This is the promised part 2 on the discipline of studying God’s word. I took a break from writing on this subject to address some things that were heavy on my heart regarding the subject of abuse in the church. I’m most likely going to be removing those posts at some point and posting a condensed, clarified version (UPDATE: they are now removed), but for now, I’d like to invite you to consider with me how we can enrich our relationship with God through the disciplined study of His word.
Now that we’ve established the spirit and state of mind in which we must approach the study of God’s word, let’s consider some practical things. In the eight or nine years that I’ve been a believer in and a follower of Christ, I’ve experimented with a lot of different patterns, routines, and practices in studying God’s word. I’m going to share the most helpful ones with you. The Father encourages us to seek for His truth in a similar way to how we might mine and refine precious metal (Proverbs 2:4). He has given us a bible, not a set of systematic theology volumes (which are all very well in their place); He has left work for us to be done because we work for what we treasure, and treasure what we have worked for. A very casual survey of metallurgy reveals that, over the centuries, human ingenuity has discovered many ways to extract pure gold and silver from ore. All of them were developed through work, and all of them involve hard work. We mentally apply ourselves to obtain the things that are most precious to us. Listen to the Father’s counsel from the book of Proverbs:
“Blessed is the one who finds wisdom, and the one who gets understanding,
for the gain from her is better than gain from silver and her profit better than fine gold.
She is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her.”
(Proverbs 3:14-15)
The wisdom of God is better than fine gold and sweeter than honey (cf. Psalm 19:10). What if we believed that? What if we took Him at His word? How different would our lives be if we took it to heart that nothing we could ever desire, not even the dearest love of our soul, could ever compare to the wisdom that is found in understanding, believing, and obeying the word of God!
So practically, then, how do we go about mining the precious riches of God’s Word? The most important thing is, of course, to do it. There are many ways to study God’s Word. His wisdom is far too precious and immediately needed in our lives for us to wait to get started in the habit of study until we find the perfect method. It is also too precious for us to not be constantly evaluating and improving our study approach.
Experience has its benefits, but ultimately, the Bible is our first and best guide on how to study the Bible. Here’s a few biblical principles for how to study God’s word, coupled with some of my own insights on the application of those principles.
MEDITATION
The godly person is someone who meditates on God’s Word day and night (Psalm 1:2, 119:15-16, 148). This might go without saying, but biblical meditation is not about emptying the mind; it’s not about disengagement from thought. It is quite often necessary for us to clear our minds of other things in order to fill up our minds with God, and prayer is helpful for this. That said, meditation is about conscious reflection and thought about God’s Word. It is pondering, contemplating, considering. Meditation is a critical discipline in the study of God’s word; without it, memorization and simple reading are pointless, and obedience is easily misguided.
Sometimes some kind of physical activity such as taking a walk or a run or a bike ride is helpful to keep our minds from fidgeting while we are trying to meditate on God’s word. More often, it is physical stillness that I need. Either way, it’s important to quiet our minds so that the real worries and concerns and questions and desires of our hearts can rise to the surface of our consciousness to engage and be engaged with by God’s words. If we’re not allowing God’s word to speak to the real stuff in our hearts and minds and lives, we’re not meditating. So meditation isn’t just about unpacking the meaning of Scripture but making room for Scripture to speak to us. “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12) In context, this verse is not primarily a statement about the written word of God, but the Person we encounter through the word, Jesus Christ. When we quiet our hearts and make room for God to speak, Jesus draws near through the written word and separates truth from lies, sin from goodness, and love from idolatry in the deepest parts of our hearts.
That said, the conscious engagement of our minds with the unpacking of biblical meaning, or the refining of our understanding, is an essential part of biblical meditation too. To this end, it’s helpful to ask questions of the text, and write or journal those answers. I tend to have so much to write when I do this that it’s often helpful for me to sit in front of my lap-top and pour thoughts and reflections into an open WordPad document; if I rely on physical journaling, I rarely get anything done because it takes too long to write everything out. This is in part because I’m a verbal processor and I have a hard time really working with my own thoughts unless I talk through them or write them out. Technology is not the enemy of godliness, but it’s helpful to set boundaries (like turning off my wi-fi).
Many people use some form of the Discovery Bible Study (DBS) method in their approach to meditating on God’s word. DBS was initially developed for the purpose of cross-cultural evangelism and discipleship, but it can be a help in our conversations with God as well, provided that we aren’t controlling the conversation with our agenda, and that we’re actually allowing Him to speak to us. What I like about DBS is that it involves looking for answers to specific questions, and verbalizing those answers because this engages the conscious mind. At the heart of DBS is conversation about three questions:
-What do I learn about God from this passage?
