“I don’t read the Bible enough. I should read it more.” This oft-repeated confession by Christians to fellow believers is as ubiquitous an admission as “I have not been eating well, and I should work out more.”
That we should read the Bible is rarely questioned. Why we should read it is also fairly well-established.1
What we rarely do is examine why we, as confessing Christians, don’t read the Bible despite saying that we should. In my years of lay and vocational ministry, I’ve known the acceptable answers to this question and what we perceive to be “unacceptable” answers.
While time constraints are the most “acceptable” excuse, they don’t hold up under scrutiny and serve as the Bible-reading equivalent of “the dog ate my homework.”2 The Bible is readily accessible for the 91% of Americans who own smartphones, and with just 12 minutes a day, we can read it in a year.3 Making time to read the Bible is more than doable for most of us who claim to have no time.
The real reasons we don’t read the Bible go unexamined because we consider them unacceptable. The Bible feels boring and like a waste of time. I’ve had this confirmed by the college students to whom I minister. It’s boring for those who have grown up in Sunday School and feel they already know all the stories and key verses and that there’s nothing new to learn. It feels like a waste of time for those who find the Bible difficult to understand.
Most of us struggle with a combination of both: we skim familiar passages, like the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000, because it is repeated in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and we avoid more obscure parts because they’re too hard to grasp. As a result, we fail to be shaped by the well-known and the unfamiliar sections of the Bible.
On the heart level, the reason we struggle to want to read the Bible is common to all fallen humanity. The effect of sin has caused a “hardness of heart,” which makes us like sheep that are
prone to stray and turn to our own way (Ephesians 4:18; Isaiah 53:6). This spiritual problem will require spiritual assistance, and we ought to pray for ourselves and for others the same prayer that Paul prayed for the Ephesians: that God may grant us to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in our inner being, so that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith (Ephesians 3:16-17).
However, on the pragmatic level, some obstacles can be cleared away by addressing some of our common misunderstandings regarding the Bible’s purpose and form, and how we ought to approach reading it.
Misunderstanding #1: The Bible Is To Be Applied
Correction: The Bible Is To Be Received And Known As A Person
Most sermons and Bible teachings tend to approach Scripture through a medical paradigm. The text is seen as offering a diagnosis and remedy for a specific problem within the congregation, and the sermon concludes with various prescriptions or applications to address the symptoms of that problem. However, Jesus encourages us to engage with Scripture through an agricultural paradigm, where the Word of God is compared to a seed that must be received (Matthew 13:1-23; Mark 4:1-20; Luke 8:4-15).
This seed metaphor is a corrective to the over-emphasis on direct application. Seeds do not simply “apply” themselves immediately but produce fruit of understanding, wisdom, and obedience over time. Much of the Bible is applied to our lives insofar as it shapes us as followers of Christ, and our thoughts and behaviors then flow out of our transformed hearts and minds.
The Apostle John offers a further corrective when he begins his gospel with “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Here, the Word of God is personified as the Son of God, emphasizing that we should approach the Scriptures relationally. We would never meet with our friends or loved ones solely to figure out how to use them and what instructions we might receive from them. We should not approach Scripture merely to extract practical lessons. Rather, we should come to the Bible seeking to know and encounter the person of Jesus Christ, deepening our relationship with him as we grow in understanding.
Misunderstanding #2: The Bible Is a Collection of Isolated Teachings
Correction: The Bible Is One Unified Story
This misunderstanding is caused by how we are trained to read the Bible by the vast majority of the books in a Christian bookstore, and in turn it causes greater misunderstanding. Verse-of-the-day devotionals and topical studies all approach the Bible more like an anthology or reference book than a narrative.
In the introduction to their book “The Drama of Scripture,” Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen write, “The Bible is not a mere jumble of history, poetry, lessons in morality and theology, comforting promises, guiding principles, and commands; instead it is fundamentally coherent. Every part of the Bible—each event, book, character, command, prophecy, and poem—must be understood in the context of the one storyline.”4
There will certainly be occasions and seasons that call for studying the Bible for specific insights or taking in Scripture in bite-size pieces. But it is essential that we read the parts in light of the whole. For that reason, I usually dissuade students who are not yet familiar with the Bible from devotionals and topical studies. Doing so would be analogous to engaging with a series like “Harry Potter” and starting by only reading all of Voldemort’s speeches or watching random scenes from the movies.
It makes more sense to first experience the entire story and then revisit certain key moments for deeper reflection. Many people’s lack of knowledge of the whole sweep of Scripture is also why I am partial to studying a book in its entirety over a single semester rather than conducting topical studies.
