How should Christians read the Bible?

Question 11001.

Ask me how Christians should read the Bible and my first instinct is to ask what you expect to happen when you open it. Some people read the Bible the way they read an instruction manual, hunting for the paragraph that solves today’s problem. Others read the Bible the way they read poetry, letting phrases wash over them without ever asking what the author actually meant.

What follows is how I read the Bible myself, after thirty years of preaching and a fair number of wrong turns. None of it is clever. All of it takes time, and most of it takes the sort of patience our phones have quietly trained out of us.

Why we read the Bible at all

We read the Bible because God has spoken, and because what He said has been set down in words that stay put. Paul told Timothy that all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16). The word behind Scripture there is graphe, the writing, the thing recorded and fixed rather than floating about in the air.

That fixedness is the whole basis of the exercise. If God has spoken in words that hold still, then my task when I read the Bible is to discover what those words mean, not to decide what I would prefer them to mean. The moment I make myself the author, I have stopped reading and started writing.

It also means the Bible is not a private possession. When I read the Bible I am joining a very large company of people, most of them dead, many of them poorer and braver than I am, who found their footing in the same sentences.

Start with the plain sense

My working rule is simple. When the plain sense makes good sense, seek no other sense. God gave us ordinary human language, with its ordinary grammar and its ordinary figures of speech, and He expected ordinary people to follow it. If a psalm calls God a rock, nobody imagines geology. If Luke says Jesus went up to Jerusalem, nobody looks for a hidden meaning in the verb.

This is why I resist the instinct to look for a secret layer under every text. Allegory feels spiritual. It is usually the reader’s imagination wearing a clerical collar. The literal, grammatical and historical sense is not the shallow reading; it is the disciplined one, and it is far harder work than inventing symbolism.

So when you read the Bible, ask first what the words say in their ordinary meaning, then what kind of writing you are in. Narrative, law, poetry, prophecy, letter and apocalypse all behave differently, and reading a proverb as though it were a promise has broken more hearts than most heresies.

Context does most of the work

A verse without its paragraph is a stranger without a name. Before I ask what a sentence means to me, I want to know who wrote it, to whom, in what circumstances, and what came immediately before and after. Nine times out of ten the difficulty dissolves once the paragraph is back in place.

Take Philippians 4:13. On a coffee mug it promises athletic success. In its paragraph (Philippians 4:10-13) Paul is talking about contentment in hunger and plenty, and the strength he has in view is the strength to go without. That is a better promise than the mug offers, and a harder one.

Historical setting matters in the same way. Knowing that Corinth was a port city crawling with cults, or that Hebrews was written to people tempted to slide back into the old covenant, changes how the arguments land. You do not need a degree for this. A decent study Bible and a willingness to slow down will carry you a long way, and a few good tools help.

Let Scripture interpret Scripture

The safest commentary on the Bible is the rest of the Bible. Where a passage is obscure, I look for the clearer places that speak to the same theme, and I let those govern my reading of the difficult one. That is not a trick for avoiding hard texts; it is an admission that the same Author wrote the lot and did not contradict Himself.

This principle keeps me out of a good deal of trouble. It stops me building a doctrine on a single ambiguous phrase, and it stops me treating a narrative description as though it were a command. What Scripture reports is not always what Scripture requires, and only the wider witness will tell you which is which. I have written more fully about how this works in practice.

It also means I read the Bible with the New Testament open beside the Old. The apostles show us how they handled their Scriptures, and their example is worth more than any modern method.

In practice this looks like keeping a margin note of the cross references that matter and following them up rather than glancing at them. A concordance is an unglamorous tool, and it has saved me from more bad sermons than any commentary. Following a word through the whole canon will often show you in twenty minutes what an hour of speculation never would.

One story, distinct administrations

When I read the Bible I read one unfolding account with a single Author and a single Saviour, yet with genuinely different administrations along the way. God dealt with Adam differently from Abraham, with Israel under the Law differently from the Church under grace. Recognising that is not slicing the Bible up; it is refusing to flatten it.

This is why I do not lift the promises made to national Israel and quietly reassign them to my congregation. The covenants God made with Israel are His to keep with Israel, and the distinction between Israel and the Church protects the reliability of every promise God has ever made, including mine.

Practically, it means asking of every passage: to whom was this said, under what arrangement, and what carries across to me? The whole Bible is written for me. Not every part of it is written to me.

Read to obey, not to win

There is a way to read the Bible that leaves you better armed and no better. I have done it. You go looking for ammunition for the argument you had last week, and you come away with a sharper tongue and a colder heart. James warns about the man who looks in the mirror and forgets what he saw (James 1:22-25).

So I try to read with a question that has teeth: what does this ask of me today? Sometimes the answer is a sin to drop, sometimes a person to forgive, often just a truth to believe when my feelings are arguing otherwise. Reading with that question turns study into worship without any extra effort.

Pray your way through it as well. I rarely read the Bible without turning the paragraph back to God in prayer, which is one reason I keep saying that prayer and Scripture belong on the same page rather than in separate compartments.

The habits that make it stick

Choose a readable, reliable translation and stay with it long enough for the phrasing to lodge in your memory. I use the ESV in the pulpit and at my desk, though I have no quarrel with anyone who prefers another careful version, and I have set out my reasoning on which translation to use.

Read in books rather than in fragments. A verse a day from a calendar will not build anything; a chapter of Mark or a paragraph of Romans, read in order, will. Keep a notebook, write down the question you cannot answer, and come back to it in a month. Half of them answer themselves once you have read further.

And give it real time. Not heroic time, just honest time, at an hour when your mind is still your own. Meditation in the biblical sense is chewing rather than skimming, and biblical meditation is the difference between having read a chapter and having taken it in.

So, now what?

Start tomorrow, not next January. Open a Gospel, read a paragraph slowly, ask who is speaking and to whom, and ask what it requires of you before you close the book. That is the whole method, and everything else is refinement.

If you have tried to read the Bible before and stalled somewhere in Leviticus, forgive yourself and start again somewhere else. The aim is not to complete a circuit of the text once a year. The aim is to know God, and God is remarkably patient with slow readers.

What would change in your week if you assumed, every time you sat down, that the God who made you had something to say to you today?

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, ESV