Bible Study vs. Devotional Reading

In my recollection of the churches that I grew up in, there were certain practices that were regularly encouraged from the pulpit, with the big three being prayer, evangelism, and reading the Bible. While I don’t pray as often as I’d like, over the years I’ve found different ways of praying that have worked for me; I’ve tried evangelism in different ways during different seasons of my life, although with very little to show for it; and for a number of years I managed to keep a practice of regularly reading the Bible.

Towards the end of my theological studies, however, I found it increasingly difficult to simply ‘read the Bible’. After experiencing the richness of going deep into the text, just reading it felt superficial and pointless to me. Sure, I could pick it up and read a few verses, or maybe even a chapter, but what difference would it make? I’d have done my religious duty for the day, but would I have meaningfully engaged with the text? Would I remember what I had read by this time next week? Would what I read have any impact on my relationship with God or how I live my life? For me, it felt like the answer to all of these questions would almost always be ‘No’.

(I want to add a brief caveat here that, even at the time, I was conscious that these were questions about my own personal experience of reading scripture. I didn’t and I don’t think that other people shouldn’t read scripture devotionally, and looking back I can see that when I was younger I found this sort of practice to be beneficial. However, my experience was that the more I learned and the more familiar I was with scripture, the less I got from a simple reading and the more difficult I found it to read the Bible in what I understood to be a ‘devotional’ way.)

I struggled with this for quite some time. I felt compelled by the sense that I was supposed to read the Bible every day — this was what good Christians do, this was what I felt was expected of me by my church community — but I couldn’t shake the difficulties I had with ‘devotional reading’. I tried sectioning off certain parts of scripture like the Psalms, telling myself that there were certain books that could be read in a simple ‘devotional way’ — they didn’t need to be studied to be beneficial — but I found the Psalms raised more questions for me than they answered.

Eventually, after much wrestling, I was able to put aside this idea that I needed to read the Bible ‘devotionally’ and read it every day. I was able to accept the idea that studying scripture was a legitimate devotional practice. I resolved to take a longer-term approach to reading scripture — rather than having to read something every day and get something out of reading every day, I started to set longer term goals around my reading of scripture, and I decided this could include taking notes and working on things for the benefit of others.

While this isn’t where the story of how I engage with scripture ends, it’s a resting place that I was able to sit in for a number of years. If you’re interested, the first concrete expression that this new attitude took was that I started reading the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) with a view to understanding their broader structure and the similarities and differences between their structures. I can’t remember whether this took me months or years, but I still look back at the materials that I worked up from this to this day.