-What do I learn about myself/people/others?
-How can I put what I’ve learned into practice?
For myself, I find it helpful to ask even more specific questions such as these:
GOD
-What specific attributes or characteristics of God are made apparent or glorified in this passage of Scripture? What do I learn about His personality, His love, His justice, His holiness, His grace, His wrath, His mercy, His power, or His presence?
-What do I learn about the works of God in this passage? What has God done, and how does it impact my life?
-What do I learn specifically about the person and work of Christ from this passage, or how does it relate to Christ?
-How would my life be different if I was to take to heart the awareness of who God is and what He has done that is offered to me in this passage? What does He want me to remember about Him?
PEOPLE/ME/US
-What does this passage of Scripture reveal about the claims of God’s lordship on human lives, or specifically on my life? What does it reveal about God’s presence in my life or the lives of others?
-What does this passage suggest or declare to be true about me as a person, or about other people in the world?
-What does this passage state or imply about my identity as a believer in Jesus? What does God want me to remember about myself? How might my life be different if I did?
APPLICATION
-What promises can I believe? How would my life be different if I believed them?
-In light of this passage, what can I worship God for/how can I worship Him differently?
-What commandments can I obey? Why does God want me to obey them?
-How is God correcting my thoughts and actions in love?
-How can my life find meaning in God’s greater story because of the truth in this passage of Scripture? How will Christ be formed in me through obedience to His word?
All of these questions can be starting points for prayer, whether we are seeking God to understand the meaning of the text (e.g., “Father, help me to find your promises here”) or apply it (e.g. “Father, help me to believe these promises”). Scripture study thrives when it is mingled with prayer. God wants us to engage with His word on our knees; it’s the only way our hearts can be softened enough for His wisdom to work its way in. He resists the proud and gives grace to the humble (Proverbs 3:34). The Bible is a spiritual book that is spiritually understood. This doesn’t mean that there are no rules or structure or logic to interpreting the Bible. But it does mean that we can’t possibly hope to arrive at wisdom (which is more than intellectual knowledge) without the Holy Spirit, and it also means that there are treasures of God’s word that can only be discovered or appreciated by those who know and seek Him personally. No one can be wise for you (Proverbs 9:12), and no one (except Jesus, who has made a way for all of us) can seek after God for you. To paraphrase worship leader Brooke Ligertwood, “everyone must walk the path of God’s presence for themselves.” There is something of a symbiotic relationship between prayer and meditation on God’s word. Praying while we meditate of God’s word engages our minds with the personal God who is the author of His word, and helps us humbly depend on Him for understanding. Meditating on God’s word as we pray keeps our prayers engaged with the things that God is most concerned with in our lives.
In the end, meditation on God’s word must be focused on the person and work of Christ if it is to profit us at all. Nothing will help us find spiritual nutrition in the obscure or challenging portions of God’s word quite like a robust, rich, biblical doctrine of Christ. What is more, there are many portions of scripture that we might think we understand very well, but actually cannot understand without Christ at the forefront of our minds. You cannot mine the riches of the Law until you understand that Christ is the end of the Law (Romans 10:4). You cannot nourish your soul in the Proverbs until you understand that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ (Colossians 2:3). You cannot with cry out or celebrate with the prophets until you understand that it is Christ who inherits and distributes all the blessings that God promised to Abraham and David and the nation of Israel (2 Corinthians 1:20). You cannot join the voice of your heart with the chorus of the Psalms until you know that the story of Christ is the story of God, and that our stories are woven into the story of God through our union with Him.
In all of our meditation, we will be rewarded (or not) by what we are looking for. If we are looking to be searched and known, to be refined and tested, to be challenged and instructed and corrected and purified–if we engage God’s word with a determined willingness to sacrifice our pride, our most treasured little points of doctrinal detail, our dearest little idols and monuments to ourselves–we will arrive at the knowledge of God. But if we engage in God’s word with a desire for self-promotion, we will ultimately miss out on everything that God means to give us through His word, and we may be none the wiser (I Timothy 1:3-8). We all come to God’s word with many ideas and desires more or less firmly lodged in our hearts and minds that are lifted up against the knowledge of God (2 Corinthians 10:5)–and by knowledge I mean (as I think Paul means) not just mental apprehension of sound doctrine, but as intimate relationship. If we are unwilling for those things to be loosened, dislodged, shattered, and swept away by the supernatural power of God for the sake of the treasure of knowing Him, we will find ourselves no better off than the Pharisees (John 5:39-40). Unless we are willing to die to ourselves, to be utterly dethroned before the living God, we cannot have life through the word of God.
