OUR DAUGHTER ALICE LOVES BOOKS. SHE ALWAYS has. Alice loved looking at picture books when she was barely old enough to turn the page. At first she preferred simple touch-and-feel books. Now at four years old, she likes to have my wife, Emily, and me read more complicated storybooks to her.
One of the things I’ve tried to do from the start has been to read Alice a lot of Bible stories. We have a big Bible storybook that has stories from Genesis to Revelation. We also have smaller books that tell individual stories, like Noah and the Ark, Jonah and the Fish, or the Parable of the Lost Sheep. One of Alice’s favorites is a little storybook that tells about the birth of Jesus. She loves that one, and I’ve read it to her countless times.
One day when she was barely three years old, I was getting ready to take Alice to daycare on my way to work. She walked into the kitchen holding one of her baby dolls wrapped in a little blanket. “Look!” she said. “It’s the baby Jesus!”
“Oh,” I said, “I see.”
“Yeah!” she replied. “We’re gonna put him in the manger.”
I smiled at her. “That’s right, isn’t it? Because there’s no room for him in the inn.” Then I went off to hunt her socks and shoes. She stayed in the kitchen, cradling the baby doll and speaking softly to it.
I got back a few minutes later and said, “Come on, Alice. Time to go.”
She looked up at me sharply. “I’m Mary,” she said. “You’re Joseph.”
“Oh! Okay,” I said. “Then let’s go, Mary.”
I must have looked a little startled because when I picked her up she looked at me sympathetically and said, “I love you, Joseph.”
“I love you too, Mary,” I said.
During the ride into town, she kept calling me Joseph and herself Mary. When we got to her daycare, I asked her if she wanted to leave the baby Jesus in the car. But she wouldn’t have any of it. “No,” she said. “Maybe I can share Jesus with my friends, and then when they’re done they can give him back to me.”
After I dropped Alice off, my mind was racing and my heart was full. I walked back out to my car amazed that she was already internalizing the biblical story enough to bring it into her play-acting.
Since that day I’ve thought a lot about what it means to “search the Scriptures.” That’s a phrase from the Gospel of John. Jesus uses it to tell his audience that they should looked deeply into the biblical story to discover the truths about him. John Wesley also used the phrase to name what it means for us to interact with the Word of God as a means of grace.
When Emily and I started reading Bible stories to Alice, I’m not sure we had anything more in mind than a desire for her to become familiar with major characters in the Bible. What we discovered, though, was that she was being formed by those stories right from the beginning. She was being changed by what she heard. The Bible, without us even realizing it, was becoming a means of grace to her.
Think for a moment what it must have been like to grow up as a Hebrew in ancient times. At some point you would have realized how odd your life was compared to other people. Everybody around you just assumed that there were many gods. Yet your faith taught you that there was only one God—and that this God has a special love for Israel, even though Israel was never large or powerful. Then there was the law to follow. You would have been taught to embrace all kinds of rules regarding diet, ritual cleanliness, and the like that other people would find simply perplexing.
At some point I imagine you would have asked somebody the questions, “Hey, why in the world does our faith require so much of us? And why do we do things that make us so strange in the eyes of the world?”
The answer for these very understandable questions is found in the Bible itself. In chapter 6 of Deuteronomy, Moses explains to the people he’s leading through the wilderness that it’s going to be important for them to tell their children the story of their faith.
Look, Moses says to the parents, there’s going to come a time when your children approach you with questions. They’re going to want to know why we have all these strange laws and rituals.
Like any parent, Moses knows that it won’t be enough to just tell the kids what to do. They’re going to want reasons. So he continues. When they ask you about all these things, you tell them this: we were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt. And the LORD brought us out of there with a mighty hand. He brought us out of Egypt so that he could bring us into the Promised Land. Everything we do now—every single one of these laws and rituals—is meant to remind us of God’s salvation and our identity as God’s people. We have a story with God, and every one of his commands reminds us of that!
“He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna . . . in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.”
—Deuteronomy 8:3 NRSV
Notice the idea that Moses is trying to get across: God’s Word is meant to work goodness in your life. Everything that God has given to us in Holy Scripture is intended to be a means of grace to us. That’s why he tells the Hebrews to pass on all the words he has given them: “You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Deut. 6:6–7).
Moses is the first great prophet of the Old Testament. He speaks the word of God, to give spiritual nourishment to God’s people. This is what all the subsequent prophets do as well—Isaiah and Jeremiah, Amos and Micah—as they are sent by the Lord to guide Israel toward faithfulness. The prophets are the mouthpieces of God’s word to his people.
When we turn to the New Testament, we find Jesus speaking about the power of the Scriptures as well. Once when Jesus was in Jerusalem teaching, he confronted his audience with a stark claim about the Bible’s message. “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life,” Jesus says to them, “And it is they that bear witness about me.” Then he adds, “Yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:39–40).1
It’s a profound moment in the Gospels. Christ calls his listeners (then and now) to read the whole of the Bible as pointing to himself. All that God is doing, all that Israel and the church have been struggling toward, all that the promise of salvation contains—these are all bound up in the life of Jesus Christ. He isn’t trying to take authority away from the Scriptures. Far from it. He’s actually giving the Scriptures even more authority by claiming that they are pointing to the very source of life and salvation. Himself.