Misunderstanding #3: The Bible Should Be Instantly Understandable
Correction: The Bible Is An Ancient, Complex Text Requiring Effort, Study, and Reliance On The Holy Spirit For Understanding
The doctrine of the perspicuity (clarity) of Scripture arose during the Reformation to counter the medieval Roman Catholic belief that Scripture could only be correctly interpreted by popes and church councils. Reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin believed that the fundamental teachings of the Bible, which guide people to eternal life through faith in Christ, are clear and understandable for everyone. They emphasized that with the help of the Holy Spirit, anyone can grasp these teachings without needing an expert interpreter from the church.
However, we have exaggerated the doctrine to expect that all of Scripture should be easy to grasp on a first reading. This expectation has led to readers feeling frustration and shame when they inevitably encounter inscrutable parts of the Bible due to the text’s depth and complexity.
An apt metaphor of uncertain origin illustrates this dual aspect of Scripture’s clarity: Scripture is like an ocean in that the essentials of salvation are like shallow waters—easily accessible to all who wade in—but the deeper truths are like the ocean depths– requiring effort, tools, and guidance to explore fully.
Each time that I have begun a Bible study or a talk at a conference with the acknowledgment that Scripture is hard to understand, students and participants relax a bit and become more willing to engage with the text. Setting their expectations appropriately anticipates their frustration and invites their questioning and participation.
For students new to my Bible studies, I often begin by reading them a headline from that week’s news and asking them to tell me what the headline means. For example, when I first started this exercise in 2016, there was a headline that read, “Hillary Hammers Trump on Taxes.” The freshmen stared at me, incredulous that I did not understand the simple headline. I proceeded to ask more specific questions like: Who is Hillary? Who is Trump? What are taxes? As they answered these questions, I continued asking what they meant by their answers: What is a presidential candidate? What is an election? How is it run? What is the United States? Did Hillary take a hammer to Trump’s head?
Usually halfway through the exercise, students begin to understand what I am getting at: So much contextual knowledge is taken for granted for us to make meaning out of a simple contemporary headline. Archaeologists who find our news stories 2,000 years from now would have to reconstruct so much in order to reach an accurate understanding of what the journalist meant. And no, it never can mean in the future what it never could have meant now. If the writer of the headline never meant that Hillary took a hammer to Trump’s head, then it cannot mean that 2,000 years from now either.
Bible reading requires effort for several reasons. First, there is the cultural and historical distance between the world of the Bible and our own. The Bible was written in ancient languages and within high-context cultures vastly different from the modern world, so understanding the context of the original audience is crucial. Second, the literary variety found within the Bible presents another challenge. The Bible is composed of many genres—such as poetry, prophecy, narrative, and discourse—each requiring a different approach to interpretation.
Lastly, the Bible as the self-revelation of the trinitarian God means that it addresses profound theological truths, aspects of which we can only apprehend, not fully comprehend. The Scriptures reveal the nature of God, the human condition, and the story of redemption in ways that stretch our understanding and invite us into deeper reflection. Given these challenges, understanding the Bible takes effort and intentionality.
Be patient, persistent, and prayerful! Don’t expect to understand everything immediately. The Bible is rich with layers of meaning that require time, study, and patience. Continue reading regularly, trusting that God will reveal more as you grow in your understanding.
Ava Ligh serves as campus staff for Reformed University Fellowship at Columbia University in New York City.
1 We read because Scripture is God’s self-revelation, illuminating who He is, what He requires, and how He saves. Without it, we remain in the dark about God’s nature and our own condition. General revelation through creation confirms our guilt before a holy God (Romans 1:21), but special revelation in Scripture provides the remedy, offering eternal life through faith in Christ (Psalm 119:105; John 5:24; 2 Timothy 3:16).
2 According to a survey done by Crossway in 2018, the top barrier to Bible reading for 6000 of its readers was “I don’t feel like I have enough time.” Crossway, Infographic: How Do You Read the Bible?, Crossway, last modified October 4, 2023, https://www.crossway.org/articles/infographic-how-do-you-read-the-bible/
3 Pew Research Center, “Mobile Fact Sheet,” Pew Research Center, last modified June 12, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/#:~:text=The%20vast%20majority%20of%20Americans,sm artphone%20ownership%20conducted%20in%202011; Crossway, Infographic: You Can Read More of the Bible Than You Think, Crossway, last modified October 4, 2023, https://www.crossway.org/articles/infographic-you-can-read-more-of-the-bible-than-you-think/
4 Craig G. Bartholomew and Michael W. Goheen, The Drama of Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 14.