More Bible, Better Bible in 2024
Maybe you’ve heard what the Massachusetts Historical Society has done. It’s posted online all fifty-one volumes of the private diaries of John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States. Unfortunately, they’re not yet searchable by key word or phrase. But just today I came across an entry that stood my conscience up straight.
The entry is dated August 31, 1809. Adams, forty-two years old, is crossing the dark Atlantic from Boston to Denmark with his wife, Louisa Catherine, and their two-year-old son, Charles. He’s on his way to St. Petersburg, where he will assume the duties of America’s first diplomat to Russia. On this day Adams makes notes about how he spends his time aboard ship. I rise about six o’clock, often earlier, he records. Read ten or fifteen chapters in the Bible. We breakfast about 9.
Ten or fifteen chapters? Before breakfast? Surely there must be some reasonable explanation that accounts for this remarkable feat. There is. Adams continues, There is much time for study and for meditation at sea, and when the weather is as moderate as we have generally had it hitherto upon this passage, a person capable of useful application may employ his time to as great advantage as on shore.
Oh, so that explains it. Lots of leisurely time on his hands.
But during his years in St. Petersburg, Adams wrote a series of letters to one of the sons he’d left behind in the United States. It has to do with the Bible and its teachings. While urging his boy to read the Bible every day, he relates his own example. I have myself for many years made it a practice to read through the Bible once every year. . . . My custom is, to read four or five chapters every morning, immediately after rising from my bed. It employs about an hour of my time.
John Quincy Adams was not a preacher. He never planted or pastored a church. He never served as a missionary on a foreign field. He was never the president of a Christian college or dean or professor of a seminary. But he was busy.
Adams served his country as a member of the House of Representatives; as a senator from Massachusetts; as the United States ambassador to the United Kingdom, Russia, Prussia, and the Netherlands; as the eighth United States secretary of state; and finally as president of the United States (1825–29). And right through his long and eventful life, Adams continued to read the Bible—more of it and with more discipline than many Christians, and perhaps, even some preachers.
Well, a new year is almost upon us. I’m not one to poke fun at New Year’s resolutions. To me there’s always something welcome about turning the calendar to January and feeling that I have another chance at a new beginning. Maybe my best intentions will be disappointed. But one thing is for sure, it is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation that everything that will be good and successful in this new year begins with my Bible. Not that we would want to, but we can never get away from that axiom. The Word of God is the beginning of anything good. And this year can be much better, immeasurably better, if with living, hungry faith we’ll begin it with less television, fewer DVDs, far fewer games, less sports, less blogging, much less trivia, and in the place of all these thieves, more and better Bible reading. I’d like to encourage preachers to challenge themselves to this in 2010.
Reading for Myself First
Let’s start with how to frame the goal. It can’t be first of all pastoral. It must be intensely personal, a matter between my soul and God alone, as if there weren’t another person on earth to listen to Him. Our people don’t understand how especially difficult this is for preachers. Preachers are terribly tempted to read the Bible professionally.
In the spring of 1969 David Martyn Lloyd- Jones (1899–1981) delivered a series of lectures at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia on the subject “Preaching and Preachers.” Two years later they were published by Zondervan under the same title. Chapter 9, “The Preparation of the Preacher,” is one of my favorite sections. It contains Lloyd-Jones’s caution against reading the Bible like a preacher instead of like a hungry soul.
One of the most fatal habits a preacher can ever fall into, he warns, is to read his Bible simply in order to find texts for sermons. This is a real danger; it must be recognized and fought and resisted with all your might. Do not read the Bible to find texts for sermons, read it because it is the food that God has provided for your soul, because it is the Word of God, because it is the means whereby you can get to know God.
Of course, every Scripture that deeply affects a preacher will eventually meld into his sermons. That’s the best of both ideals. Lloyd-Jones himself concedes this and even goes so far as to offer suggestions as to how to capitalize on personal Bible reading for further use in the pulpit. But that’s different than reading with sermon-making in the forefront of my mind.
