If you’ve ever handed someone a Bible and watched their eyes glaze over, or picked one up yourself and wondered where to start, this episode is for you. Pastor Jim Butler and Pastor Cameron Porter answer one of the most practical questions a new or curious reader can ask: where does a beginner begin? The answer covers what to read, how to read it, why prayer matters more than you’d think, and what your phone is doing to your ability to sit with the Word.
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Transcript
Summary Keywords: Bible reading, unbeliever, believer, 10 Commandments, Gospels, prayerful study, spiritual transformation, Old Testament, New Testament, historical context, meditation, social media, attention span, church context, divine author
Speakers: Wim Kerkhoff, Pastor Jim Butler, Pastor Cam Porter
Where Do You Even Start?
Wim Kerkhoff (0:07): I love this question: what’s the best way for a beginner to start reading Scripture? And I think there’s two parts to that. One is, they’re not a believer yet, but coming to an awareness of God and sin. They’re hearing the gospel, maybe, but not saved yet. And then there are believers. I’d say they ran into a Ray Comfort on the street and said, “Wow, yeah, I believe.” They respond, but they haven’t read their Bible yet. So where do you start? Genesis? Matthew? John?
Open It and Read: For Both Unbeliever and Believer
Pastor Jim Butler (0:38): Well, for both unbeliever and believer, and this is going to sound overly simplistic, open it and start reading. I see this with believers sometimes: “I’m not reading my Bible like I should.” Then open it and read it. There comes a point in time in everybody’s life where we’ve got to get our act together. Somebody might put on extra weight, look at themselves in the mirror, and say, “I need to work out, I need to lose weight, I need to clean up my diet. I’ll do that next year.” No, do it right now. So for every time somebody says, “I know I should read the Bible but I don’t,” just open it and read it.
For the unbeliever, running through the 10 Commandments is a good thing. I’m not endorsing every jot and tittle of Ray Comfort’s practice, but the thing I appreciate about it is that through the law comes the knowledge of sin, and through the knowledge of sin, we recognize our need for the Savior. So for an unbeliever to read the 10 Commandments, to understand what God speaks at Sinai and repeats on the plains of Moab, if an unbeliever is committing adultery or theft or murder, how do you know your sin and misery? The law of God tells me so.
And then go to the Gospels. Learn who Jesus is, and learn what Jesus did, because that’s the answer to the condemnation that comes from reading the law of God. How do I know my sin and misery? The law of God tells me so. How do I know grace and mercy? What Christ accomplished on the cross.
For New Believers: Start with Mark
For a believer new to Bible reading, I know the typical response is “read the Gospel of John.” We just finished going through John in our Sunday morning services, and it’s glorious, but I won’t pretend there isn’t tough stuff in there. We spent a lot of time on the Trinity, and that can be hard going for a new reader.
I think Mark is good. Mark is 16 chapters, not super long, and it’s carried by the word “immediately.” Immediately, immediately, immediately. Here is who Jesus is, and here is what Jesus does. It’s a great presentation of Jesus as the Messiah who came to save his people from their sins.
Don’t Overreach: Take It One Bite at a Time
There’s an old adage: how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Sometimes people take on too much, get too ambitious, and burn out. “I’m going to read my Bible from Genesis to Revelation.” They get to Leviticus and they’re done.
Be modest in your ambitions. Give yourself 10 or 15 minutes, a chapter, and read, knowing you’re not going to get everything. This is lifelong transformation by the renewing of your mind. It won’t happen overnight.
Familiarity with the structure helps too. There’s an Old Testament and a New Testament. The focal point of the Old Covenant was the people of Israel. The focal point of the New Covenant is the true Israel, Jesus Christ, and the church in union with him. A basic timeline, some major events, some of the kings and prophets, that context only benefits you. So: get a Bible and read.
Pray as You Read
Wim Kerkhoff (5:29): And pray as well, right? Just for the spiritual.
Pastor Jim Butler (5:33): Spurgeon had a good observation on that. If I were reading a book written by my next-door neighbor and came across something confusing, I’d walk next door and ask, “What do you mean here?” Prayerful study of Scripture is useful, not only for illumination by the power of the Holy Spirit, but to help us kill pride. Prayerless study can result in proud, arrogant people who are puffed up. Paul says, “Knowledge puffs up.” A prayerless acquisition of doctrine and theology can produce pride.
Prayer keeps us humble. It keeps us dependent, constantly imploring God to help us understand, not so we can best everybody in Facebook debates, but so we can be faithful to God.
Ezra set his heart to study the law, to do the law, and then to teach it. Ezra 7:10. That’s a great model. Study it, do it, then teach. I think pastors can fall into the error of studying to preach rather than studying to do and then preaching. Lloyd-Jones said it well: you’re not searching Scripture first and foremost for sermons, you’re searching Scripture first and foremost for food. Get your own nourishment first. Then you’ll be positioned to teach.
Reading with the Sense of the Divine Author
Pastor Cam Porter (8:28): I think one of the things in answering “how to start reading the Bible” is how we are to read the words of the Bible when we approach the text. It’s important for all believers to understand that we’re not attending to the nakedness of the words, but to the sense intended by the Divine Author.
So when we come across a passage like Christ saying, “The Father is greater than I,” are we to understand that in the bare nakedness of those words? That Jesus, the Son of God, is somehow less than the Father? Or do we take the sense of the Scriptures as a whole, as understood by the church, and see that Christ is speaking according to his assumed humanity, because God cannot be less than God?
It goes back to Jim’s comment about the believer as an island unto himself with the Word and the Spirit. That’s not how the Bible ought to be read. The Bible ought to be read within the blessed and safe confines of the reality that Christ promised to build his church, to send his Spirit to equip the church, and that in his ascended glory, he gave gifts to the church, men for the preaching and teaching of the Word, to provide the reader with that safe, biblical context within which to read.
Social Media and the Attention Span Problem
Wim Kerkhoff (10:30): A practical thing that came to mind for me: if you look at the last 10 years with social media, it’s trashed most people’s ability to read. I found that myself. We’re on our phones, scrolling, bombarded with information we can’t absorb or read. I just started doing in the morning: no Bible, no phone. Time alone, prayer, meditation, journaling, and then start looking at messages. That’s been helpful. Otherwise we just can’t get into the text. It just bounces off.
Pastor Cam Porter (11:04): We’re conditioning ourselves to only have the attention span for 144 characters. We open to a Psalm and stop after verses one to four because we want to scroll to something else. Compartmentalizing our lives, staying away from lawful things whose unlawful use can deter us from a good understanding of the Word, slowing down, reading it, meditating upon it.
Not only are we to read the Word. David meditated upon the law, upon the revelation of God. We’re to read it, hide it in our hearts, and meditate on its truths to draw out the glorious implications and the meaning that God intended by revealing himself in it.
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