a whole year and say, "All in Philippians," or "All in Romans," or something like that.

And so I might mention one other thing. 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— two suggestions. Get a book like, say, Vaughan Roberts' God's Big Picture, or get a good study Bible like the ESV Study Bible, and walk through the whole Bible reading the introductions to the biblical books, or reading some of those really good essays that summarize the whole Bible.

So don't think that you have to do everything inductively, that just reading it for yourself. Do that, by all means, but there are great helps out there. And just always remember, whatever you do, never, never stop reading. This is God's very Word, broad or deep. It is His transforming voice.

And speaking of slowing down and thinking slowly about one particular text, Pastor John is doing this very thing every week. It's something we call "Look at the Book." If you're not familiar with "Look at the Book," you should check it out. Pastor John marks up a text on a screen right before your eyes, and you can watch him as he draws circles and lines and makes connections in the text at a granular level.

You can find those videos online at DesiringGod.org/labs. Tomorrow we close out the week with a listener who wants to know how much of our decision-making is emotional in nature, and should we be concerned by that. Pastor John will answer that tomorrow on the Ask Pastor John podcast. Don't miss this episode.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.