What is your advice for studying the Bible in your own time?

This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 1990.

You ask me for advice on how to study the Bible in your own time. That is not always the easiest advice for someone to give to someone else, since each person's approach to Scripture tends to be different according to their personalities.

For my part, however, I have followed some very simple and straightforward principles.

First, I read, not simply a particular passage, but the whole of the book in which that passage occurs, and I read it many, many, many times, until I have the contents in my mind so that I can recall fairly easily where any particular verse comes in the context of the whole book.

Secondly, when I then study an individual passage or verse, I ask first, 'What exactly does this verse say?' and I use all the help I can find to ascertain the exact meaning of the words and the sentences involved.

Next, I would ask, 'How does this verse fit into this context? How does it lead the mind, either through logic or similarity of idea, from the verse that preceded it to the verse that follows it?' In other words, I am asking about the logic of the thought flow through the whole passage: 'What has this verse and its contents got to do with what precedes it, and how does it lead on to what follows it?' And I should do the same, not only with the individual verse, but with the whole passage and the context in which it occurs.

After that, I should ask 'Why am I being told this?'. This is because it often happens that, even if I can understand exactly what the verse is saying, I do not immediately see the point of it. So I ask myself, 'Why is God telling me this? What has it got to do with anything at all? How is it important that I should be told this, and what difference does it make to me anyway?'.

If I feel the Lord has shown me the answers to these questions, and that I have seen the message of the verses or the passage in question, I would then check my interpretation by asking a further two questions: 'Does the Bible talk anywhere else about this same topic, and does it there confirm the interpretation that I have arrived at in the first passage?'; and, 'Is the interpretation I have arrived at true to life? That is, does it have obvious relevance and importance to the human situation?'.

Now it can of course be that a message of a particular part of Scripture speaks very powerfully to a particular situation in life. But I may not at once see that it does, because my own experience of life is limited, and I have not yet personally come across the situation in life to which the verse is speaking. Therefore, it is a good thing in your studies to widen your horizons as far as you can, and to make time to do this in order to perceive and understand the great problems that meet thinking men and women. If we do that, and learn the big questions about human existence on this planet, we shall then see all the more readily that the Bible does have answers to these big questions, and does not simply speak to the little details of our private lives and their individual needs.

So that is how I go about Scripture. Don\'t worry if you find it does not help you very much, because, as I say, everyone has their own approach. On the other hand, if you do find any of it helpful I shall be very pleased.

Very sincerely yours in Christ,