How do you read your Bible?

This post set me thinking on how I am reading my bible.

(Bible) Reading for Joy vs. Reading for Information

Erik Raymond 

Have you ever found yourself disinterested in the genealogies or lengthy records of people in the Bible? From time to time I find myself stepping on the devotional gas to speed past those names as if they are not important. I know better than this.

As Alan Jacobs observes in his book Reading in the Age of Distraction, too many of  us read for information rather than pleasure. We just can run through the words looking to pick out the meat and leave behind the bones (so to speak). What happens when we do this in a narrative like in Ezra 2? (This happened to me this morning.)

In this section the list of over 40,000 exiles are returning from captivity to Israel. If we just skip over it we miss the joy that the author is aiming to communicate. These people were living in a foreign land, displaced from their history and identity. They were removed from the hub of worship. They lived under the cloud of God’s evident displeasure. Not only could they not enjoy all of the blessings that God had provided them as his nation, they were made to see, breath, and even taste pagan culture in all of its dregs. Now, at this particular time, God was moving these people (listed in this chapter) back to the land to enjoy the blessings of God and restart the covenant community’s practice of worship.

When we skim over the names we miss the fact that these are real people, with real birthdays, real deaths, real sniffles; they had real issues: real fears and dreams. God was answering prayers and longings. He was bringing them home to be his people. There are some real morsels of delight there for us if we are willing to slow down.

Reading should be enjoyable not laborious. Bible reading should be particularly enjoyable for the Christian. This takes work for us however. Everything in the tide of our information culture says “skim” “skip” “fast” and “self.” We have got to force ourselves, or at leat preach to ourselves to read for joy rather than simply information. As you make plans to read the Bible in 2014 do so with joy because you get to not because you have to.