Posted inDiscipleship

Reading For Transformation: Introduction

Hi, I’ve got a question for you. How’s your Bible reading going? Quite often I’ve had conversations after the Sunday gathering about spiritual life in general, how the Lord is guiding and providing for us, prayers being answered and many other wonderful and encouraging stories. But something that I often find is that when I ask ‘how’s your Bible reading going?’ people will hesitate. Bible reading can be so hard at times, can’t it? Many people struggle to understand what they are reading or to glean something from their devotionals which makes it really difficult to cultivate a habit of regular reading.

Not so long ago I listened to one of those sermons at a conference; you know the ones, that are really inspiring and make you walk away from the event thinking ‘right, I really want to have a complete life change, I want God to use me so much, I want God to utterly change me, transform me so that I can go out and be God’s vessel through which He can transform the community around me.’
Well I listened to one of those sermons and I left the building that day full of enthusiasm, determined to get into the Bible a lot more, knowing that I really wanted God to transform me and I can then go out and be who He wants me to be, salt and light in the community around me.

Well, the day whizzed by and before you knew it, evening and morning, the fourth day. Thursday morning, I’ve got to be honest I had so much to think about that I completely forgot to read my Bible and it wasn’t until I was in bed that I remembered. So on Friday I made sure to get up extra early and catch up with my readings. I opened my Bible and saw that I had eighteen chapters to read! My heart sank and I gave up. 

Let’s be honest, if you’ve been in church for a while then you have probably heard a lot of sermons and seminars and perhaps read plenty of books that have told you about why you should read the Bible. Well Bible reading, certainly the discipline of regular BIble reading can be so hard. Let’s say for instance that you are following a reading plan and when you reading you have absolutely no idea what you are reading, it just makes no sense to you. Or maybe your particular plan that day has four chapters of genealogy and as you work through the difficult names and the such and such begat such and such, thinking to yourself, ‘what is God trying to tell me here? That if I have another son I should call him Abihu?

Having heard all those sermons and read all those books about why we should be in a habit of feeding on God’s word provides us with the motivation to dig in. The next question is how. Do we just read it like an ordinary book, open it at the beginning and read from cover to cover? How on earth do we memorise everything that we’ve read? We talk about putting it into practice but how can you practice what you can’t remember and how can you remember when there’s so much to read? My pocket Bible that comes everywhere with me has 1076 pages! How do you memorise God’s word?


The hope is that these posts will help some people to engage with God’s word more effectively so that we can see transformation in our lives, and through transformed lives we can see transformed communities, transformed neighborhoods, transformed families, transformed friendships and a transformed world.

Well, that’s the introduction to the series, in the next video/post we’re going to be looking at the difference between reading for information and reading for transformation. Are there different ways to approach reading something like a novel or a magazine article or any book you’ll find on your bookshelf compared to opening God’s word? If so, why and how? That’s coming up next in ‘Reading For Transformation’. Until then, bless God.