“You should read your Bible.” In one form or another, you have probably heard this advice for as long as you have been around a church. You agree with the idea, but you have not dusted off the Bible on the bookshelf to crack it open and read for months, maybe even years! Why not? For some people the problem is difficulty in comprehension, but I think for most people, the problem is a certain lack of enthusiasm, i.e., they think reading the Bible is boring. Oh, they will not admit this at church, but they can find a thousand other more interesting activities than reading a Bible verse–like cleaning the toilet or mowing the grass.
Some people have always felt like yawning when they started reading the scriptures. Others were excited at the beginning when everything was new and bright. They felt like they were exploring unknown territory. Who knew what miraculous surprises were around the next corner! Then about a year or so into their Bible study experience, they started to lose that wide-eyed eagerness. There were fewer and fewer surprises and more and more reruns of the same old stories. That is when the Bible-study blues set in, and their study became routine and mundane or stopped altogether.
Let’s look at the pattern of many new believers. If you experienced that initial love of reading the Bible, think back to when you were first excited about the truths that you were learning from the Bible. Do you remember how happy you were to read a new passage? You could not wait to see what new truths you could discover. Then, you decided to read the Bible all the way through, and again there seemed to be exciting new information on each page. Well, some of the pages you skipped because they were full of strange names or ideas that you did not understand, but you kept going because there would be something new and fascinating a few pages later. Then one day you realized that you knew most of the interesting stuff, and you did not really care about the rest. You tried without success to motivate yourself, so you started reading devotionals or religious books or just watched sermons on the Internet to fill your spiritual needs. As for you generational Christians who were raised reading the Bibles at home, I do not know what stages you went through to get there, but one day you got to the same place as the new converts.
Maybe, you were raised in a church-going family and had regular devotions with your family where you read from the Bible daily. Maybe, you never owned a Bible until you were an adult. Or maybe, your experience is somewhere in between. Regardless of where you started in your reading of the Bible, it is easy to let yourself be enticed away from the scriptures, especially if your studies have become mundane. However, it is essential that you resist life’s distractions and dig into the scriptures because they are your safeguard and your treasure map and your photo album of pictures of God. Reading God’s word is essential for your spiritual health, so how can your Bible study become exciting and rewarding rather than boring and blah? What do you do when you develop a “been there, done that” attitude towards the Bible?
The first step in changing your attitude is to change your perspective. I teach reading, and one of the basic concepts we have in reading theory is that there are different levels of understanding. The lowest level of understanding is repeating facts from the text. It is an important step, but if you stop there, you are not considered to be a good reader. The same is true of reading the Bible. Reading the Bible is not only about obtaining information. Unfortunately, many people stop at this level. They do not progress and become good readers of the Bible. Good readers interact with the text. They look for connections and try to picture the ideas in their minds. They make applications of the text and synthesize the information into their lives. This is even more important with the Bible because it is not just letters arranged in an organized manner on a page. The Bible has a creative force in it that transforms us. How can you change the way you have been viewing the Bible and learn to interact with the text? There are tons of reading techniques that I could start listing, but you would be yawning after the first two, so I will settle for teaching you to use your sanctified imagination as you read. I did not come up with the term “sanctified imagination.” I have heard a lot of pastors use the term. It means prayerfully putting yourself into the story so that it becomes real to you.
The first step in using your sanctified imagination is to refuse to passively read the words. Instead, try to picture the actions. If there is something that interferes with your ability to do so, ask questions of the text that will clear up your picture. You might need to look up a detail in a commentary or just try searching for information on the Internet. For example, Matthew describes a terrifying experience on the sea. “And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep” (Mat 8:23-24). Now, this should be easy to try to imagine, except when I try to picture the boat, I do not know what to picture. It had to be bigger than the old rowboat that I once rode in with my uncle, but it was not like the ferry that I took across the James River in Virginia. I looked on the Internet and found a picture of “the Jesus boat” replica that was based on the remains of a first century fishing boat found in 1986. Now, I could picture the boat, and it was a lot easier to imagine the waves sweeping over its edges. That sparked a thought for me. That boat sure did not look very comfortable to sleep on. Jesus must have been really exhausted not to wake up when the water started splashing in. As you try to picture the events, questions and connections and new ideas will begin to multiply. Do not suppress them. Investigate them or write them down if you do not have time to look them up. As you use your sanctified imagination, you will start to understand that the Bible contains exhilarating experiences that rival the most action-packed adventure film.
