Slideshow image

Every earnest believer wants their study of Scripture to make a difference in their lives and the lives of others.  I’m not suggesting it should be expected or will always happen, but productive and meaningful Bible study should move you emotionally from time to time.

I realize that the last sentence is contrary to what many of you have been taught or perhaps read. What do I mean, by “from time to time”?  Shouldn’t we always be emotionally touched by Bible study?  My answer is that if you’re doing Bible study to feel a particular way or get some spiritual high, your Bible study is self-focused.  To be blunt, that is the antithesis of Bible study.

Bible study is not about you. It’s about gaining knowledge of God and his plan through the means he gave you for that end:  the Bible.  This doesn’t mean that we don’t learn about God in any other way.  Yet God prompted people to write long ago so that those of us living today would know certain things about him, his plan for humanity, Jesus Christ, and how to be in right relationship to him through Jesus.  Nowhere are we taught in the Bible to “search the Scriptures to feel a certain way.”

The perspective of Bible study against which I am arguing has, to my mind, reduced the role of the Spirit to tingle our emotions.  As a result of that outlook, some believers are tossed by the elasticity of their feelings and circumstances and fall easy prey to clever articulations of bad theology – even within the church.

Real Bible study ought to produce careful thinkers about truth.  As we expose ourselves to Scripture and submit to what it teaches on its own terms, the Spirit will illumine our minds and use that understanding to move us emotionally, whether that be to a profound sense of peace, satisfaction, guilt, or repentance.  Too often we read or study Scripture with an unconscious demand: “Lord, I’m reading this now, give me that feeling I really need to get through my day.”  Bible study is not a narcotic.  You can’t have a true sense of knowing God – and the emotional impact that brings – without the discipline of being in the Word of God. God knows what you need.  He will honor your loyalty.