Get Your Coffee. I Have Some Thoughts.

Laura Hirosawa presented me with a very good question: “[W]hat exactly is a genuine Bible study (yes, I am talking about myself here, too…).  Some of us grew up without great examples and never learned how to do something like that.  Any help?”

Laura, this is a question that has caused me to do a good deal of thinking.  I had already intended to write some sort of post about how to get into Bible study, but then you sent this question to me and got me thinking about another question, “What makes us think it’s so difficult and/or optional?”

This is a struggle I had to overcome and I think I came by the struggle honestly, even as I attended regular Bible classes and a Christian university.  What I would like to address in this post is the answer to the question about why we have such a difficult time studying the Bible.

Once we have named our enemy, we can properly get on to how to study the Bible.

I was born on a Sunday morning.  The very next Sunday morning found me sitting square on my mother’s lap in my first Church service.

As soon as I could hold my head proper on my neck, I was taken out of the general worship service and placed in a service more appropriate for small babies.  This signaled the end of my time worshiping with the general assembly and the beginning of my 20 plus years as a member of the smaller congregations within congregations dedicated to the younger members of the flock.

When I was in pre-school and elementary school ages, my Bible classes were comprised of a Bible story (usually Old Testament or Jesus), moral application, memory verse, and some sort of craft.  Also?  Snacks.  If we brought our Bible, we got a sticker by our name.  Even at 6, I saw the irony in being rewarded for bringing Bibles that we were immediately instructed to place on the floor under our chairs.

I learned that I should be nice to poor people, tell the truth, mind my parents, share my toys, and that it was important to listen to God.  I learned that Jesus died on the cross and that He did that to save me from my sins; sins being lapses in morality and morality being good, clean living.  In short: I had a very rough idea of how the Gospel worked and what the Bible was all about and I was in excellent shape to be taught how to put it all together through solid study of scripture.

In junior high and high school we once again sat in the auditorium with the grown-ups during worship services.  But we sat in our own little section where we could pass notes outside of our parents glare.  Our classes consisted primarily of moral instruction using scripture to back up the point.  Old Testament was generally skimmed, relying mostly on our elementary education, as we focused primarily on the New Testament.

What I learned in middle school and high school was mostly how important it was to be morally proper; morality being good, clean living.

It is important that you know that I am not trying to poo poo any of the fine men and women who put so much of their love for God into instructing me through those years.  What I am trying to do is pinpoint the reason I had such a hard time with Bible study for so long.  Sometimes it is not so much what the teacher teaches, but what the student learns.

While I was in high school, I did me some sinning.  I had softer names for it though; preferring to instead call sin, “mistakes”, “lapse in judgement”, or simply “part of being a teenager”.  No matter what I called it, it made me feel awful, guilty, and wrong in the sight of God.

Enter church camp, retreats, and really deep devotionals (we called them “devos” and they were usually followed by pizza or Frito pie).  These events spent time focusing on my righteousness before God because of grace.  It was a great chance for me to remember that I was not a sum of my incidences of sin and that God had a bigger plan for me.

I was full of a lot of basic ideas and certain truths but lacked the Bible study ability to know how to make sense of it all.  This made application of Christianity to my life very complicated and messy on a good day.

From the high school congregation, I joined the college aged congregation.  It was in this congregation that I learned mostly from my peers; either by their example or by their actual teaching.   Two of the biggest things that I got from that time was that I needed to be more active in showing the world the love of Jesus and that freedom in Christ meant that I could do just about anything I wanted with no guilt.

It also became apparent to me, while attending a Christian university, that Bible study was very difficult and required a great deal of intellectual know how to attempt.  It was during this time that I began to equate “PhD.” with “God’s select”.

I was a spiritual mess in college.

It was after I was in my twenties that God had mercy on me and exposed to me just how vital Bible study is to ALL believers in Christ.  I will be covering the “how to” very soon, but right now I would like to sum up why I believe that these church experiences left me apathetic about Bible study (and thus, atrophied in my relationship with God).

In Summary:

(Did you like that I made the summary all official looking?  I did that because this is a long post and I bet more than half of you scrolled to this point instead of reading it all.  That’s okay.  We’re still friends.  It’s why you get a summary.)

The Bible had been presented to me in my very early years as a series of old stories that taught lessons.  By the time I was old enough to read on my own, a cursory glance at a Bible told me that I knew all the stories and as such, all the lessons.  The only benefit I saw to Bible study was for the purpose of reinforcing prior knowledge.

As far as I was concerned, the Bible’s main intent was to teach me how to conduct myself as a child of God.  The New Testament encouraged me to act like Jesus in matters of service, community and forgiveness.  The Old Testament taught me to do what God says.  -  No matter what.  Seriously, dude.  Do. what. He. says.   What more was there to know?

I could relent to the notion that it was possible that the Bible contained something that I didn’t already know, but I figured that I could just keep trucking and wait for a scholar to find it for me.  If the occasion ever struck me to read the Bible, I would stick with the stories and singular verses I knew and I would read them through the unchanged filter of my presumptions about the Bible’s purpose.

I was wrong.

We talked before about the danger of UnBibledChristians.  There is no question that it is pandemic in the Church, and I hope you feel a lot desperate at the thought of a whole generation leading the Church with no Bible.

I’m working on an answer to Laura’s question of “How”, I just couldn’t get to it before wrestling briefly with why we don’t know how in the first place.