Growing Your Relationship with God Through Reading the Bible: Pt. 5 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning. As you start your day, I am happy to start it with you this time each weekday morning and to help you start it by spending time with God. Well, growing closer to God is something that most of us want.

This week’s focus has been about that growing closer to God through spending time in His Word, the Bible. God has spoken. He’s still speaking, and whenever you open the Bible, you can hear from God.

Well, as we’ve talked this week about the significance of this, one of the most important practises you can put into your Christian life, we’ve been looking at lessons, how to make the Bible central in your life:

In 2 Timothy, the apostle Paul writes to Timothy about this. He says in verse 15 of chapter 2, Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.

So how can you handle the Bible rightly? How can you get out of it what’s in it?

How can you really see what’s in a Bible passage, you know, sometimes you hear someone teaching from a Bible passage and you think, whoa, I would never have noticed that.

So here are a few pointers for you for how you can get the most out of a Bible passage:

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1. As you open your Bible and you read a Bible passage, take your time, right? You’re not going to see those deep things through a hurried scan of a passage and then saying, oh, I really didn’t learn anything from that. No, take your time. In fact, read it slowly, and read it slowly several times. Thinking while you’re reading. What am I reading? What am I seeing? What is Paul or whoever wrote that passage saying? What does he want me to get out of this? What is in this passage, right? Take your time.

2. Second, look for themes. So often you find themes. I remember being asked to teach for an entire week, an hour each day, on Jesus’ final prayer in John’s chapter 17, where he prayed for the disciples right after he commissioned them. And I thought, what am I going to say? You know, am I going to walk through this passage, and I thought, OK, what, how could I kind of outline this passage, and that’s a great way to teach a passage. But as I kept reading the passage over and over slowly thinking, I started noticing there were repeated themes all through Jesus’ prayer. I noticed he used the word sent 7 times in that prayer, talking about his own having been sent by God and then his sending of the disciples as well, as he prayed for them. I noticed him talking about the world over and over and over in that, and the world’s reaction to the disciples and that he had sent them into the world. I saw him praying about all the Father had given him and that he’d passed all those things on to the disciples, and as I started seeing these themes, I ended up teaching that week each day on a different theme that was in the prayer. Well, I learned so much by noticing those themes.

3. Sometimes it’s progression. Psalm 1 says, how blessed is the man does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly nor stand in the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of the scoffers. Well, there’s a progression there from walking to standing to sitting, and that reflects a progression in your life when you start walking away from God. If your Bible is paper, mark it up, underline things, circle things, draw connections between themes. If you’re in a Bible app, highlight it, use different colours to track themes, make notes in it. Follow the cross references. Often if you’re in a digital Bible, you’ve got the little A, B, and C beside words, and if you click on it, it’ll take you to other verses that give you more understanding about that topic.

Ask yourself what is the one big thing this passage is communicating. Write it down. Then ask what is God saying to me personally, and take time to respond to him. Get the most you can out of a Bible passage.

I’m John North.

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