To begin a mastery of the Bible, you must read the Bible. This may seem self-evident to some, but to others who have never developed the habit, it is groundbreaking. Some Christians do not read the Bible, or they only read snippets that are attached to daily devotionals. This will not get you where you want to go. You must begin to read the Bible widely.
It is only by covering a lot of territory in Scripture that you gain a breadth of knowledge. If you never read the Old Testament, you will never have a general knowledge of it. If you only read the Gospels, or the Epistles, you will never have a basic grasp of the other sections of the Bible. As a result, your life will be untouched by important truth, plus your ability to connect the dots from various different Scripture passages — a critical component of a mature Christian experience — will be limited.
The New Testament tells us that many stories in the Old Testament were "written for our instruction, upon whom the ends of the ages have come" (1 Corinthians 10:11). If we never read those Old Testament stories, we will never gain the insight, the power, or the freedom that become ours when we do.
The good news is that there is a simple way to read for breadth of knowledge. If you read the Bible for five minutes a day, you will read the Bible over thirty hours a year! (5 minutes × 365 days = 1,825 minutes divided by 60 minutes per hour = 30.4 hours!)
Think of it!! Thirty hours a year! Perhaps no other discipline will provide a breadth of Bible knowledge more easily. If you want to master the Word so well that the Word masters you, begin by reading it.
Very early in my Christian experience, I was challenged to read the Bible at least five minutes a day. I took that challenge, and have not missed my daily time in God's Word in over forty years. As a result, I have read the Bible for a couple thousand hours! And it was all done at the manageable pace of five minutes a day. There is no easier way I could have gained and maintained the breadth of knowledge of Scripture than by taking this simple step. I urge you to take this first step, too.
Pick a readable translation. To begin with, pick a translation that is easy for you to read. Many Christians have a New International Version of the Bible, which is a fairly readable translation. I study out of the New American Standard Bible, which is a good study Bible because the translation is very literal. However, for those times of just reading for the story and flow, and breadth of knowledge, I have found that more conversational translations sometimes allow the Bible to come alive in a way that the NASB does not. I experimented for years with more conversational Bibles and, frankly, was disappointed with them for two reasons. First, they often interpret unclear passages for you to make it more readable, and I didn't always agree with the translators' interpretation. Second, in their attempt to be conversational, they often dumb down the language so that it is unsatisfying to read.
However, I have found The New Living Translation to be an effective reading Bible. This version began as a paraphrase that author and publisher Ken Taylor wrote to help his young children understand the Bible better. In a paraphrase, you start with an English Bible and reword it to make it easier to understand. But in 1995, Taylor commissioned a team of translation experts to go back to the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts and change whatever needed to be changed in order to bring the version up to the level of a translation. In my opinion, they did a commendable job.
All Bible versions have strengths and weaknesses.
Continue reading on the blog…
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