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Question:
Peace be upon you, pastor! I’m deaf and mute. I have accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord, but I am very powerless to read the Bible. Please help me to have the strength to read the Bible with zeal, because I want to know Him with all my heart. Despite everything I do, I love the Lord JESUS CHRIST immensely. My problem is that I am powerless to read. May the Lord bless you abundantly, pastor!
Dear Sister, I rejoice that you have accepted Jesus Christ in your heart and that you have received the forgiveness of sins and the gift of eternal life through faith in Him. I am also glad for the desire that you have in your heart and that you have expressed in this message, because your condition is exactly what the Lord Jesus meant when he said at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:3 NASB)
And also for this state is the blessing that says:
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied. (Matthew 5:3 NASB)
Here you also have the promise that you will be satisfied and God will satisfy this desire to know His Word in depth.
In the Epistle of James it is written:
But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not just hearers who deceive themselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was. But one who has looked intently at the perfect law, the law of freedom, and has continued in it, not having become a forgetful hearer but an active doer, this person will be blessed in what he does. (James 1:22-25 NASB)
The text speaks of two kinds of Christians, with two different ways of approaching the Holy Scriptures. The first comes and listens, but does not fulfill it with deeds. This listening can also be compared to just reading the Bible, because when someone just reads the Scripture but does not pursue something specific, he has no concrete purpose and then that reading has the same effect as listening – go and immediately forget what that person was like. If he forgets, then he can’t even apply it in his own life.
The second Christian in the mentioned verse is the one who is not content to just listen or read just like that, without a concrete purpose, but the respective believer deepens his eyes in the perfect law, that is, in the Bible and persists in it not as a listener (or reader) who is forgetful, but as a doer who fulfills the Bible with actions. This deepening of the eyes is deep study. You need to start studying the Bible deeply. When you start carefully examining it, then the Bible will become very interesting and you will not be able to get tired of what you have studied. I read the entire Bible before I made the decision to become a Christian. Then, after I reconciled with Christ and entered the New Covenant, I read the entire Bible for another 2 weeks and read it with a Bible Encyclopedia next to it, to make sure I understood every word and phrase. But then came a time when I didn’t know how to study the Bible and no one could show me how to do it. I assume you have this state right now. When I went to someone and asked him to teach me to study the Bible, he told me to read a verse and meditate… What should I meditate on, because I could not see in that verse more than I could just read? Others have advised me to read commentaries so that I can understand the Bible better. I started and read half of William Barkley’s comments on the New Testament, but I still wasn’t satisfied. What a joy it was when I saw the book “How to Study the Bible” by Kay Arthur at the deacon’s house. Along with that book I received from the deacon the course “Lord, I want to know You” by the same author, a course on the character of God, which is designed to be studied in 42 days, but I was so hungry that it took me only 2 days and 2 nights to study it. Since then, reading the Bible has never been difficult or boring for me. Since then I have been studying the Bible with great pleasure and for 26 years now I study daily, using these exceptional inductive Bible study textbooks.
Translated by Aliona Soltan