My first business with a Bible every morning must be to tune my own soul’s ear to hear God’s voice to me, not my people. That frequently takes some deliberate, determined work deep down in my heart. My heart wants to hide like Adam when God calls. It’s not that it doesn’t want Him to talk. Because I’m a preacher, because every Sunday I have to have something to say, old scaly preachers’ hearts are prepared for God to talk, just so long as it’s to Eve, or to the serpent, or to their churches. But what preachers’ hearts don’t want is to be called by name. Then the preacher’s heart uncomfortably twists to deflect the Master’s words with, Lord, and what shall this man do? But, oh, it can seem so earnest as it rushes to outline the text for someone else!
So I’ve got to recognize that my heart is deceitful and desperately evasive. It will piously exploit even sermon preparation as a foil against having to turn the Bible loose on myself.
In his book To My Younger Brethren H.C.G. Moule (1841–1920), evangelical minister in the Church of England and frequent speaker at ministerial life conferences, passionately addressed our personal need to hunker down with our Bibles in a kind of spiritual solitary confinement.
I put in my plea, he wrote, for such a secret study of the Word of God as shall be unprofessional, unclerical, and simply Christian. Resolve to “read, mark and inwardly digest” so that not now the flock but the shepherd, that is to say you, “may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life.” It will be all the better for the flock. Forget sometimes, in the name of Jesus Christ, the pulpit, the mission room, the Bible-class; open the Bible as simply as if you were on Crusoe’s island, and were destined to live and die there, alone with God.
Does any preacher dare deny his need for this? Why not, then, renew our resolve to read the Scriptures for ourselves first in 2010? The husbandman that laboureth must be first partaker of the fruits. Can it be merely coincidental that in the same breath Paul immediately continues, Consider what I say; and the Lord give thee understanding in all things (2 Tim. 2:7)? Preachers must need to be told to think seriously about their need to be the first of their flock to enjoy rich, fruitful, Scriptural things. But evidently even their own serious reflection won’t make the case sufficiently. The Lord, Paul says, will be needed to give them understanding in this, as in all other things.
Reading More, Much More
At this point I’m on the horns of a dilemma. I can go one way or the other with what to say next, but I can’t go both. I’m going to have to focus either on reading the Bible more broadly this year, or on reading it more deeply. It’s the daily choice between plow work or spade work, between cutting comparatively shallow furrows across the surfaces of passages or digging deeply into their gleaming, wealthy seams.
This time I’m going to plead for more of the former in the near future, for challenging ourselves to read much more Scripture this year. To traverse the good land “from Dan to Beersheba,” as older writers put it quaintly.
Of course, no one can make rules for anyone else about this. It’s dangerous enough to attempt rules for oneself in this area. But what preacher doesn’t feel that he ought to be reading more of the Bible more of the time?
For most of us the key to doing more of this is intentionality. It’s a matter of setting a stated quantitative goal. Here’s a minimal one that Lloyd-Jones puts before us: I cannot emphasize too strongly the vital importance of reading the whole Bible. I would say that all preachers should read through the whole Bible in its entirety at least once every year.
For some preachers, who haven’t read through the entire Bible for some time, it would be a blessed experience to determine that by God’s grace they’ll do so in this new year. If you’re one of them and are looking for a new approach to systematically getting through the entire Bible, check out the various Bible schedules that are available on the Web. Just type “Bible reading schedule” into Google. All sorts of different schemes will pop up.
Others of us could read through our entire Bible several times this year. In fact, there are probably very few preachers reading this article who couldn’t do that if they just made up their minds that it was important and then prioritized it accordingly in their schedules.
