Well, if you enjoy reading books and reading for an extended period of time and getting lost in a story, thank God for this gift, because it is a gift not all Christians can enjoy. For many believers, reading is made painfully hard by dyslexia, as is the case for a podcast listener named Henry, who writes in to us today.

"Hello, Pastor John. I recently discovered that I suffer from a learning disability that impairs my reading ability. I can only read a short amount of material, I lose my concentration after a few minutes and then develop serious headaches from reading on past that. At first I thought I was just lazy, but it is actually a learning disability I have had almost my entire life.

I want to read the Bible and read it fully, but I find it incredibly difficult. At times it's almost impossible. How can someone who can only read for a very short amount of time read the entire Bible and glean truth from it?" "I recently wrote an article that I called 'Sanctification and Senility.' The question I raised was, 'How do you fight for faith and the obedience that comes from faith when your memory has weakened to the point where you don't remember the promises of God after you read them?' And part of my answer was that we should see senility and the loss of memory, eventually loss of eyesight and the ability to read and loss of hearing and ultimately perhaps being in a coma, we should see all of this as a progressive state of disability." Henry's drawing attention to disability.

"And that we not be passive, but that we multiply our personal efforts as much as we can and make up the difference for what we're losing. And finally, that we involve other people, the precious friends in the body of Christ to do for us what we can no longer do for ourselves, like bending over us in our final coma and with a loud voice," I remember doing this with my grandfather, "with a loud voice shouting into our ear, 'Even to your old age I am He, and to gray hairs I will carry you.

I have made, and I will bear. I will carry and will save.'" Everybody thought my grandfather was gone. He wasn't even there. He probably weighed 90 pounds and curled up like a fetus and wore a diaper and hadn't spoken for weeks, and his eyes were all crusty. And when my father and I got done shouting our prayer in his ear, his whole body convulsed and he said, "Amen," which so shocked me, I've never, ever ceased to pray and read into a comatose ear.

So all that to say, if it gets that bad, don't even give up hearing the Word of God then. Surround yourself with people who can help you. So maybe I need to make explicit an assumption about the importance and means of sanctification, because I don't know where Henry is on that.

Henry may be only asking about how he can read the whole Bible as a kind of spiritual discipline, but I want to stress that hearing the Word of God from Scripture, by whatever means we can, is not a mere spiritual discipline. It is a matter of life and death.

We live by faith, or we don't live at all. And faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. Romans 10, 17. "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God." Matthew 4. Jesus said all of that and more about hearing and depending on the Word of God.

Faith, however, cannot be sustained without the Word of God. And holiness comes from faith, and holiness is essential for salvation. Like it says in Hebrews 12, 14, "Strive for the holiness without which we will not see the Lord." So you can see, Henry, that for me, the question you're raising is not peripheral, it's not marginal.

It goes right to the heart of what it means to be a Christian and how to sustain faith. And there are huge obstacles standing in the way of hearing the Word of God, and those huge obstacles are there for all of us, not just those with learning disabilities. The big ones are sin and indifference and love for the world and spiritual blindness to the glory of Christ.

These are all huge obstacles to hearing the Word of God. But there are also obstacles like senility and, in Henry's case, a learning disability. So I take Henry's question very seriously. How do you, Henry, maintain faith, what Paul calls fighting the good fight of faith, and how do you fight for holiness, which comes through faith, when there's a learning disability standing between you and hearing the Word of God?

And let me just make four suggestions. Number one, be sure that your mindset is not simply to put a certain amount of time in on the Bible or read a certain amount of the Bible, but to feed your faith on the blood-bought promises of God. Faith lives by standing on the gospel and trusting the promises.

The goal of reading the Bible is to know God, what he's done for us in Christ, and what he has secured for our future, whether it's five hours or 5,000 years from now. And we need to see the beauty and the glory and the certainty of spiritual things in the Bible.

So the goal is not just to put in a certain amount of time or to cover a certain amount of material. The goal is to see and savor God and his ways and his promises. The goal is to fight for faith and to walk in obedience by faith. So be sure to keep that mindset.

Go to the Bible to get food for your faith. Now here's the second one. Earnestly ask God to help you, to give you wisdom in dealing with your learning disability or whatever the obstacle may be. Ask him for supernatural help. I'm dismayed at how many Christians are fatalistic, materialistic, humanistic when it comes about their disability, when it comes to do with their disabilities.

That is, don't just think in terms of medicines. Don't just think in terms of therapy. Don't just think in terms of human discipline. Those are all important. Think in terms also of what a sovereign God can do if he acts on your behalf supernaturally. He may not take away the disability.

He usually doesn't. But who knows what he may do if you ask him in regard to reading the Bible with your disability. Here's number three. Feel it, that with a disability, you're going to have to work harder than most people to attain the same ends. All of us have weaknesses that are different from other people's strengths.

And if we spend our time in self-pity, treating those weaknesses as excuses, we will waste our lives. There are some strengths we'll never have and some things we'll never accomplish. But oh, oh, what amazing things people with disabilities have accomplished by refusing to be dominated by the negative implications of their weaknesses.

It's amazing. For example, instead of reading the Bible for half an hour, you may need to read the Bible three minutes, ten times a day by setting the reminder on your smartphone. Or you may work harder to memorize scripture so that you have it in your mind and heart when you're not reading because of how hard it is to read.

Here's number four. Don't neglect the use of audio Bibles. They are a glorious gift of modern technology. You may discover. Try this. You may discover that turning on the audio of your Bible on your iPad or smartphone or CD player and following the text with your eyes, that kind of reading may actually overcome some of the negative effects of your disability.

I do that when I'm especially tired. I let the audio read for me while I read with my eyes. Or you can just shut your eyes and listen. Or you can listen in the car. Or you can listen while you're making dinner. Or you can listen while you're going to sleep or while you're waking up.

I think that's really important. Go to sleep and wake up to the Bible instead of goodness knows what else people use to go to sleep on. And lastly, I would say, by all means, spend a lifetime cultivating deep friendships in the body of Christ and in your family if you can, so that when you're old and can do hardly anything for yourself, others will be there for you to read to you and to perhaps in that last comatose hour say glorious words really loud into your seemingly deaf ear, even to your old age, I am he, into gray hairs, I will carry you.

I have made and I will bear. I will carry and will save. Amen. That is a good and helpful word for struggling Bible readers. Thank you, Pastor John. And if you have a question about Bible reading, please send it to us. There's not many more precious questions to us than questions about how to read the Bible better.

So keep those questions coming to us. And thank you for listening and making the podcast part of your day and a part of your commute. It's an honor to tag along with you and to be part of your day. Three times a week we publish and you can subscribe to our audio feeds, search our past episode archive, even reach us by email with a question you may be facing about the struggles you face in Bible reading like this one today from Henry.

It is a very good question. Thank you, Henry. We do all of those things through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Well what is the difference between unholy anger and holy anger? And does this difference have any real application in our own lives? It is a question that will lead us into a deeper discussion on the dangers of anger in our lives and anger in our marriages.

That's when we return on Friday. I'm your host, Tony Reinke, and we will see you then. 1 DesiringGod.org Page 2 of 2 DesiringGod.org Page 3 of 3 DesiringGod.org Page 4 of 5 (Session concluded at 4pm)