Jesus’ teaching is important if we want to understand how the Word of God is present in the words of the Bible. It isn’t the ink and paper that makes the difference. Rather, it is the presence of God’s message within the Bible that is important. When the apostle Paul wrote to his assistant Timothy about the Scriptures, he said that they are “breathed out by God” and useful “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). Paul was talking about the teaching contained within Scripture, the teaching of God’s good news about the Lord Jesus Christ. God has spoken to us in the person of Jesus Christ, and God still speaks through the revelation of his word in the Bible.
This means that to understand the power of Holy Scripture, we must take it seriously in our study and devotion. Immerse ourselves in it. Become familiar with it. Commit ourselves to reading it with purpose. Learning a verse here and there, or half paying attention during the Sunday sermon in a casual, as-you-feel-like-it-sort-of-way is not going to get you very far. What we need is to embrace the Scripture as the very thing that points us to Christ. As Jesus tells us, by searching the Scriptures we can come to him and find true life!
I find it interesting that John Wesley never says, “The Bible is a means of grace.” Instead, he says that the means of grace is “searching the Scriptures.” Is there a difference?
Yes there is a difference, actually. The difference has to do with how something can be a means of grace for us. Objects are not means of grace. They are just things. If we focus on the things themselves, we are likely to make idols out of them. Take the Bible, for example. You can walk around with it under your arm every day of your life, but it won’t do you any good unless you actually open and read it. Stick it under your pillow at night and sleep on it for forty years and all you’ll get is a chronically sore neck. For the word of God that is in Scripture to become a means of grace for us, we have to receive it actively. The means of grace are really about how certain objects and practices are taken up in an active manner in the spiritual life. We must engage them with our minds and our hearts.
When Wesley describes the major approaches to searching the Scriptures, he uses the words reading, hearing, and meditating. He explains what he means like this:
Reading: Constantly, some part of every day? Regularly, all the Bible in order? . . . Seriously, with prayer before and after? Fruitfully, immediately practicing what you learn there?
Hearing: Every morning? Carefully; with prayer before, at, after? Immediately putting into practice: Have you a New Testament always about you?
Meditating: At set times? By any rule?2
Wesley’s point is that a variety of ways exist for how we can embrace the Word of God. And we can read the Bible on our own in study and devotional contexts. In fact, this is probably the best foundation for how to place God’s Word at the center of your life. It must be read daily with an approach that allows each day’s reading to build off of the one before it.3
One of the things we find in Wesley’s teaching on how the Scriptures can be a means of grace in our lives is a deep optimism about the power of God’s Word to affect us in every stage of our lives. He claims that searching the Scriptures is “a means of conveying the grace of God to all, whether unbelievers . . . or believers.”4 The Scriptures can be a means of grace to unbelievers because they contain the good news itself. They serve as the vessel for God’s Word— the way that the Christian message of faith and forgiveness gets communicated. For those who already believe, scriptural teaching maintains its power to transform human life. When we receive forgiveness we experience a new birth, but that rebirth is but the first step toward our completion in Christ. So we are called to search the Scriptures throughout our lives, as God continues to renew us in ever-greater ways.
Wesley’s great concern in how he understands the Bible to function as a means of grace is always that we would see the connection between Spirit and word. He says that “all outward means whatever, if separate from the Spirit of God, cannot profit at all, cannot conduce in any degree either to the knowledge or love of God.”5 So there is no power in the letter of the text itself, except the power that comes by the Holy Spirit. Yet, the Holy Spirit will also never disagree with anything in the word of Scripture. So the key to searching the Scriptures faithfully is in trusting God’s promise to give us the Spirit as our guide and counselor. We can trust in the means of grace because we trust that God will meet us in the means as he has promised to do.6
We recently began a new Bible study at my church. I’m leading a group of about twenty people through the Gospel of Luke. We’re going to take four months to work through Luke from start to finish, reading the entire book slowly and carefully.
During our first meeting, I asked the people who joined what they hoped to get out of the study.
The answers told me a lot about how believers hunger for the sustenance of God’s Word. Here are some of their responses:
• “I want to learn more about God’s Word.”
• “For a closer, more personal relationship with Jesus Christ.”
• “I am interested to know more about the content of the Bible.”
• “I like the idea of the benefits of a group Bible study. We can learn more from one another’s perspectives on the biblical material. And we can also benefit spiritually from the relationships that will form in our group.”
• “To learn the ways of Jesus.”
I think these are all wonderful reasons to commit to searching the Scriptures. The common element that I see in all of those responses is this: they all desire to embrace Holy Scripture as a means of grace.
