What It Takes to Study God's Word

So we must learn then what the Scripture says and then we can begin to make a deeper effort to understand what it means by what it says and that puts it into the fabric of our life and allows us to begin to live it out. Welcome to Grace To You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Experts will tell you that you learn best by repetition over time. That's why you can cram for a test and get the questions right but not really know the material just hours later. That's definitely not your best approach for studying Scripture, and as you'll see today as John MacArthur shows you what it takes to really learn the Bible so that it colors every part of your life, helping you become a stronger Christian. The title of his study says it all, how to get the most from God's Word.

And now, here's John. The goal of preaching certainly is to make the Word of God clear and to proclaim the truth and teach the truth to you, but it also at the same time should stimulate you to want to take up the sword for yourself, take advantage of the tremendous opportunity you have to come to grips with the great truth of Scripture. A verse to begin that supports that thought is 2 Timothy 2.15, be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, handling accurately the Word of truth.

There is a statement made to a young pastor by the name of Timothy. He is told that he must be responsible to with diligence present himself approved to God. How can he do that?

By being a workman who doesn't need to be ashamed. How can he accomplish that? By handling accurately the Word of truth. It is essential that he, as a minister of God's Word, handle it carefully, proclaim it accurately. But it's not just the minister who is responsible to study the Word of God, not just the minister who is to discern its truths. In the book of Acts, there is a great testimony given with regard to a group of people.

They're called the Bereans, that's because they lived in a town called Berea. And when the Apostle Paul went there, he preached the truth to them. It says in verse 11 of Acts 17, these were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the Word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so. Here were a group of people who are called noble because they did essentially what Joshua 1.8 says, they meditated day and night on the Word of God in order that they might discern its truth and against that truth measure the preacher.

They are noble because they diligently searched the Scriptures and they did it daily with great eagerness in order that they might discern who was speaking the truth. Studying the Word of God is something that demands diligence. It is a craft that calls for craftsmanship. But it begins with basic knowledge. Like anything else, any apprentice at a new job or a new trade starts with the knowledge of the basics. And certainly as students of the Bible, that's where we have to start. We start with knowing the content of Scripture. That calls for a faithful and careful and consistent reading of God's Word. I would suggest to you that if you're going to be a student of the Bible, it will all begin with a high view of Scripture. And then it will move to the second aspect of being effective in Bible study and that is basic knowledge of the text.

You have to know what it says to begin with. And that becomes a matter of reading the Scripture. I confess to you that I'm not a particularly good reader of Scripture.

That's because I have such a highly developed sense of curiosity, I guess. I find it very difficult to read Scripture very long before my curiosity gets the best of me and I have to stop and find out what it means. But in your early years of beginning to study the Word of God, you have to resist some of that curiosity or else you'll get so bogged down you'll never get through the basic content. It is important to read the Scripture so that you come to grips with what it says. Then you can begin to search out what it means by what it says.

But everything begins with a knowledge of Scripture. Go back with me to Proverbs chapter 1, Proverbs chapter 1. In verse 20, we read this, wisdom shouts in the street. She lifts her voice in the square. At the head of the noisy streets, she cries out.

At the entrance of the gates in the city, she utters her sayings. Now, the idea here is that divine wisdom is available. It is not hidden. It is not stashed in a cave somewhere. It's not buried in the ground. It's not hidden behind some mysterious codes. It doesn't take somebody who knows the secret to unlock it.

It is rather public domain, if you will. It is in the street. It is in the square. It cries out in the noisiness of life.

At the entrance of the gates of the city, which is the busiest place in town, their wisdom is made available. And what the writer of Proverbs is saying, it is available. So how long, O naive ones, will you love simplicity? In other words, are you going to spurn the availability of divine wisdom? And scoffers, how long will you delight in your scoffing? And how long will you fools hate knowledge? And then there is reproof.

