Don’t Just Study the Bible, Read It

Imagine a chess club. This club was filled with people who loved the game of chess. They studied it for hours. They watched online videos of all the greats battling it out. They argued over the best openers, the best strategies, and whether you should castle queenside or kingside. They met weekly. They read books. They wrote books. But there is one thing they never seemed to get around to doing. They never played chess.((This is a loose adaptation of the Cru illustration of the Parable of the Fishless Fisherman. https://www.cru.org/us/en/blog/share-the-gospel/evangelism/parable-of-the-fishless-fishermen.html))

That would be ridiculous, of course. Why study chess if you’re not going to play chess? And yet, I fear that as Christians we can sometimes spend so much time studying about the Bible or talking about the Bible that we don’t just read it. To use a similar analogy, we are like people who spend hours preparing a meal but never sit down to eat it. I think this particular threat can be a problem for the normie Christian reading their Bible as well as the preacher or teacher when they share a message. Let’s look at each of those problems one at a time.

Read the Bible on Your Own

If you want to get started reading your Bible, there’s a lot of help available. Literally thousands of books, podcasts, videos, and other resources have been designed and published to help you study the Bible, many of them free of charge. You could listen to sermons every hour of the day, every day of the week and not begin to make a dent in all the sermons that were uploaded to that internet from that previous Sunday. All of this is wonderful, and could rightly be described as an “embarrassment of riches.” We have near limitless assistance in better reading the Bible. The danger, of course, is that these wonderful tools can become a replacement for actually reading the Bible.

Devotionals are wonderful, but they are not the Bible. Devotionals are written by men; the Bible is inspired by God. Devotionals might be wrong; the Bible never is. Preachers might do a phenomenal job of explaining a text, but there’s something to simply letting the text speak for itself. I once heard a highly studied and very successful preacher make the comment that preaching was predigested food, and that God’s people needed to read and study the Bible on their own. Don’t let fun explainer videos, your favorite preacher, or even a helpful five minute devotional keep you from reading, meditating, and studying the Bible on your own. Don’t just study the Bible, read it!

Read the Bible When Preaching or Teaching

If you are called on to preach or teach the Bible, make sure you read it. The temptation to replace the Bible with Bible study tools is perhaps even more acute for those who have shelves filled with commentaries. While we can and should get other perspectives on the text, we must always be going back to the text itself. The most important part of sermon prep must be reading the passage we are studying, and reading it repeatedly until it sinks in.

It’s not just in our study, but also in our actual teaching that we must read the Bible. One of my responsibilities for the church I serve at is to write the small group curriculum for our lay teachers every week. I try to keep my lessons to a manageable length, really I do! I’m not sure the people teaching them would necessarily agree, but nobody’s perfect. One of the things I have noticed is that if I fill my lessons too full, the temptation is for teachers (including, at times, yours truly) to skip reading the passage, or to read less of the passage, or to read the passage once and then never really refer back to the text itself.

I have emphasized in training sessions that we want Bible studies, not studies of the study I wrote. The focus needs to be on the text of the Bible itself, and not one fallible man’s lesson about the Bible. Preachers can do the same thing by reading the passage for their text once, and then never really come back to it. When training high school preachers, I encourage them to use the phrase “look at verse number” as often as they can throughout their message, because that’s where the power of the sermon lies. I try to remember that myself when I’m preaching.

I have come to realize that even the way I read a text in a sermon matters. I once heard a preacher make the wise observation that he read the text he was preaching from slowly and carefully, because it was the only part of his sermon that was guaranteed to be true. Too often preachers (again, at times, including yours truly) have rushed through reading the text. It’s as if they were so excited to get to what they wanted to see about a text they the text itself was an obstacle to get past. One way you can clearly detect this is by listening to sermons at double speed. This amplifies the difference in speaking rate. It can be telling to hear a preacher’s pace increase as soon as he gets to the text and then slow down again once he finishes. I’m not saying someone who does that is sinning or not taking God’s Word seriously, but I have myself been convicted that reading the Bible is not something I should be rushing.

Obviously, none of this is to denigrate preaching. The New Testament commands preaching and holds it up as a noble thing. But I have found in preaching that if I’m not careful, I can stray from the text in subtle ways even as my sermon is an allegedly “text-driven” message.

When I was in college, one of my Bible professors was asked to give advice on reading the Bible. With his characteristic dry wit I remember him saying something like, “My first suggestion for how to read the Bible is to read the Bible.” He was right. As a pastor, I can get so caught up in studying about the Bible or working on my explanations of the Bible, that I don’t spend the time I need to reading it. I don’t think I’m alone. So let’s all of us keep studying the Bible, but even more than that, let’s keep reading it.