There are 1189 chapters in the Bible, 929 in the Old Testament and 260 in the New. I’ve read through the Bible in sixty days. It takes about an hour per day at pulpit pace. But I once met an Indian pastor who for several years had been reading repeatedly through his entire Bible at the rate of (are you ready for this?) fifty chapters a day. He had a pretty sizable ministry too. Plus a Bible college and seminary. I’ve never read Scripture at that rate, but what a soul-satisfying and memorysupplying thing it would be to start and finish all of the Bible in just over three weeks. You’d have to set aside about three hours a day to do it. There are preachers whose schedules would allow for something like this, and they wouldn’t need to feel guilty about using their time this way. The apostles laid down the ideal long ago: We will give ourselves continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the word (Acts 6:4). Thou art a preacher of the Word, said a Puritan, mind thy business.
Still, that’s setting the bar pretty high. I finished nine chapters at 7:30 this morning. Forty or so more would have taken me until nearly 10:00 a.m. Maybe I could do that a few times a month this year, but probably not more. But think for a minute about even that. Why not? Why not an entire morning once a month spent reading one of the Bible’s big fields? Genesis, or the entire life of David, or two or three Gospels, or twice through Acts?
Here’s a way it could happen. Take out the calendar and make an appointment for yourself and just your Bible. Schedule a morning in January. Mark it, “Plow work.” Now fight like everything to keep that appointment.
The night before, prepare as though the next morning were the opening of deer season. In fact, sure enough, maybe you ought to do what you do when you go hunting. You get your gear together, you pack a nice lunch, a Thermos, some snacks, and you get in your car and drive away. To where? To wherever you’re likely to get a shot.
So where are you most likely to be undisturbed and clear-headed for your special morning with your Bible? I confess to doing some of my best reading away from my study. I’ve read whole books and large parts of Scripture sitting at picnic tables in parks or with my back against a giant tree in the woods. I once heard another preacher relate that once a month he steals away to the sprawling lobby of a spacious hotel where he buys coffee and lunch to “pay” for spending the day there in a quiet corner and a big, plush chair. I’d have to find a chair that faced the wall or my mind would wander all over the place, but if I lived in the North, I suppose that it would take an arrangement something like that to get away and alone on a cold day in January.
Regardless of where you go, I don’t see why this kind of thing isn’t entirely doable. One can only wonder at what the effect might be of such a massive washing of water by the word every thirty days or so.
Reading Prayerfully, Dependently
I’ve left the most important challenge for last. Its imperative urgency simply cannot be overemphasized.
Any fairly well-trained minister can adequately exegete a text, find pertinent cross references, and fit the verse’s teaching into an orthodox system of theology. But that’s not necessarily spiritual understanding. This latter is nearly impossible to define scientifically, but every preacher, indeed every child of God, can testify to it experientially. It’s the exhilarating, faithproducing, peace-bestowing combination of accurate interpretation and insightful applicational discernment, but even something more—something like the experience of standing in a dimly lit room into which, all of a sudden, a shaft of brilliant light bursts through a window. It’s illumination. The kind that makes verses glow, even burn. One simply can’t explain it. Nor can one command or control it. It’s like the wind: thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth. But we can pray for it.
Henry Venn (1724–97), an English evangelical and a friend of such worthies as John Newton, William Cowper, and Charles Simeon, was a prodigious writer of letters answering Christians of all sorts who sought his counsel about a wide variety of spiritual needs. Among the issues he frequently discussed was this matter of devotional Bible reading. But Venn’s counsel almost always included the often-overlooked matter of praying for insight as one reads.
To one correspondent he wrote in 1776, I can, from happy experience, assure you, there is one certain way (and I conclude but one) of acquiring spiritual understanding. It is a laborious one, and very contrary to our natural love of ease: you will find it in the 2d chapter of Proverbs, and the first nine verses, compared with the command, Deut. vi. 4–9. From hence it is plain, that much pains must be taken in pondering on the word of God: we must read it with as much attention as we do a mathematical proposition; and add to our attention earnest prayer that our understanding may be opened to understand the Scripture. . . . We often are destitute of the spirit of prayer, and therefore find it irksome to bow our knees; but in this manner of reading the Scriptures I have seldom failed of finding light and love spring up in my heart, and grace to pour out my prayer, as the passage engaging my meditation suggests.
