Help Me to Deeply Study the Bible

Episode notes:

This program is comprised of the following episodes:

"Write as You Read"

"Get into the Book"

"How to Approach Scripture"

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Dannah Gresh: Bible teacher Jen Wilkin says that when we study God’s Word there’s a few things that we need to keep in mind. 

Jen Wilkin: One of the important aspects of biblical interpretation that we have to keep in view is that a text cannot mean something to me that it never could have meant to its original hearers.

Dannah: Today, I aim to restoke your passion to study all of the Bible! 

Welcome to Revive Our Hearts Weekend, I’m Dannah Gresh. 

No one knows me better than Bob Gresh. The other day I was having a problem . . . a big one. I called my husband as calming as I could and said, “Um, I need some advice.”

And he said, I quote, “I’m on my way.”  

And minutes later he was by my side. Do you know why? He knows how to read my voice. And without even knowing what was going on, he knew he had to come! It’s a pretty cool thing, actually. Knowing someone like that.

How do Bob and I know each other so intimately? Time. I’ve spent time with him—thirty-two years to be precise, well, married years. There were those dating years too. So, oh my! I’ve known and been studying Bob Gresh for a very long time. 

Knowing God is no different. It requires time! Time in His Word and time in His presence. 

Last week we talked about studying the Bible, making time to sit and learn from God, so we can know Him more. And the big takeaway was: just get in there and read it. 

Today we are going to go a little deeper as we learn how to study. We’ll hear from Kay Arthur and also Jen Wilkin. And what we’ll hear is truly going to jump-start your desire to open your Bible. 

I’ve heard many many excuses why women don’t study the Bible. Let me list a few: 

• They think they need a degree.
  You’re about to hear that’s not true! You don’t have to attend seminary or know Greek or Hebrew!
• They don’t have time.
  Oh, I feel that one sometimes! And I hear that one a lot from young mothers. 
• They think the Bible is boring. 
  Now, I'm not quite sure what to say about that, but stick around, I think we can help with it.
• They believe the lie that the Bible is not applicable to them today.
  (Hmmm, did you hear the word “lie” in that sentence?”) 
• No one has ever told them how to study the Bible.
  Well, you’re in the right place today if that’s you!

Well, if any of those seem familiar to you, would you give me your ear so I can replace that excuse with some passion to get into God's Word?

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth and I talked with Kelly Needham about this very issue—studying the Word. I love how Kelly breaks things down and helps women understand what some of the roadblocks might be to studying the Word of God. 

Kelly Needham: The Bible is not new information. It is alive, active, and relevent today and speaks in fresh ways, but it is not brand new. What social and the news is, is new information. It's coming all the time. We feel this sense of there's unknown and new information coming at me, and I need to get it all. This old information, why should I spend my time on that and miss out on this current thing?

But the reality is, if we would dig into the timeless truths of God's Word, it would give us so much more wisdom to understand and really digest the news that would be healthy for us.

Second Timothy 3:16 tells us that Scripture is not brand new, it is breathed out by God. It is given to us so that we can be complete and equipped for every good work. It's actually equipping us for our lives today in a really important way that we need.

So that's one hurdle we have to overcome. We have to believe God's' Word and act on it by spending time there, even though it is super tempting to just jump on to the endless relay of information we have through the apps on our phone.

But the other hurdle that you mentioned, Nancy, is one of, "Why can't I just read a devotional? Why do I have to dig into all these parts of the Bible that just feel obsolete—whether it is Old Testament laws that we know Christ has fulfilled for us. Why should I get to know the old covenant and the Old Testament laws? Or why should I read the geneologies? Why can't I just do the easy work?

One of the things I would say to that is reading the Bible for ourselves, reading all of God's inspired Word is: a protection for us, it helps us to know it for ourselves. There are all sorts of devotionals out there taking God's Word and applying it in inappropriate ways. We see that Satan when he tempted Jesus in wilderness, used God's Word at one point to try and lure Him to disobey God. There's plenty of examples of that.

When we read the Scripture for ourselves, it's a guard for us to make sure we are not led astray by false teaching. We become really familiar with the real thing. We are able to identify it.

But also, it's in those long readings, in those boring things, that we really have a chance to cultivate this long-term treasure hunt, as Dannah said a couple days ago, that we read in the Scriptures. Things we might be able to apply to our lives or see the meaning of it then. But when we read something that Jesus did or said in the New Testament, we go, "That reminds me of what Jesus said about the law when he tells the leper to go show himself to the priest. My Bible is referencing Leviticus. I remember reading something about that two years ago. I'm going to go back and reread that."

