Nathan writes in to ask, "Pastor John, you mentioned in episode 107 that one of your seminary professors, Stan Fuller, helped to establish your framework for how to rightly read and interpret the Scriptures, called arching. I was wondering if you could give me one piece of advice to help me better read my English Bible better." Okay, since you just asked for one, here it is.

Write down the text with a pen and paper, not with a computer. Don't type it on a computer. Copy it out of your Bible with a pen on paper, either just a plain old sheet of paper or buy yourself a nice moleskin, call this notebook that you just bought, your written Bible.

And here's why. I'm saying write it out. Here's why. When I was in seminary, 23 years old, so this is 44 years ago, I began to see how when I began to learn arching from Dan Fuller, which had a step in it of writing every proposition of every paragraph on a different line and figuring out how those propositions relate to each other, I discovered that the very writing caused me to see things.

So a few weeks later, after I began to see that, a young woman came up to me at Lake Avenue Church and she said, "I'm not getting anything out of my Bible reading. You got any ideas for me?" And I said, "Why don't you try to write it down?

Just make that part of your Bible reading this week." She came back to me a week later and said, "I can't believe it! I can't believe what I'm seeing!" And she was so excited. So here's the reason, I think, why that is. Number one, it slows you down. Most of us read the Bible and everything else too fast, like sprinting through a rose garden, right?

Let's just get through the rose garden here. I saw all the roses. I really did. Well, you did, but really did you? So don't sprint through the rose garden. The best way to not sprint through the rose garden is to write down the rose garden, write down the text.

So it slows you down. Number two, it gives you a way to respond and retain. For me anyway, when I'm reading often and I feel something, I see something, I get a little frustrated because I know that if I keep reading, that feeling's gonna go away and I'm gonna forget what I just saw.

And if I'm writing it down, I can circle the word. I can underline the word. I can draw lines between the two words that I just saw. I can put a bracket in and scribble what I just observed, close the bracket and keep writing. So it gives me a way to respond and I have a sense of, I could hold on to this.

I could keep this because there it is now. I could come back tomorrow and see what I saw again. A third thing is that when you write the text, it raises more questions and it gives you an immediate way to preserve them right there. You can just write the question down.

You don't have to answer it right there if you don't have time or you're not able to, but there they are. And asking questions is the key to understanding. And so anything that enables you to cultivate and then preserve and then eventually answer questions, that's gonna go, gonna take you deeper.

And one last thing, this all leaves a record of God's dealings with you and your soul. And that's what we want. We want to meet God in the Bible. And in my experience, slow, meditative, commenting, question-asking, reading is where I meet God. I don't meet God when I'm rushing through a text, when I'm willing to pause.

And so get a pen, get a notebook or a piece of paper, open your Bible and copy out a paragraph. I don't mean, by the way, all four chapters that you're going to read today and you're trek through the Bible should be written down. I just mean, let part of your experience be this, not all of it.

Yes, thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Please email your questions to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. At DesiringGod.org you'll find thousands of other free articles and books and sermons and other resources from John Piper. I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.