Perhaps the most important point to realize about taking our study of the Bible more seriously is that we don’t study the Bible in order to master it. We study the Bible so that it might master us. That means that the first thing we need to do in approaching the Scriptures is to come with the right attitude—a willingness to humble ourselves, open our hearts and minds to Christ Jesus, and ask that the Holy Spirit be present in the midst of our study.
Remember the apostle Paul’s description of the nature of the Scriptures: “breathed out by God.” The Bible’s power is a spiritual power, meaning that it comes from the presence of the Holy Spirit working through it. In order for that power to transform us within, we need to set aside all our presuppositions and claims and agenda items so that a space is made for the Spirit to do what the Spirit will. Prayer is a central part of taking on that attitude. So in other words, the first step in adopting the discipline of searching the Scriptures as a means of grace is humility.
When we move from preparation to practice, we should recognize that it is possible to search the Scriptures in a number of different ways. The Wesleyan approach to this calls our attention to the three elements of reading, hearing, and meditating on Scripture. I think of these three elements as connected to three common discipleship activities:
1. Reading . . . connected to . . . personal study
2. Hearing . . . connected to . . . worship (sermons) and group Bible study
3. Meditating . . . connected to . . . spiritual contemplation
When we put personal study, worship and fellowship with others, and spiritual contemplation together, we have the framework for how to embrace the Bible as a means of grace in every part of our spiritual lives.
We don’t study the Bible in order to master it. We study the Bible so that it might master us.
The first part of searching the Scriptures involves personally opening your Bible and reading it on a regular basis. This is easy to understand, but for many people it can also be intimidating.
The word “Bible” means “book,” but the Bible is actually a collection of sixty-six books, written down over the course of many centuries and consisting of a lot of different types of literature. It has history, genealogy, and chronicle. It has poetry, prophecy, and proverbs. There are letters and gospels and apocalyptic visions. Many of the place names sound strange, and the names of people can be even stranger. The study Bible on my desk right now runs to more than 2,700 pages! It’s no wonder that a common experience of pastors is for their church members to admit to them that they find the Bible hard to understand and more than a little daunting.
When I started to read the Bible seriously for the first time, it was important for me to find ways to make it seem more manageable. Devotional guides can do that, and Bible commentaries do it at a more advanced level. While a devotional guide often focuses on a topical approach to Bible study, I think it is also important for people to get a sense of the flow and scope of whole books of the Bible. The Scriptures weren’t written in little two- or three-verse chunks, after all. They were written as whole books. For me, that means reading them as whole books is the best way to get a sense of the message contained within them. Fortunately, there are plenty of study materials available to guide a reader through the Bible in a manageable way.7 The key to personal Bible study beyond finding a good study resource, of course, is committing to a daily discipline.
The second part of searching the Scriptures has to do with hearing them spoken and described by other people. The most common form of hearing the Scriptures for most Christians is through a sermon or homily during Sunday worship. I think that this form of searching has to be a cornerstone of any Christian’s engagement with the Bible. Most preachers work very hard on their sermons in ways that are not always obvious to a congregation. They read the Scripture passage they will be preaching upon over and over again. They pray about it. And they consult biblical commentaries by scholars and pastors who offer their interpretations on it. Then they reflect on how to put the message of that Scripture passage in a relatable context, including illustrations that help to shed light on aspects of the biblical message. So if you really focus on what a preacher is saying in the context of a sermon, you are likely to receive spiritual food that can sustain you throughout the week.
Another way we can search the Scriptures by hearing them is through participating in a group Bible study. When we do that, we have the advantage of listening to the reflections and interpretations of other people who have read and prayed about the same Scriptures we have been studying. My own primary work at present is a teaching ministry, which I do both in seminary and church contexts. I love teaching the Bible in a group study format at my church because of the tremendous gift I receive from all the people in the Bible study. Personal Bible reading is very important, but so is searching the Scriptures in fellowship with other Christians. (In fact, I believe we are much more likely to stick to our personal discipline of daily reading when we are also involved in a group Bible study.)
The third way we can search the Scriptures is through meditating upon them. This may be the least obvious approach to many people, but it can also be among the most fruitful. How you go about meditating upon Scripture can be understood in different ways. For many people, it will be through pondering a preacher’s message during the Sunday sermon. Others like to focus on memory verses, which they will commit to mind and then repeat in a reflective manner. I do this sometimes when I am mowing the lawn or running on the treadmill. One of my favorite passages for meditation is Proverbs 3:5–6, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and rely not on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths” (NRSV). I have also known people who find benefit in reading the Scripture in a meditative manner. They will select a Scripture passage and then read it slowly, again and again, often stopping to offer a prayer for God to illumine the mind and heart to understand the Scripture’s meaning more fully. By reading in a contemplative way, we are reminded that engaging the Bible is not just about learning its content. It is instead about sitting with God’s Word, allowing time for the Spirit to meet us there. In our present culture and its unlimited distractions, shutting off all our devices and opening up the Bible can be one of the most important things we can do.