There is such rich depth that we get in those moments in seeing that God sent the leper back not just to be a witness to the priest who is there. But the ceremony for cleansing of a leper that we read about in Leviticus, though it isn't applicable today, is full of rich, beautiful imagery to help this leper that he is not only healed and restored to his own community, but he is restored to God.

Those moments of connection, they require for us to have a really long-term, delayed-gratification way of reading the Scriptures. To go, "I believe it all matters. I'm going to pay attention now, even though I don't see the reason for this for two or three years. I believe there is a treasure trove here that I want to be ready for.

It takes some pushing back against instant gratification. Devotional reading is instant gratification. I think that's okay every now and then. I need that in my life too. But I also need the delayed gratification of reading the Scripture for myself. Even if that means I close it, and I don't have a nugget for my day, I'm going to believe God is going to do something in me. Because He said that His Word doesn't return void. It is always accomplishing the purpose for which it was sent out to do.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Well, that verse you quoted from 2 Timothy 3, "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work." All Scripture. We want to get to the good work and the complete and the satisfied and the finished product. But there is a process to get there, and you need all Scripture.

You need the geneologies. You need the Old Testament. You need Leviticus. You need the lists. The first nine chapter of 1 Chronicles is all geneologies—lists of so-and-so had a son named so-and-so who had a son named so-and-so. You can kind of get stuck in that. Or you can take God at His Word that there is something about all of Scripture when you put it all together in that beautiful assembled puzzle that is profitable. It is profitable. It is for our good, our benefit, our righteousness, for our Christ-likeness. So it's all got purpose.

Dannah: That conversation with Kelly Needham was so good and practical. Kelly has such a winsome approach in teaching younger women about the need to crave more of God. So good. We have more of that conversation on our website, go to ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend and click on today’s episode "Help Me to Deeply Study the Bible."

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth loves God’s Word and that is probably obvious to you if you listen to the daily program, Revive Our Hearts. As we are learning how to dig deeper, she wants to encourage you to journal, to write. But it's not necessarily the kind of journaling you’re familiar with. Here’s Nancy to explain.

Nancy: First, and this sounds so simple I almost hesitate to say it, but write out portions of the Scripture itself—just word for word. There’s value in taking time to copy out portions of the Word of God, word for word. There are actually several occasions in Scripture where God instructed people to do that very thing.

Remember in Exodus when Moses went up on the mountain to meet with God? God said to him in chapter 34, verse 27, “Write down these words” and the Scripture says, “He wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments” (verse 28, NIV).

Then we see that 40 years later as the children of Israel were preparing to enter the Promised Land, Moses rehearsed God’s laws for the entire congregation. Then he told the people what God had told him. He said, "Write these laws down. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates."

This, by the way, is one of the reasons that I love to have in my house framed portions of Scripture so that I have the Scripture displayed everywhere around me. It’s in my bathroom; it’s in my study; it’s in my bedroom; it’s in my living room; it’s everywhere I can turn in my house. I try to have some portion or portions of the Scripture just because of the value of having it always before us.

But why write it down? God knows how prone we are to forget. As we write it down, we’re being helped to remember. Remember when teachers in school would write something on the blackboard, or whiteboard, as it is more recently, and make you copy it a lot of times in your notebook. Do they do that anymore in school? I don’t know if they do, but we just considered it busy work. Well, maybe the teacher knew that by writing something down repetitively, we just might get it. It might get into our system. So consider writing out portions of the Scripture by hand.

Then, as we mentioned a moment ago, write in your Bible. You say, “What should I write in my Bible?” There’s no specific reference in Scripture to writing in your Bible because remember that hardly anybody owned a copy of the Bible before the 16th century. But I find that writing in my Bible has been a very practical help and blessing in my devotional life.

I remember when I was a child, my parents encouraged us to underline verses we found to be particularly meaningful. I got a little carried away, and I underlined so much that my dad suggested at one point that maybe I should just underline the things that I didn’t find meaningful. But I started as a child in that way, just writing in the Scripture, highlighting verses and phrases for emphasis, things that really spoke to me personally. Over the years, I have read and marked up many different copies of the Bible.

Each of my Bibles, if you could put them in order in the sequence in which I’ve read them, each of those Bibles would tell something of my personal journey of faith during that time period of my life.

• I’ll circle repeated words and phrases.
• I’ll jot down notes about the meaning of a specific word or phrase.
• Sometimes I’ll even write down the date, or even the place where I was when God used a specific Scripture or passage to speak to my heart in a particular way.
• Sometimes I’ll just jot down a few words that record my personal response to what I’ve read—things like, “Yes, Lord. I agree. Thank You, Lord. Change my heart, Lord. Make this true in my life.”
• I may jot down the name of someone I’m praying for as it relates to a particular passage.
• Jot down just insights—the margins aren’t very wide, so I don’t write down a lot. I do write very small, and when my eyes finally go, I won’t be able to read any of those old notes.