Turn at my reproof. Behold, I will pour out my Spirit on you and I'll make my words known to you. There is no real reason to be ignorant about the truth of Scripture because it is available. It is not hidden. It is not for those who know some secret code. It is not for those who can unlock some cryptic mysteries.

It is readily available for everybody in the street. And God even promises that He'll assist in the process, pouring out His Spirit so that His words can be known. Then comes, of course, the judgment. Because I called and you refused, I stretched out my hand and no one paid attention. You neglected all my counsel, didn't want my reproof.

I'll laugh at your calamity mock when your dread comes...when your dread comes like a storm. It is available, this knowledge of God through His Word. It is not secretive.

It is not hidden. And those who refuse to come to its straightforward truths and be taught by the Spirit will be judged by the God who has made Himself so clear that according to Romans 1, all men are without...what?...excuse. Now we are not called only to know it, but obviously we are called to know it and put it into practice through obedience. Listen to what it says in James 1 21, receive the Word implanted which is able to save your souls but prove yourselves doers of the Word and not merely hearers. So the idea is that we are to put the Word of God into practice in our lives.

That will, as we saw in Joshua 1 8, make our way prosperous and lead us to good success. In order to put it into practice, we have to understand it. In order to understand it, we have to know its content and we go back to the fact then that we must read the Scripture so that we can absorb what it says and then begin to work on what it means by what it says. So we have then this desire to do the will of God planted in us as believers. It is predicated on knowing the will of God which calls for us to understand what it says and then to be able to interpret what it says and apply what it means by what it says. The Lord revealed to His prophet Isaiah, as we continue to sort of build this foundation, the Lord revealed to His prophet Isaiah the magnificent nature of His being and the importance of His judgment. And God clearly stated that each person must listen to everything that God says, for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, My thoughts than your thoughts. As the rain comes down and snow from heaven and returns not thither, but waters the earth and makes it bring forth in bud that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater.

There's that hydrological cycle I mentioned to you. So shall My word be that goes forth out of My mouth. It shall not return unto Me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please and it shall prosper in the thing where until I sent it. Here again, God reveals to the prophet that His word when received and applied produces the ends which God intends. In the hymn book of the Psalm, Psalm 138 2, the psalmist says, I will worship toward Thy holy temple or Thy holy place and praise Thy name for Thy lovingkindness and for Thy truth for Thou has magnified Thy word equal to Thy name. There is no greater testimony to the importance of Scripture than Psalm 119. And you ought to familiarize yourself with Psalm 119. One of the wonderful things about the study Bible is that it's going to break down Psalm 119 into all its components. It's a long psalm of 176 verses and every verse is about the Scripture, except the very last one which is a response.

But 175 verses about the Scripture all broken down so that you can come to grips with what the Scripture really claims for itself. But in nearly every one of those 176 verses, there is an emphasis on the necessity of knowing the Word and obeying it. Turn with me to Psalm 119, and obviously we can't read all 176 verses, but I want to pinpoint some of the verses that need to be highlighted which emphasize this call to the Word of God. Psalm 119, verse 16, I shall delight in Thy statutes, I shall not forget Thy word. And here is the Psalmist expressing His love for the Word and His delight in obeying it.

Verse 24, Thy testimonies also are My delight, they are My counselors. Verse 35, make Me walk in the path of Thy commandments, for I delight in it. Verse 47, and I shall delight in Thy commandments which I love. Verse 48, and I shall lift up My hands to Thy commandments, that is, I'll do them, put them into practice, which I love, and I will meditate on Thy statutes. And over to verse 72, the law of Thy mouth is better to Me than thousands of gold and silver pieces. Down to verse 92, if Thy law had not been My delight, then I would have perished in My affliction. And then verse 97, down to 104, O how I love Thy law, it is My meditation all the day. Thy commandments make Me wiser than My enemies, for they are ever Mine. I have more insight than all My teachers, for Thy testimonies are all My meditation.