The admonition of James is fitting here: “But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic.” (James 3:14-15) I deeply regret time that I wasted, relationships that I fractured, and so much life that I missed as a much younger believer because of my preoccupation with little pet points of doctrine that may or may not have been true and were not nearly as important as I blindly supposed them to be. Prideful longing for the attention of men is a great deceiver, and it will make us bold about many things that we really have no reason to be. If we are dishonest about the intentions of our hearts, we are only hurting ourselves and our relationships. Mustering armies of proof-texts for doctrinal wargames over the application of ceremonial laws or the proper mode of baptism may be intellectually stimulating, but it will not promote the praise of God, it will not build up the household of God, it will not fill up a dry and thirsty heart, and it will not keep you from sin.
EXTENDED READING
I have put meditation ahead of extended reading because I believe that a really solid grasp of a few passages of Scripture is a prerequisite to being able to glean much from reading extended portions of Scripture, especially in the Old Testament. A firm hold of the principles of Christ, as we have discussed, is essential to being able to gain spiritual nourishment from reading the Old Testament. That being said, we become very limited in our understanding of God’s character and work when we confine ourselves to our favorite portions of the New Testament, and perhaps some passages in the Psalms. There are a lot of really terrible misconceptions about who God is and what we ought to expect of Him that get transmitted from one person to the next through out-of-context, single-sentence quotes from the Old Testament on calendars, keychains, journal covers, and facebook statuses. “All Scripture is breathed out by God, and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17) Including the parts that we leave out.
If you want to know what Jeremiah 29:11 means and how it applies to our lives, you really ought to take a day and read Jeremiah from start to finish. It will shake your soul. It will lay in ruins so many precious illusions about the life of faith that you took for granted. It will bring you face to face with the jealous anger of a holy God, and it will force you to reconsider whether your personal comfort or success in life is quite as indispensable to God as you have always assumed. If you have a good hold on Christ, you will understand much better why He had to go to the cross. Read it. Let it disturb you. Let it restructure your view of God and of reality for the better.
While you’re at it, take a few hours sometime and read Job. Read Ezekiel, and don’t skip over the graphic parts; grapple with them. Read about the life of David from start to finish, all his glorious promise and his gruesome failures, and let it stir the longing in your heart for the better king that was promised to and through Him. Read Deuteronomy, and ponder what it might mean for a people to be God’s treasured possession. Taking a few hours every now and then to read a longer portion of less familiar Scripture will strengthen what is true in your vision of God, and challenge what is misguided. Just remember that there is a veil over the reader of the Old Testament, and the veil is lifted by Christ (2 Corinthians 3:12-16). Make it your aim to behold Him. The Jesus Bible produced by the Passion Movement is an outstanding resource, and its commentary has much to offer in the way of guiding the reader towards beholding and worshiping Jesus through the Old and New Testaments of Scripture.
MEMORIZATION
Memorizing the Bible is a biblical idea. Colossians 3:16 says, “Let the word of Christ dwell richly within you.” That’s impossible if we’re unable to recall specific things that God has said to mind throughout the day. Memorization is not an end to itself; its value is that it enables us to nourished by God’s word as we meditate on what we’ve memorized.
I’m on a brand new long-term scripture study and memorization plan that I put together two weeks ago. I’ve been making use of a great app recommended by a friend for the memorization side. I’ve had the desire (but not the discipline) to memorize longer portions of Scripture for quite some time, and it seems that I’ve found a good rhythm to stick to. In the summer of 2015 I attempted to commit both Ephesians and James to memory, and while I could not now recite very much of either of those books verbatim, the result of the effort was that I now have a much deeper grasp of both of those letters than I otherwise could have.
The real benefit of Scripture memorization is not in being able to rattle verses off word-for-word and make an impression on God, yourself, the devil, or anyone else. The benefit is found the meditation that happens in the midst of the process of memorization and that can happen as a result of it. This is especially true when we memorize longer portions of scripture, instead of scattered verses. Memorizing longer chapters or longer sections of chapters, or even whole books, confronts us with the need to grapple with God, His concerns, His claims, and His work instead of crafting a shallow, personalized Christianity driven by our own impulses and perceived needs. It causes us to ask questions like, “why did God say that?” and “why did He say it that way?” It has the result of allowing some of God’s thoughts that we might not otherwise think of as useful to soak in our minds and hearts, and reshape them so far that the whole structure of thought and desire by which we filter information as useful or un-useful is redefined.