But as I’m writing, I’m being helped to concentrate, to focus on what it is that I’m reading. That’s the value of writing as you read.

Dannah: Great things from Nancy. Write, copy verses, it helps us to remember. And remembering is key, isn’t it? Those Israelites were forgetful so often, and I hate to admit it, I am too. So do what you can to help remember.

Another great lady who has logged many hours helping women study the Bible is Kay Arthur. If you’ve ever done a Precept Bible study, you know this woman. Kay has taught millions of people learn to study God’s Word. Kay is an author, radio host, and speaker. Today we’re gonna hear Nancy and Kay talk about how to handle the truth correctly when we really go deep with how we study our Bibles, and for Kay that begins with the word "inductively." 

Kay: Inductively means you go straight to the book you’re studying. In other words, you don’t look at the commentaries.

You can look at them later, but you don’t look at the commentaries to find out what other people think or discovered. Rather, you go to the Word of God yourself.

When you go to the Word of God yourself, it basically involves three things that intertwine with one another. It’s not first and then second and then third.

You observe the text; you discover, “What does it say?” Most of our error in handling the Word of God comes because we really don’t know what it says, or we don’t examine it in its context and its setting in that particular chapter, in that particular book, or in light of the whole counsel of God.

Nancy: You have a big Bible sitting in front of you. Is this a Kay Arthur Study Bible?

Kay: No, it’s not a Kay Arthur Study Bible, but it’s called The New Inductive Study Bible. It’s open to 1 Corinthians 15 right now.

Nancy: So if we were going to be looking at 1 Corinthians 15 . . . you wouldn’t start with chapter 15 if you were studying 1 Corinthians.

Kay: You’d have studied the whole book.

Nancy: But you’ve come to chapter 15. What kind of questions would you ask about the text as you’re looking at it?

Kay: When you observe the text, the first thing you want to ask . . .

You want to interrogate it. I was using this in Eurasia. There were Russians there. There were Romanians there who lived under Communism. I reached over (I'm teaching) and grabbed a guy by the shirt collar and said, "Who are you? What are you doing here? When did you get here?" Who, want, when, where, why, how. I just grabbed him.

Then I looked at him and we both began to laugh, but he had been interrogated by the secret police.

Nancy: So you made him a little nervous.

Kay: We all broke down and laughed. Because what you do with the text is you get ahold of it. You ask the questions, “Who, what, when, where, why, and how?”

• Who is this about?
• Who are the main characters?
• Who is speaking?
• To whom are they speaking?

You start with the most obvious when you’re studying inductively. You look for the easiest to see. People are the easiest to see.

If you walk into a room and there’s a person there, you may not see all the pictures on the wall, but you see the person. So you look at who.

And then what:

• What is this about?
• What is it saying?
• What is the subject? 
• What is this person doing? 
• What is this event?

So you look at who and then what.

Then when is this happening? When is something that we usually miss if we’re not careful; especially if you’re studying prophecy, you can get your prophecy all messed up.

So you want to find out,

• When is this happening?
• When is it going to take place?

So it’s who, what, when. Then where.

• Where is this happening?

I put a green circle around every when. Then I double underline in green and find out the where. Where did this happen? Where is this land that he’s talking about? Where is Christ coming from? Where is He coming to? So you ask the where.

Every word of God is God-breathed, so every word is important, and I want to pay attention to it. So it’s who, what, when, where, and then why.

• Why did he say this?
• Why is this happening?

You want to ask that question. Then how.

• Does He tell us how?

For instance, in Philippians 4:6 He tells us, “Be anxious for nothing.” Then He tells us how. Literally in the Greek it’s, “Stop being anxious,” and then He tells us how.

Well, we’re in 1 Corinthians 15 because that’s where my Bible was open. So we start reading:

Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain (vv. 1–2).

He’s talking about the gospel. So what we do (and they would find this out from reading 1 Corinthians) is mark key words.

Remember, the Bible is an oral book. It wasn’t until the 1400s A.D. that we had our own copies of the Bible. Up until then every copy of the Bible was copied by hand.

So they heard. Well, if you want somebody to get what you’re hearing, you repeat it. You use the same word.

So we would have them mark gospel, and they would see gospel as they go through the text. I mark it in a distinctive way. I color code it.

Dannah: I love that I don’t need a theology degree or a few different commentaries. Just the Bible, just the Word of God.

Jen Wilkin is passionate about studying the Bible, as well. In fact, Jen will say that her goal is to advocate for Bible literacy. I like that about her. She’s on a soap box I like to jump on to. Jen also says that there are no pink parts to the Bible, meaning that we all need to study the Bible. Jen is a Bible teacher and author of Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds.

