Hey friends,  we’re in the second episode of a three-part series and I’m excited to dive back into it. If you didn’t listen to “Playing Catch-up and Part I of Finding Margin for the Devotional Life”, I hope you’ll take some time to circle back there. The comments from that episode lead me to believe it hit the mark with so many listeners, and I couldn’t be happier about that.

Today, we’ll be talking about where and how to begin if you’re new to Bible Study.  The first thing I like to do whenever I’m speaking on this topic is to pause and reflect on what it was like before Bible study was my delight. It’s not hard to remember the days when I wanted to love the Bible, but I just flat out didn’t and trying to read it made me sleepy. So, let’s start there.

If you’re new to the Bible, or even if you’re not that new to it, but you’ve never developed a hunger for digging into it on your own, my first suggestion is for you to take your current experience with the Bible, whatever that looks like, and approach God with it in prayer. Ask Him to help you develop a desire for His Word and to teach you through it, and then, ask Him again tomorrow. I still pray this way on an ongoing basis. I thank God that His Word has become as much bread to me as the physical food I eat. I acknowledge that He has done this marvelous thing, not me, and I ask Him to help me love His Word more than I did yesterday.  He is faithful.

My second suggestion is one you’ll find in a lot of places that address this question. That’s because it is solid good advice and why reinvent the wheel, right? Find a translation that you can understand. A few of my favorites are the New American Standard Bible, the English Standard Version, the New International Version, the Revised Standard Version, the Amplified and the Holman Christian Standard Bible. Okay, that was more than a few, but you get the idea.  If you can’t buy a Bible just now, type a verse in on a search engine and you’ll find websites where you can read a slew of different translations as quickly as your Internet can load the page, all free. Take every advantage of that. Reading the same verse in various translations will often open our eyes to something we didn’t see in the initial reading.

To recap, begin by asking God to help you love His Word, and two, find a translation you can understand. The third suggestion brings us right down to the meat of this week’s podcast. I’m often asked where to begin reading and how much to read? For me, both of those questions require me to assume an uncomfortable level of authority, but I’m game to answer if you will take my thoughts as just that, my thoughts. There are as many answers as there are Bible teachers.

That said, I like to direct new Bible students to John’s gospel. That’s the fourth book of the New Testament. The gospel of John is beautiful, profound reading. This is going to be a real over simplification, but where the first three gospel writers major on the humanity of Jesus and the timeline of his earthly ministry, John’s first words take us all the way back to the beginning, “In the beginning was God and the Word was with God”. John opens with the divinity of Jesus as the living Word of God who first spoke the world into existence, and then he devotes his efforts to establishing this same Jesus as the Son of God and long-awaited long-promised Savior, stepping into time to redeem it. John’s gospel is my favorite because He stresses the importance of the Lordship of Jesus and our need to believe and keep believing. That speaks to this remedial learner who totally gets the words of the anxious daddy in the gospel accounts who once said, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief!” Approach the book of John in bites, not to conquer the reading, but to hear the words.