To give an example of how this has proved true in my life, when I memorized (or tried to memorize) the book of Ephesians, I was brought face-to-face with how God’s reconciling of people and nations in Christ is such a central part of His story. And I realized that my spiritual life was driven far too much by my own perceived personal needs and not nearly enough by God’s plan to redeem and gather the nations into a unified body in Christ. As another example (and I could give dozens), when I memorized the book of James, I realized that the real concern of a phrase that I was very familiar with–“quick to hear, slow to speak” (James 1:19) was less about listening well to other people (although that’s certainly important) more with humbly and quietly hearing God in a way that’s impossible when I’m filling the air with my own words (see vs. 21).
I would heartily recommend to you this practice of memorizing longer portions of Scripture–chapters, books, and longer portions. There are so many spiritual benefits, even if you don’t carefully maintain what you’ve memorized (and I wish that I had). But don’t just focus on sounds and syllables and stringing them all in the proper order. Make time for your mind to engage and wrestle with the meaning of the text. Force yourself to put your questions into words. And pray, before and after and in the midst of the process! Ask God to steady your wandering mind and help you understand and internalize His priorities for your heart and life through His word.
OBEDIENCE
George MacDonald said that “obedience is the soul of knowledge.” There is a level of understanding that only comes when we obey God’s word. This is important because we all have a fleshly tendency to demand understanding before we obey. The reality is that understanding often only comes through the process of obedience. If we want to delight in God and to experience His delight in us through a deeper understanding of His heart, His work, and His character, we must discipline ourselves to obey, and humbly welcome God’s discipline! Jesus encourages us to obey Him with this promise: “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love” (John 15:10). But what does this mean? That we increase God’s love for us by obeying Him?
No, far from it! John says that “we love because He first loved us.” (I John 4:19) We don’t love God to stir up His love for us; we love God in response to the way that He has already loved us! God does not love us more when we obey Him. It is not even accurate to say that God loves us because of Christ’s active and passive obedience, His righteous life and sacrificial death on our behalf! The work of Christ is the fulfillment of the love that God had for us “while we were yet sinners” (Romans 5:8), even before we were justified and cleansed! So it is clear that we do not obey God in order to increase His love for us. God fundamentally welcomes us, delights in us, affirms us, and blesses us through Christ because of His great love for us. Paul says in Ephesians, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual lessing in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 1:3) How do we know that God has blessed us? Because we are united with Christ through faith in His finished work! We do not obtain the eternal blessings of God through obedience, but through faith in Christ.
If all of this is true, then why does Christ call us to obey Him as a means of “abiding in His love?” Many would answer this question by drawing our attention to the fact that sin, even for believers, is not without its consequences. God still disciplines us when we sin, and there is even the possibility of missing out on some eternal rewards if we persist in sinful living (I Corinthians 3:10-15). But all that God does for us He does for us in love. Even in God’s acts of discipline and judgment, He is acting for us, not against us. Why, then, is obedience the way that we abide in God’s love?
Because it is through obedience that we bring our hearts and minds into agreement with the truth of God’s love for us. Listen to Paul’s encouragement in Ephesians 5:1-2: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” The doctrine of positive confession has done and is doing great damage to the church, with all of its expectations of prosperity and material comfort in this life, but there is something to be said for the emphasis on agreeing with God. It is not our agreement with God about a thing that makes the thing true; but it is our agreement that enables us to take delight in and be comforted by what is true. Obedience is a tool of spiritual warfare, because when we obey, we are declaring to the world, the flesh, and the powers of darkness that we are not our own anymore. We have been bought with a price and born again to a living hope in the new family of grace, and when we obey we are taking ownership of that reality. Obedience is a means by which we take hold of the comfort that is found in our identity in Christ. It is a way that we reassure ourselves of the truths of grace.
But there are comforts even beyond these to be found in obedience. God’s commandments are an invitation to taste the sweet goodness of His eternal character (2 Peter 1:4) and grow in resembling Him in the way that we live. God’s commandments are a way for us to fellowship with Him in His holiness, to partake with Him of the glory of His justice and mercy and truth. As we do this, our joy in God for who He is increases–and not only that, but we bring Him the great joy of seeing His children walk in truth, and we protect ourselves from many painful natural consequences of sin that affect our ability to have true happiness in this life. There is an experience of God’s good intentions for us that is only possible through submitting to His commandments. In calling us to obey, God is not manipulating us by threatening to withdraw His love; He is simply entreating us to allow Him to love us by submitting to His commandments, because His commandments are an expression of His love. He will still love us when we disobey, but love can only bring satisfaction to a willing heart.
So there you have it. Meditate, read, memorize, obey. May you be strengthened by the Holy Spirit to delight in God and discipline yourself in the cultivation of delight through the diligent study of His word!
Andrew Micah 