How to Have Profitable Bible Study
Many Christians realize that it’s important to read and study their Bibles, yet so few people actually spend the time doing it. If you were to compare the amount of time every week you spent watching TV/videos or on social media to the time you spent reading and studying the Bible, you would probably feel pretty shameful. Where you spend your time is indicative of what you care about.
Jesus spoke in Matthew 6:21:
“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” - Matthew 6:21
The apostle Paul wrote in Colossians:
“[1] If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. [2] Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. [3] For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” – Colossians 3:1-3
Where is your treasure? Where are your affections? Are they on things above, or the things of this world?
Further still, many that carve out time to read the Bible daily are often met with frustration and confusion because they don’t know how to study the Bible. It becomes nothing more than a book of catchy Christianese slogans and mantras or a checklist of religious piety. Met with frustration and a feeling they can’t get “practical instructions” from the Bible, many turn to just listening to prominent pastors, theologians, commentaries, or so-called “Christian literature” because they don’t trust they can study the Bible for themselves.
One of the biggest failures of the modern church is the lack of instruction on how to study the Bible for yourself. Unfortunately, many church leaders want to keep up the mirage that because they went to seminary and can read Greek at a second-grade level, you need to depend on them for spiritual growth and therefore pay their paychecks.
As the saying goes, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”
Unfortunately, many churches would rather hand out fish and collect a paycheck. We don’t have time to unpack all of the things wrong with the modern church in this article, but consider this: no one in the Bible went to seminary. The only thing you need to grow is faith in God’s perfectly preserved word. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God (Rom 10:17).
While the fellowship of the Body is a fundamental part of the Christian walk, we stand by grace through faith alone in Christ, not by any other person (Rom 14:4, 5:2). We’ll be judged for what we believe and did in Christ’s Body according to God’s word, not by what any person told us to believe or do.
The most important thing you can learn after salvation is how to study the Bible. Over the next four weeks, we will be going through various lessons on how to study the Bible for ourselves. On the fourth week, we will be concluding with an interactive Bible study workshop where we will apply the principles, tools, and skills learned over the previous three weeks together. While studying the Bible takes work, it can easily be learned. You can do it!
