Memorize
I’ve got to be joking, right? You thought your memorization days were over when you finally go through your times tables, didn’t you? Well, not if you want to do something to bring your understanding of the Bible to the next level.
I’ll put it out there right from the jump—of all the things you could do to help your ability to read, understand, and respond to the Bible, memorizing it will demand the most from you. It takes hard work to memorize a verse, and even more to memorize 20, but that hard work pays off big time not only once you get that section memorized, but as you memorize.
You see, memorizing Scripture requires a lot of time on a small section of the Bible. I’m sure there are people who can do it, but it’s impossible for me to memorize 20-verses in a day. I have too many other things going on, and I’m just not that good at it. What I can do, though, is memorize one or two verses a day, for a week or two, which adds up to quite a lot of time spent focusing on the text, and that time has done wonders for my ability to read, understand, and respond.
Write in your Bible
Whenever I got a birthday card (or any other card) from my grandma on my mom’s side, I would open it and see that she had underlined a word or two—sometimes entire phrases. I thought this was odd for a long time. I didn’t need help reading the cards she gave me, so I wasn’t sure why she took the time to underline certain words. Over the years, though, it became clear—those words stood out the most to her. She underlined them so they would stand out to me, too. They did.
This is why you ought to write in your Bible as you’re trying to read, understand, and respond to it better than before. Writing in it makes it memorable. You can underline sentences that seem important, circle words that make you pause or are used often, scribble question marks and exclamation points, and draw connections between statements you find in the paragraphs.
When you write in your Bible you’re not just writing for yourself that day, but you’re writing for yourself weeks, months, and years down the road, so when you get to that passage again you are reminded of what stood out to you the first time. Do your future self a favor and write in your Bible!
Read out loud
The actor Walton Goggins said that to prepare for a role he will read a script 250-times and turn himself over to an imaginary set of circumstances. That’s it. And that’s not that far removed from what I’m suggesting in this tip for getting better at reading, understanding, and responding to the Bible.
I’ve found that I have an altogether different experience with the Bible as I move from reading it with my eyes to reading it with my mouth. One of the things I’ll do when I really want to get into a particular passage of the Bible is walk around my house (when no one else is home) reading that section aloud as if I’m the one who thought up those words. I will pretend that I’m Paul, or Luke, or John, or even Jesus as I say out loud the words I’m reading.
I don’t do that because I like hearing my own voice; I do it because something special happens as I give myself over to the circumstances of the passage I’m reading. If I can imagine—even for a short time—that I’m the one actually preaching the Sermon on the Mount, those words start to land on me in a way they just don’t when I’m only silently reading the words on the page. Even something like the letter of Jude starts to transform from a letter written by someone I don’t know to people I don’t know, to a letter uniquely fitting for the day.
It’s one thing to read the Bible as if it’s an ancient document far removed from the world you live in, and quite another to read it as if you’re the one who wrote it. So, if you want to grow in the way you read, understand, and respond to the Bible, you might want pretend you’re Luke every once in a while.