To another he advised, I hope you read the Bible with much prayer. . . . As it is written, the kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force; so in nothing do we offer violence to our evil nature more than in studying God’s holy word, and earnestly praying that the Divine truth it teaches may sink deep into our hearts, work mightily, and produce all those gracious effects for which it was of old written by inspiration of the Holy Ghost.
Still another received counsel that was reprinted in tract form many times, Those who dare despise persevering prayer to be taught by the Spirit of God what is contained in His holy Word, as if they knew enough, fall into pernicious errors; wrest some passages of Scripture, to contradict others; or grow violently zealous for doctrines; but very cold respecting that heavenly mind those doctrines are revealed to produce. Our profiting will then only appear, when, after the example of David and St. Paul, we pray from deep conviction that we cannot be properly affected with what we believe, unless we are divinely taught.
John Owen (1616–83) argued persuasively for this prayerful dependence upon the Holy Spirit as we read. Shall we think it strange for a Christian, he asked, when, it may be after the use of all other means, he finds himself at a loss about the true meaning and intention of the Holy Spirit in any place or text of Scripture, to betake himself in a more than ordinary manner unto God by prayer, that he would by His Spirit enlighten, guide, teach, and so reveal the truth unto him? Or should we think it strange that God should hear such prayers, and instruct such persons in the secrets of His covenant? God forbid that there should be such atheistical thoughts in the minds of any who would be esteemed Christians! Yea, I must say, that for a man to undertake the interpretation of any part or portion of Scripture in a solemn manner, without invocation of God to be taught and instructed by His Spirit, is a high provocation of Him; nor shall I expect the discovery of truth from anyone who so proudly and ignorantly engageth in a work so much above his ability to manage.
I’ll close with a helpful anecdote along this line from Profitable Bible Study by R. A. Torrey (1856–1928).
Some years ago, accompanied by a friend, I was making a tour of Franconian Switzerland, and visiting some of the more famous zoolithic caves. One day a rural letter carrier stopped us and asked if we would like to see a cave of rare beauty and interest, away from the beaten tracks of travel. Of course, we said, yes. He led us through the woods and underbrush to the mouth of the cave, and we entered. All was dark and uncanny. He discussed greatly on the beauty of the cave, telling us of altars and fantastic formations, but we could see absolutely nothing. Now and then he uttered a note to warn us to have a care, as near our feet lay a gulf the bottom of which had never been discovered. We began to fear that we might be the first discoverers of the bottom. There was nothing pleasant about the whole affair. But as soon as a magnesium taper was lighted, all became different. There were the stalagmites rising from the floor to meet the stalactites as they came down from the ceiling. There were the beautiful and fantastic formations on every hand, and all glistening in fairy like beauty in the brilliant light.
So I have often thought it was with many a passage of Scripture. Others tell you of its beauty, but you cannot see it. It looks dark and intricate and forbidding and dangerous, but when God’s own light is kindled there by prayer how different all becomes in an instant. You see a beauty that language cannot express, and that only those can appreciate who have stood there in the same light. He who would understand and love his Bible must be much in prayer. Prayer will do more than a college education to make the Bible an open and a glorious book.
Is there anyone who should or could gainsay that? So brethren, the new year opens before us. Anything of it that will be good must begin with our Bibles. Purpose, really purpose, to give it more and better reading this year. It has not entered our hearts, what God could do for us, not merely pastorally as shepherds of other men’s souls, but personally, as weak, hungry, desperately needy souls ourselves.
Dr. Mark Minnick is the pastor of Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Greenville, South Carolina, and serves as adjunct professor of preaching and exposition at Bob Jones Seminary.
(Originally published in FrontLine • November/December 2009 under the title “More Bible, Better Bible in 2010”. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.)