Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11135. Spiritual dryness in Bible reading is something almost every believer I know has faced, and if you are in the middle of it now, I want to say plainly that it does not mean your faith has failed or that God has gone quiet forever. I have had seasons in ministry where opening…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11132. Study Bible reading and devotional reading are not competitors, though the way some people talk about them you would think you had to pick a side for life and defend it against the other camp. I hold both together, and I want to show you why that combination, rather than either one alone,…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11131. Devotional Bible reading gets a bad name in some circles, as if reading Scripture for nourishment rather than for analysis is somehow the lightweight cousin of proper study, the spiritual equivalent of skimming instead of really working. I want to push back on that a little. Devotional Bible reading, done well, is not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11130. Scripture memorisation is one of those spiritual disciplines that almost every believer agrees is valuable and almost no believer actually practises with any real consistency, myself included in seasons of my own ministry when other demands crowded it out. I want to make a case for why Scripture memorisation deserves a genuine place…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11127. Praying Scripture simply means taking a passage of the Bible and turning its own words into your own prayer to God, rather than composing every prayer entirely from your own vocabulary and immediate concerns. It sounds almost too simple to need explaining, and yet I find that most Christians who actually try praying…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11126. A prayer list is nothing more than a written record of the people and situations you intend to pray for, and I want to say plainly at the outset that Scripture never commands you to keep one. It is a practical tool, not a spiritual discipline in its own right, which means the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11125. Intercessory prayer is simply prayer offered on behalf of someone else rather than for yourself, and I have come to believe it is one of the most underrated disciplines in ordinary Christian life. We tend to think of prayer as a private conversation about our own needs, and it certainly includes that. But…
Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 11119. Kneeling in prayer is the picture most of us reach for when we imagine someone truly serious about talking to God, and I get asked fairly often whether it is something we ought to be doing rather than just something pious people in old paintings did. It is a fair question, and an…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11076 Daily Bible reading raises a question of quantity almost immediately, and the question is usually asked with a slightly guilty face. How long is long enough? Fifteen minutes? An hour? Is there a figure that would settle the matter and let me stop worrying about it? I understand why people want a number….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11075 A Bible reading plan is a tool, and like every tool it is only as good as the job you are asking it to do. People usually ask me which Bible reading plan they should use when what they really want to know is why the last three collapsed by the middle of…