How to read the Bible

Charlene, Kana and I are now on day 7 of reading through the Bible in 2 years, DV.  We've been seeing the stories unfold and lead on - eventually to God's fulfilment of His own promise in Genesis 3:15.

The three of us have chosen a practical 2-year reading plan and got going, but today I would like to learn again  how do you prepare my mind and heart for the joyful task and privilege of absorbing the word of God?

Consider the famous passage near the end of Luke’s Gospel. Our Lord said: 

“‘These are my words that I spoke to you while was still with you, 

that everything written about me 

in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.’

 Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, ‘

Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, 

and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem’.” (Luke 24:44-47).

• Jesus makes a stunning claim 400 years after the close of the Old Testament: The Scriptures contained things “written about” Him. In fact, by citing “the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms,” Jesus claims that there’s something about him in the whole of the Old Testament, where His story emerges. 
• Jesus read His Bible with fulfilment in view.  The prophecies, patterns, types and history  point to Jesus, He fulfils them. All of history was moving to Jesus’ climactic fulfilment. 
• Proper reading of the Bible requires an instinct for getting to Christ and His fulfilment of God’s promises and plans. He is the end to which all history heads.
•  Reading the Bible well means not only looking for Jesus but looking specifically for the redemptive purpose and work of Jesus. The Old Testament contains the prediction of Christ’s suffering and resurrection, and the hope of redemption through repentance and forgiveness of sins. 
• When we read our Bibles we ought to gather a sense of God’s salvation through Christ, of atonement, of victory over death and sin, of the centrality of missions and preaching the gospel, and the privilege of playing our part in the salvation history of God.

All of this has implications for how we are to read our Bibles.

1)  There’s a place–an important place!–for applying the Scriptures to our lives. We are to “live… by every word that comes from the  mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4). Yet, our smaller stories nestle in a larger over-arching story. The larger story focuses on the glory of God in Jesus Christ in the redemption and damnation of sinners. 

2) The larger story calls us outside of our smaller selves to live beyond ourselves and there truly become ourselves. It calls us to lose our lives so that we might find them. Any reading of the Bible that makes us more focused on ourselves and teaches us to shrink back or hold our lives dear is actually a misreading of the Bible. It is to read the Bible with our goals in mind rather than God’s. We’re made for bigger things, grander visions.

3) The Lord taught His disciples to read their Scriptures in a way that revealed His suffering, death and resurrection for the forgiveness of sins.  That’s our goal and that’s our privilege if we learn to read the Bible the way our Master did.

If you wish, go here to see Thabiti's blog from which I made the above summary.