I understand more than the aged, because I have observed Thy precepts. I have restrained My feet from every evil way, that I may keep Thy word. I have not turned aside from Thine ordinances, for Thou Thyself has taught Me.

How sweet are Thy words to My taste, yes, sweeter than honey to My mouth. From Thy precepts I get understanding, therefore I hate every false way. Delighting in the word, and because you delight in it, you learn it, and when you learn it, you apply it, it affects every area of life. It makes you wiser than your enemies, your teachers, the aged of every society.

It helps you turn aside from sin and discerns for you so that you can avoid every false way. Verse 105, Thy word is a lamp to My feet, a light to My path. Verse 111, I have inherited Thy testimonies forever, for they are the joy of My heart. Verse 113, I hate those who are double-minded, but I love Thy law. Verse 127, therefore I love Thy commandments above gold, yes, above fine gold. Skipping down to verse 159, consider how I love Thy precepts. Revive Me, O Lord, according to Thy loving kindness.

And then, just several to close out. Verse 161, Princes persecute Me without cause, but My heart stands in awe of Thy words. 167, My soul keeps Thy testimonies, and I love them exceedingly. Verse 174, I long for Thy salvation, O Lord, and Thy law is My delight. Here you have the attitude that has to be brought to bear upon the Scripture.

When you understand what you have in your hand, and when you treasure this more than gold, and when you consider it sweeter than honey, when you delight in it, you will then begin to read its truth. And that's where all effective Bible study begins. Blessed are those, says the psalmist, who keep the testimony of God and seek Him with their whole heart. And how shall a young man cleanse his ways? By taking heed thereto according to Thy word. David said with my whole heart, I sought Thee. O let me not wander from Thy commandments.

And so it goes. We begin with a commitment to know the Word of God. I can suggest to you a simple plan. Take a book of the Bible and read it repetitiously for 30 days.

And here's how I did it. I took the book of 1 John. 1 John has five chapters, and I read 1 John every day for 30 days, just simply read it in the same version 30 times in a row.

In fact, I became so enthralled by it that I actually broke the pattern on the first book and read it 90 days in a row. But at the end of 30 days, I knew it was in 1 John, just because of the repetitious reading. In fact, I began to visualize my Bible. And if anybody asks me to this day what it says in 1 John 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5, I'm pretty familiar with that because of repetition. That's how your mind retains things.

In fact, if somebody says, where in the Bible does it say, if we confess our sins, He's faithful and just, that's easy. 1 John chapter 1, left-hand page, right-hand column, halfway down. You know, you begin to...you begin to visualize your Bible because of the familiarity of the text as you go over it and over it and over it. Now, at the same time, I wrote a one-sentence summary of each chapter and just over the period of 30 days memorized what that chapter was about so that I was lacking into my mind an understanding of the chapters and familiarity with the text itself. Well, at the end of 90 days, I had a fair understanding of what was in 1 John. I didn't yet fully understand all of it. I hadn't gone into the depth of studying it all, but I was familiar with it.

And it elevated an awful lot of questions in my mind. Then, wanting to stay within the framework of John, I went to the gospel of John. Now the gospel of John has 21 chapters and that's too much to swallow in one month, so I divided it into three sections of seven.

Using seven is about the maximum number of chapters you want to work with. I read through the first seven chapters of John's gospel for 30 days, the second chapter, the second seven for 30, and the third seven for 30. So in 90 days, I had gone through the gospel of John and in the process wrote out a simple little summary of each chapter, each of the 21 chapters. Well, at the end of those 90 days of reading 7, 7 and 7, I understood what was in John.

