Living by the Book/Living by the Book Workbook Set (10 page)

Now look at all that we’ve observed in this exercise. Count them, and you’ll find that I’ve come up with at least thirty observations from Acts 1:8. (And this is only one verse. I haven’t studied a paragraph, or a chapter, or even the book of Acts—just one verse.) Yet each time I come back to it, I’ll see more. In fact, an assignment I give my seminary students is to list as many observations as they can from this single verse. So far they’ve come up with more than six hundred different ones.

Imagine what fun you could have with six hundred observations on this passage. Would you like to see Scripture with eyes like that? I’d like to help you gain that skill. I assure you, it’s the essential first step in Bible study method. Come with me into the next few chapters, and I’ll show you some ways to increase your powers of observation.

H
ave you ever closed your Bible in frustration, wondering why you don’t get more out of your study of the Scripture? Wendy told us that was her experience in
chapter 1
. Perhaps like her you’ve made an honest effort somewhere along the way to sit down and study God’s Word. You heard others talk about mining the riches of Scripture, and you wanted to grab a few nuggets for yourself. But after pouring a lot of time and energy into the process, things just didn’t pan out. The few specks of gold you did find weren’t worth the trouble. So in the end, you walked away from Bible study. Maybe others were profiting by it, but not you.

May I suggest two reasons you failed to hit pay dirt: First, you didn’t know how to read. Second, you didn’t know what to look for.

Now I don’t mean to insult you, but I do mean to instruct you. Our culture has made a radical shift in the last century from a word-based society of readers to an image-based society of viewers. The media of our time are movies, television, and the Internet, not books. As a result, unlike our forebears of just a few generations ago, we don’t know how to read. To a large extent, we have lost that art.

And yet the Bible is a book, which means it must be read to be understood and appreciated. We’ve got to recapture the skills of reading if we want to become effective Bible students. So in this and the next few chapters, I want to offer instruction on how to read. Then later I’ll talk about what you need to look for.

On eleven different occasions, Jesus said to the most well-read people of His time, “Have you never read?” Of course they had. They had spent all of their lives reading. But they didn’t
understand
what they had read.

They were like a student I once came across in the library, dead asleep in front of a book. I thought I’d have some fun with him, so I stuck my head right down next to his ear and said, “Boo!” He just about went through the ceiling.

“What in the world are you reading?” I asked him after he had rallied. “If it’s that exciting I want to be sure to assign it for one of my classes.”

He laughed.

“Is it funny?” I asked him.

“It’s tragic,” he replied.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I just realized I’m on page thirty-seven, and I don’t have the foggiest idea of what I’m reading.”

He’s right. That is a tragedy. If you don’t understand what you are reading, then you are not reading—you are wasting time. I’m afraid that many people come away from the Bible having basically wasted their time, because if their life depended on it, they couldn’t tell you what they read.

Is that the case for you? If so, let me give you three suggestions to help you to learn how to read:

There is a direct correlation between your ability to observe Scripture and your ability to read. So anything you can do to improve your reading skills will be a quantum leap in the direction of improving your observation skills as a student of the Bible.

Yet I’ve discovered that an increasing number of graduates from our nation’s high schools and colleges have a very hard time reading. In fact, I
asked one of my seminary classes, “If you graduate from the university and you can’t read, you can’t write, and you can’t think, what can you do?”

One wag hollered out, “Watch television.”

Sad, but true. Years ago one of my children was halfway through first grade before I realized they weren’t teaching him how to read. So I went to complain to the teacher.

“You don’t understand, Mr. Hendricks,” she told me. “The important thing is not that your child know how to read. The important thing is that he be happy.”

Against my better judgment, I decided to let it go for a while. But at the end of the year I discovered that my child was disgustingly happy, yet couldn’t read. In fact, I went back to the teacher and said, “Did it ever occur to you that children might be happier if they knew how to read?”

It cost me almost a month’s salary to put my child in a remedial reading program. But it was one of the best investments I ever made. He ended up reading better and faster than I can, which is very fast and reasonably well. That’s why I believe that one of the most important things you can do for people is help them in the process of reading.

Suppose you want to study the book of Ephesians. You happen to be a slow reader, so it takes you one-half hour to read the entire six chapters. But suppose you learned to read it in fifteen minutes and also to double your comprehension. Then for the same amount of time—one-half hour—you would increase your effectiveness fourfold. That’s worth the investment.

I’d like to recommend a book that will help you get started in this process. It’s a book that changed my education for the better, the classic by Mortimer J. Adler called
How to Read a Book.
Widely available in paperback, it’s a tool you can’t afford to be without. It will revolutionize your life.

You see, I graduated from high school with honors. I even received the English award. Then I went to college. Unfortunately, I’d never studied in high school. I’d never even taken home a book. So after arriving on campus, I took an aptitude test, and they put me in the lowest English section in the school. This, despite my English award. Pretty humiliating. (It turned out to be the best thing that could have happened, because they gave us remedial students the best professor in the place.)

All I did for the first six weeks was study. No dates. No athletics. Yet I still managed to flunk three courses. That has a way of getting your attention. I thought to myself,
Man, I’m never going to make it.

So I went to see my professor. He was very straightforward with me: “Howie, your problem is you don’t know how to read.” And he introduced me to Mortimer Adler’s book. I read it, and it transformed my study skills. In fact, it changed the course of my life. And that’s what it can do for you in terms of Bible study.

Adler covers practical skills such as how to classify books, how to discover an author’s intentions, how to outline a book, and how to find the key terms. He tells what the four questions are that every reader should ask, what the difference is between sentences and propositions, and what good books can do for you. He tells you how to read practical books, imaginative books, historical books, and more. He even includes a recommended reading list of the great books that are worth your while to read. In short, even though
How to Read a Book
is about books in general, it’s an outstanding resource for Bible study because it teaches you how to read.

Another good tool to have is Norman Lewis’
How to Read Better and Faster.
It’s really a workbook that promises to help you read 50 to 60 percent faster than you do now, and with better comprehension. Lewis has material on how to read for main ideas, how to think along with the author, and how to read with a questioning mind. He’s included forty-two work sessions with dozens of exercises to get you involved in the process. I highly recommend his book.

It is often said that familiarity breeds contempt. Well, when it comes to Bible study, something else familiarity breeds is ignorance. The moment you come to a passage of Scripture and say, “Oh, I know this one already,” you’re in deep trouble. Instead, you need to come to every text as if you’d never seen it before in your life. That’s quite a discipline. It involves cultivating a mind-set, an attitude toward the Word.

One thing that helps is to read the Bible in different versions. If you’ve been reading the same translation for years, try something fresh and contemporary for a change, such as J. B. Phillips’
New Testament in Modern English
or
Eugene Peterson’s
The Message.
If you really want to stretch yourself, check out the
Cotton Patch Version
of the gospels. On the other hand, if you are unfamiliar with the classic King James Version, you really owe it to yourself to read it. Reading an unfamiliar version jars your attention so that you see the Bible with a new set of eyes.