Jen says that a big component for understanding the Bible is knowing the context of the passage we are reading. Here’s Jen to explain.

Jen Wilkin: Now, there are several levels of context that we need to make sure we honor anytime we are in a particular passage. One of them is just this base level, what I call the archeological questions.

So anytime you sit down to study a book of the Bible, before you sit down to read, you need to orient yourself to where that book lives or lived.

Before any book of the Bible was written to you and me, it was written to someone else. So we need to try and get inside of the skin a little bit of the original hearers because there's going to be some important things for us to take from that.

So if you have just a basic study Bible, or the people that you are teaching have a basic study Bible, they can turn to the front of it, and before they start into a book, they can read: Who wrote the book? To whom was it written? When was it written? What are the major themes? What kind of book is it? What is its genre (as we'll get into in just a minute)?

So you're going to ask them to take an ancient mindset, to put their eyes on an ancient context, and then read the book or passage in light of that. Again, is this something that you have to necessarily do for them? This is a perfect example of something that you can say, "Hey, we're going to get together next week, and we're going to start the book of James. And before we do, I want you to answer these five questions about the book: Who wrote it? To whom was it written? When was it written? What's the style of the book? What are the major themes?

That's it. And then they get together, and you can talk about. You can then build in a little bit more cultural perspective for them as you go.

What we cannot do is commit cultural imperialism when we read a text. We cannot impose our modern mindset on an ancient text any way that we want. One of the important aspects of biblical interpretation that we have to keep in view is that a text cannot mean something to me that it never could have meant to its original hearers.

Now, based on what I see on Instagram, this might be falling by the way just a little bit. We place such a premium on this personal message that is coming to me. Can you hear the individualism ring in that? And how many of those personal revelations that people have (I'm not saying that none of them are valid), but how many would hold up in a decent small-group discussion where people are being honest? 

Hey, I get that you like this idea, but it's not there, my friend. Before we can talk about what the text means to us, we have to talk about what the text means! There is an objective meaning that has been placed in the text. Meaning is determined by the author. Now we know the Author is God, but it also has a human author as well. Meaning is determined by the author, and it is discovered by the reader, not assigned by the reader. It is discovered by the reader.

So your job is not to read something, and then place whatever lens you feel belongs on it. Your job is to ask, "What did the author want me to know from what he has written here?" Those are two totally different things, and we need to help our women get into that mindset.

On context, the other kind of context that we need is textual context. So if you pull a particular passage out to teach to your women, be sure you have built around it all of the context that it needs for them to know what they need to when you read that text.

Try to avoid just reading a verse and then going on to whatever your point is because you were just using a verse to prop up a point. This is so, so important because it helps mitigate against that spot-knowledge thing that we run up against, and it really, really makes a difference.

Be responsible to teach a text within its context. Think of the trouble you could cause. Think of the great good you could do if you will take the extra time to build the context around it.

Dannah: Such a good reminder from Jen Wilkin! We need to be careful as we study. We can do such good with it, but we can also cause harm. Make sure that as you are studying you are asking God to continue to reveal Himself to you and continuing to humble your heart to hear Him correctly.

Of course, as you study, you will hit times when the words don’t make sense and you don’t understand. That’s okay. Continue studying, ask others for insight, maybe your pastor. But keep studying the Word of God.

We have more from Jen and also Kay Arthur on our website go to ReviveOurHearts.com/ and look for the Revive Our Hearts Weekend episode titled "Help Me to Deeply Study the Bible."

We have a resource to help you study the Bible. It’s actually a word study on the Names of Jesus. It’s called The Wonder of His Name, and it’s written by Nancy. As Easter is just a few weeks away, I love to sit down and savor the names of our Savior. Learn the meaning of Jesus’ names like Redeemer, Man of Sorrows, Bread of Life.

And this book, The Wonder of His Name, is yours for a gift of any amount when you give to Revive Our Hearts. Give today by calling 1-800-569-5959, or go to ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend and click on today’s episode. It’s called "Help Me to Deeply Study the Bible."

Next week, we’ll take a journey that some don’t have to take. But we’ll talk to a couple who live in the Middle East and minister to persecuted Christians. I can guarantee you’ll be encouraged. You don’t want to miss Revive Our Hearts Weekend next time.

Thanks for listening today. Thanks to our team: Phil Krause, Dylan Weibel, Rebekah Krause, Justin Converse, Michelle Hill, and for Revive Our Hearts Weekend, I’m Dannah Gresh

Revive Our Hearts, calling women to freedom, fullness and fruitfulness in Christ.

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