And to this day, I can still visualize that and that's been many, many years ago. And I will...I remember that the wedding at Cana was in John 2 and that the woman at the well in Samaria is in John 4 and that Jesus countering His brothers and their lack of faith in John 7 and the feeding of the 5,000 in John 6 and John 10 is the shepherd chapter and John 15 is the vine chapter and the high priest of Paris in 17 and so it goes and so it goes. Jesus in the garden is in 18, just pure familiarity. I also began to realize that some of the things I didn't understand in the epistle of John were explained in the gospel of John and that the best interpreter of Scripture is Scripture itself and I learned that very early and that's why when I teach you the Word of God, I explain the Scripture with the Scripture, don't I? Because that's the way I learned the Scripture. And then after that, I went back to Philippians and took Philippians, which is a brief book of four chapters, read it thirty days in a row and was familiar with what was there. Then I went back to the gospel of Matthew and took 28 chapters, broke them into four sections of seven, seven for thirty, seven for thirty, seven for thirty and in four months I had grasp on the book of Matthew. Now at that pace at about seven chapters at a time going from a shorter book to a longer one, in two and a half years you will have done the New Testament.

Now you're going to read the Bible for the next two and a half years, I hope. How about reading it so that you produce familiarity? And that calls for repetition. That calls for repetition. And in that process, in two and a half years, you will have learned that there are parts of the Bible that connect very obviously and you will cease to be a total concordance cripple.

You know what I mean. You can't remember where anything is and so you go chasing through that inadequate concordance in the back of your Bible that never has the verse you're looking for because you will have absorbed that. Now you can't do that with the whole of the Old Testament. Much of that narrative flow you just read as narrative and its intent and its full rich meaning gets explained so wonderfully in the New Testament.

But you need to be familiar with the New. Get yourself on that kind of a reading plan and you will be amazed and astounded to find out what a Bible scholar you'll become in that two and a half years as you begin to connect the Scripture with itself. And again, this reaffirms the idea that we have been conveying and that is that it has a single author. While there were many who wrote on behalf of God under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, God Himself is the author and with one author always speaking infallible and inerrant truth, there is complete continuity. And that is what theologians called analogia scriptura, that is to say the Scripture is analogous to itself. That is there is no contradiction. There are apparent difficulties which our finite minds cannot grasp like the Trinity and like the paralleling of human volition and divine election.

There are those kinds of issues that we cannot resolve because of the limitations of the human mind, but there are no contradictions because of the singular author being God Himself. I found that that exercise of reading the Bible in that fashion in just a period of two and a half years or so gave me a tremendous familiarity with the content of Scripture. And that became the foundation upon which to build an understanding of that content. And many of the questions that I had early on in my Christian experience were answered not by reading commentaries or studying theology books, but just by absorbing the very text of Scripture itself.

I'll tell you something else. I continue to read Scripture all the time and as I continue to read it all the time, I continue to be amazed at what is disclosed in it. There is a basic understanding of Scripture that the Bible defines as the milk of the Word, 1 Corinthians chapter 3. There are not certain milk doctrines and certain meat doctrines, in other words, certain lighter things and heavier things. Milk and meat does not describe different truths, it describes the depth of truth.

There is a milk level of understanding and then there is a meat level of understanding. And you go from the milk down to the real steak as you plunge into Scripture and begin to see the profound depth that is there. But you start with an understanding of the Scripture itself. And then from there you begin to ask yourself, okay, I know what it says, what does it mean by what it says?

Let's go from the milk to the meat. And we need to get into that and we will when we talk about the process of discovering the meaning of Scripture. We're going to do that and I'm going to show you in particular how I go about determining the meaning of Scripture. But before we get there, there's something I have to talk about, the major prerequisite to effective Bible study, it is your view of Scripture, right?

I added to that another prerequisite to Bible study and that is that you know what it says. You have to hold it high and learn what it says. There are no shortcuts.

There are no shortcuts. And listen, folks, spiritual maturity is related to the application of truth, is it not? Spiritual blessing isn't something you get zapped with while you're just wandering through a revival tent.

It doesn't happen that way. It's not something that's going to happen to you because the sermon was a real zinger and captivated you. You may have a momentary working of God in your heart, but spiritual maturity and spiritual growth is the long haul process of the application of divine truth in your life. It calls for meditating on it day and night. It calls for observing to do everything that is in it and then you begin to make your way prosperous and have good success. It doesn't happen in short spurts.

