Just Read Your Bible

Piper, in answering the question about how to defeat an addiction to entertainment, said one thing that is either striking, or defeating:

Immerse yourself in the Bible, even when you don't feel like it, pleading with God to open your eyes to see what's really there.

Now, five years ago I would have scoffed at this. It is one of those "Just do it" phrases that doesn't seem at all helpful. "Ok, I get that I need to do it, but how do I do it?" I was looking for a magic bullet, a get rich quick answer. Not, "You just need to do it." I have since changed my tune. Only one thing has made me a consistent Bible reader: Being consistent. It is as simple as that.

Mark Dever was once asked, "What’s one thing you’ve learned after years of reading the Bible about how to read the Bible well?" His answer, I hope, will be of great help to you:

That’s it’s more important that I keep doing it than what I get out of it at any particular time.

A lot of young Christians will have an exciting quiet time on Monday and a really exciting one on Tuesday and an awesome one on Wednesday but then something happens on Thursday and they actually don’t even do it and Friday they do it and they feel guilty and it isn’t that good and Saturday they do it but it’s late and they were discouraged...and then they just get discouraged because they’re not always having a super experience. That’s where I would look at them and say, "Just keep going. Aim at obedience in a long direction set in a pattern for decades. If you just keep going you’ll gain so much by consistency and faithfulness that there’s no way you can gain just by sudden experience."