The Bible Recap
Prep Episode 5: Avoiding Common Mistakes: What to Look for When You Read the Bible
Wed, 18 Dec
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SHOW NOTES: - Head to our Start Page for all you need to begin! - Join the RECAPtains - Check out the TBR Store - Show credits PREP EPISODES (in case you haven’t listened yet): 1. Let's Read the Bible in a Year (Chronological Plan)! 2. How I Learned to Love (Reading) the Bible 3. Why Reading the Whole Bible is Important (interview with Lee McDerment) 4. Preparing to Read the Bible 5. Avoiding Common Mistakes: What to Look for When You Read the Bible 6. Reading the Bible in Community BIBLE READING & LISTENING: Follow along on the Bible App, or to listen to the Bible, try Dwell! SOCIALS: The Bible Recap: Instagram | Facebook | TikTok D-Group: Instagram | Facebook TLC: Instagram | Facebook D-GROUP: D-Group is brought to you by the same team that brings you The Bible Recap. TBR is where we read the Bible, and D-Group is where we study the Bible. D-Group is an international network of Bible study groups that meet weekly in homes, churches, and online. Find or start one near you today! DISCLAIMER: The Bible Recap, Tara-Leigh Cobble, and affiliates are not a church, pastor, spiritual authority, or counseling service. Listeners and viewers consume this content on a voluntary basis and assume all responsibility for the resulting consequences and impact. Links to specific resources and content: This is not an endorsement of the entire website, author, organization, etc.. Their views may not represent our own.
Full Episode
Hey Bible Readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap. If you and I are going to spend a year, and hopefully the rest of our lives, reading through the Bible, let's aim to do it well. Today I'm going to talk about the three primary mistakes I made during my first trip through Scripture and tell you how to avoid them.
Hopefully you'll be able to get the hang of this much quicker than I did and with fewer pitfalls. My first major mistake, and the one I think we're all naturally inclined to make, is that I was looking for myself in Scripture. Maybe it was the result of my church upbringing, but I'd come to view the Bible as a big to-do list, even though I knew that wasn't the primary message. 5. 6.
What did I learn about who God is? If you can't find God in the passage, look harder. Ask yourself, what's happening in these pages that could be attributed to God? There's only one book of the Bible that doesn't mention the name of God, Esther. But even in the absence of his name, the pages are saturated with his actions.
So when you're in a section like that, try asking yourself, what is he doing behind the scenes? What's he doing in the hearts of the people we're reading about? Why did he put this section in his book? He's always at work, so look for it. The questions we ask of the Bible impact the wisdom we glean from it. So let's ask the right questions.
As you ask yourself questions that point your eyes toward God, I believe your heart will be drawn in by the beauty of the divine all the more. You'll be motivated by love more than by work. You'll be moved by desire more than by duty. I'm such a task-driven, list-making, box-checking perfectionist that it's hard not to treat this as a task or a goal.
It's hard to remember that it's a relationship and I'm here to learn about a person. It's hard to look for who he is and stop searching for my application points. Those things are important for sure. I never just want to read the Word of God and be unmoved or unchanged by it. It will have effects on my life.
But the point here is to let those effects be the result of beholding Him and wanting to honor Him and our relationship, not trying to do those things out of an obligation or in hopes of having a better life. This is not self-help. This is not even an attempt to earn God's favor. This is an effort to behold the beauty of God and be drawn in by Him.
One sign that you might be viewing scripture as a to-do list is if you wonder how it's applicable to modern day life. That's like asking how your mom is applicable to modern day life, or your wife, or your husband, or your child. This is a relationship. This book reveals a person, not a task. So tip number one is read it as a story about God, not about you or your to-do list.
One beautiful side effect of this is that it actually sets us free to love God. My second major mistake was disregarding context. That's especially easy to do when you're reading things out of context, which is how most of us have spent our lives. We flip open to a random chapter or we read the little snippets in a devotional without ever seeing how the story works together.
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