It doesn't happen with ecstatic events. True spiritual development, true spiritual growth is just like human growth. It is a process fed by nourishment. And that nourishment is the Word of God. Jesus said, sanctify them by Thy truth.

Thy Word is truth. Sanctification doesn't happen in a stadium at a big rally. Sanctification doesn't happen at a camp somewhere where somebody gave a message that grabbed your heart. Sanctification is a long haul process by which someone is matured into Christlikeness through the intake and the living out of the understanding of divine truth. So we must learn then what the Scripture says and then we can begin to make a deeper effort to understand what it means by what it says and that puts it into the fabric of our life and allows us to begin to live it out.

Let's pray. Father, thank You for those who by virtue of their salvation, conversion, and new birth have the Spirit of God as their teacher. O God, may they have a strong desire like a newborn babe does for milk, a strong desire to know Your Word, so essential if they're to be diligent and study it as workmen who need not be ashamed. We thank You, Lord, for this great treasure. We thank You that we can understand it.

You have made it clear. We want that understanding that we may live it and know the fullness of blessing and bring You honor. In Your Son's name, amen. That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. The title of his practical study here on Grace to You, How to Get the Most from God's Word. Now, John, let me bring you back to something you said in the closing moments. You said that spiritual growth, like human growth, is a process fed by nourishment, and that nourishment is the Word of God. Let's take a step back for just a moment and talk about the issue of trusting God's Word. Wouldn't you say that before a person can be nourished by the Bible, he first needs to be convinced that what he's reading is true?

Yeah, that's absolutely right. If you're thinking you're going to approach the Bible with skepticism and it's going to have an impact on you, that's not going to happen because your presuppositions will cancel out the things that offend you. And the things that offend you, in most cases, are the most important things for your life because it moves you from sin to sanctification. So you need to approach the Bible as the Word of God without skepticism, without thinking that you can pick and choose, take what you like or what you agree with and dismiss what you don't. So that then raises the question, how can you get yourself to a place where you trust the Bible? And here's a good tool for you to get to the point where you do trust the Bible. It's a book called You Can Trust the Bible.

That's pretty clear. Is the Bible inerrant, infallible, complete, authoritative, sufficient for salvation, hope, happiness, instruction? This very brief book provides answers to those important questions and examines how miracles, prophecy, science, our own human experience and even the person of Christ demonstrate the Bible's authenticity. If you have any doubts at all about the veracity of the Bible, the truth of the Bible, there's no need for that. So for a limited time, we'll send you a copy of You Can Trust the Bible free of charge. All you need to do is ask for it. If you're questioning the Bible, you don't need to.

You shouldn't question it. But if you want some help in coming to that conviction, it's free of charge. Just contact Grace to you today. Call us, email us, head to our website and request a free copy of You Can Trust the Bible.

We'll send it to you right away. Thanks, John. And friend, the Bible has the power to change lives, including yours. John will show you why you can trust the Bible in his booklet by that name. To get your free copy of John's booklet, contact us today.

Our number here, 800-55-GRACE and our web address gty.org. John's booklet You Can Trust the Bible answers some of the most common questions people have about the reliability of Scripture. And as John said, if you doubt what the Bible says about miracles, prophecy or science, this booklet will help you put those doubts to rest.

Again, You Can Trust the Bible is our gift to you. Just call us at 800-55-GRACE or go to our website gty.org. And thank you for praying for us and for encouraging people you know to listen to these daily broadcasts, and also for remembering that Grace to You is listener supported. When you pray for us and support us financially, you're helping us reach people around the world with the life-changing truth of God's Word. You can mail your tax-deductible gift to Grace to You, Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412. You can also express your support by calling at 800-55-GRACE or use our website gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Be sure to watch Grace to You television Sundays on DIRECTV Channel 378, and be back tomorrow for another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.