Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11000. How should Christians pray? It is one of the first questions a new believer asks and one that mature believers never entirely stop asking. The disciples had watched Jesus pray and their request was not teach us about prayer but teach us to pray, which tells us something about where the difficulty actually…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11016. Memorising Scripture strikes many Christians as a relic, something belonging to Sunday school prizes and an age before search engines. Why store what you can look up in four seconds? I want to make the case that this is one of the habits worth recovering, and that the reasons for it are rather…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11002. Biblical fasting is the deliberate setting aside of food, for a set time, in order to give undivided attention to God. That is the whole of it, and everything else people attach to the practice is either application or invention. It is one of the least discussed and most misunderstood habits in Christian…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1127. A Bible reading plan started with such good intentions back in January. This would finally be the year you read through the whole thing. February arrived and you missed a few days. March, you tried to catch up and fell further behind. By April you had quietly given up. Sound familiar? You are…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1126. A Bible reading approach is one of those decisions that sounds small until you actually sit down with your Bible and wonder where to begin. Should you start at Genesis and read straight through to Revelation? Should you jump around to different books as a need or interest arises? Should you follow a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1123. Bible reading dryness is something every Christian I have ever pastored has experienced at some point, myself very much included. The pages seem flat. The words don’t come alive the way they used to, or the way you keep hearing they should. You know you are meant to want this, and yet most…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1095. Audio Bible listening has become one of the most common ways church members tell me they get through Scripture, usually confessed with a slightly apologetic tone, as though listening were a lesser cousin of proper reading. I want to put that apology to rest, because for most of human history, hearing the word…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1094. Bible apps have changed how most of us meet with Scripture each morning, and I think that change deserves more thought than a shrug and a download. I use a Bible app most days myself, so this is not a piece written from the safety of a leather-bound pulpit Bible looking down its…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1092. Meditating on Scripture is one of the oldest disciplines in the Christian life, and one of the most misunderstood, because the word “meditation” now carries associations that have very little to do with what the Bible means by it. When people hear “meditate”, many picture emptying the mind, sitting cross-legged, chasing a blank…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1090. Scripture and prayer belong together so closely that I have never known a season of neglecting one that did not, sooner or later, weaken the other. I say this from experience as much as from study. There have been stretches of ministry where my Bible reading thinned out, and without my quite noticing,…