Why Do You Read the Bible?

Reading the Bible is generally considered a good thing. To some it is the barometer of being a good Christian, a handy metric when you’re not sure if your Christian life is “meeting the standard”. To others, reading scripture is a tangible trump in any spiritual competition. It could be acquiring wisdom or just frantic scramble to keep up with a schedule. Budding theologians are quick to discuss their personal “hermeneutical preferences” and whip schools of thought out of their holsters like six-shooters. Christians, and non-Christians, read the Bible for a number of reasons, some of them rational, many of them good. In the midst of all this, the Bible also takes a position on its own function.

Regenerating us

Having been regenerated not of corruptible seed but of incorruptible, through the living and abiding word of God. –1 Peter 1:23

Peter has a number of choice things to say about the Holy Scriptures. The word, and its relation to the average, work-a-day believer, forms a strong undercurrent in his two epistles. He identifies it as the means by which God has begotten us. Immediately the word becomes a matter of life, not knowledge. The believer’s relationship to the word is one of a begotten to a begetter, not a student to a tome or a bludgeoner to his bludgeon.

Peter goes on to say that the word of the Lord being the means of our regeneration gives us great encouragement, for “the word of the Lord abides forever.” Our foundational experience of faith is based not on the transient word of man but on the eternal word of the Lord.

Causing us to grow

As newborn babes, long for the guileless milk of the word in order that by it you may grow unto salvation, if you have tasted that the Lord is good. –1 Peter 2:2-3

From our conversion, the word is the real food for our Christian life. While this point is not new among us, it bears repeating. I particularly like Peter’s presentation here, with the end goal in view: “grow unto salvation”.

Now hold on, we got saved in 1:23, what’s this “unto salvation” bit?

Well, you got born one day didn’t you, and thankfully that wasn’t the end of the story, you proceeded to grow unto the point of college at the University of Texas, which does not admit infants.

In the same way, the spiritual life that was born in us at regeneration needs to grow and mature. Again, our solution is the word. Eventually the Lord will do what Peter says in 5:10: “perfect, establish, strengthen, and ground” us. The means is not outward correction, improvement, or acquiring a critical mass of knowledge—we have to eat. In our physical life there is no substitute for caloric intake; in our spiritual life there is no substitute for biblical intake.

Praying the Bible

The Bible must become real food to us. The best way for us to convert physical paper and print into the “spirit and life” the Lord mentions in John 6:63 is prayer. We should bookend our reading with prayer, asking the Lord to nourish us as we read and thanking Him for speaking to us. We can be saved from whatever our view of the Bible is and brought into the Bible’s view.

Practically, we at Christian Students are on a Bible reading schedule. In a real sense, to be people of the word should not be one of our activities, but what defines us. My prayer for myself, and for our club, is that we would be people who take the word of God as life, not as a box to check off our list, a weapon in our mental arsenal, or even the most interesting of all our class reading. What God has spoken is the very fuel of our Christian life. Today the schedule says 1 Peter 5-2 Peter 1. I encourage you to read it, but I encourage you to read any passage. In whatever you read, ask the Lord sincerely to make this word spirit and life to you, and that it would cause you to grow unto salvation.

By: D. Fulton