An excerpt from one of my seminars at New Word Alive.
Pause for a minute and ask yourself: what things most help you to enjoy the Bible, and why?
There are lots of reasons why Christians let the Bible stay closed. And therefore why they stay in spiritual infancy. One of the main ones is that they assume it is boring. And maybe people like me too often give the impression that it is boring or inaccessible. They get the idea that it is less emotionally engaging than a good worship time or less important than addressing the problems in their lives, or less interesting than the inducements of the world.
Whenever I see that a big warning bell goes off inside my head. All my antennae go up to see if that person has had to endure bad Bible studies, boring sermons and nobody helping them to see wonders and treasures in God’s word for their amazement. They can’t have been exposed to good stuff because good stuff opens up their hearts before the Living God, setting them on fire for Him and His truth.
Here is the shock: God is not glorified by us just reading the Bible. And we don’t necessarily grow or get helped just by reading the Bible. The devil knows the Bible – and he isn’t growing as a Christian! God is glorified when we are salivating over it and prizing its promises and pursuing him. God is greatly honoured when hearts and wills are changed by the Holy Spirit through the word to willingly fall in line with His will and purpose. God is magnified by lives that demonstrate that they delight in all that He is and all that He has done. That is how He is glorified and that is how He is honoured in our Bible reading. Therefore that is the goal of our Bible reading.
So my number one top tip for avoiding boring Bible reading is always this: worship over the Bible as you read it. Pray over it. We are meant to be exposing our hearts to God so that we exult in God. The whole point of reading the Bible and getting it into us is so that God gets worship in our lives and through us to the ends of the earth.
Bible study is about meeting God, exposing our hearts to him and him to our hearts. It is about exultation. Three steps, if you like: seeing what is there in the Word, meeting the God who reveals himself and adoring and obeying him. Understanding is for the purpose of adoration. When you sit down with the Bible for a daily devotion your aim is to make your heart happy in God and to bring every area of your life to him in homage and submission. To slightly misquote Don Carson, he purpose of reading the Bible is "Gospel-Everything".