The second dimension of using your sanctified imagination is to try to see the plot from the perspective of one of the characters in the story. Ask yourself what he or she would be feeling and why people are reacting like they do. If someone is behaving in ways that you cannot understand, ask yourself if there is something in the culture of the time that could explain the attitudes that you see. As you read the Bible, put yourself into the life of one of the characters. For example, in several of the gospels, you can read the story of the ruler of the synagogue who wanted Jesus to heal his daughter. “And there came a man named Jairus, who was a ruler of the synagogue. And falling at Jesus’ feet, he implored him to come to his house, for he had an only daughter, about twelve years of age, and she was dying. As Jesus went, the people pressed around him” (Luk 8:41-42). I used my sanctified imagination to picture what was happening, but I also included character motivations. I tried to get into Jairus’ head to see the story from his perspective. Here is a small part of my journey with Jairus. “Jairus was exhausted. He had had little sleep for more than a week. His only daughter would be dead soon. He had kept watch over her and cried as he watched her fade in front of his sight. Just a few weeks ago, she had been bouncing around the house as she helped her mother cook. She was twelve years old, and she had had all the energy of youth. Watching her sometimes made him tired. Now, it hurt to look at that pale still form lying in front of him and know that within a few hours. Maybe, even a few minutes, she would be gone from his life forever.” Maybe, I am wrong, and the little girl had never bounced around the house, but that is not important. The key point is that you are putting yourself into the story and trying to understand the story from the inside. You can modify your perspective as you have more experience in life or with the Bible, but in the process of trying to understand the characters, you will come to know them as real people, not cardboard cutout paper dolls. The Bible is not about cartoon characters who have limited reactions. The people that you are reading about lived and breathed and loved and got angry, just like you. They laughed and cried and screamed at God in pain, just like you. When you start to see your connection to them, you will not have a chance to be bored.
Finally, use your sanctified imagination to investigate God’s motivations. Why did He feel it was necessary to include this information in the holy scriptures? What do you think He felt about the situation? How is His choice of action different from what You would have done in the same situation? One of the most rewarding afternoons in my life was spent in the backseat of my car studying the story of Hagar in Genesis 16 as I waited for my clothes to finish washing in the laundromat. It was the midst of the co-vid pandemic, and I could not wait inside the air conditioned business, but that did not matter as I used my sanctified imagination to discover beautiful truth after beautiful truth in a story that had always bothered me. One verse tells us that God sent Hagar back to the place where she was being treated horribly. She was told to go back and submit. That had always troubled me until the day that I examined the story deeper looking at God’s motivations. Then I saw how much God loved the slave woman who was not the mother of the promised son. God did not send Hagar back into the situation to face it alone. God told her to stop grabbing for power, but He also gave her the tools that she needed to survive without grasping for power. He became her Guardian. She now had protection that even the most powerful person in her life, Abraham, could never give her. She had approval from Abraham’s Master. God had shown everyone in the camp that he valued Hagar in a special way. She would no longer need to push others down in order to be lifted up. God Himself had lifted her up. He had promised that she would be a mother of many descendants. In fact, God’s promise was that He would “surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude.” When Hagar returned to the camp and enslavement, she came back with God’s blessing on her. For this reason, she could stand with honor before the whole camp while still respectfully submitting to her mistress. How do I know that my sanctified imagination is on target? Look at Hagar’s own understanding of the situation. “So she called the name of the LORD who spoke to her, ‘You are a God of seeing,’ for she said, ‘Truly here I have seen him who looks after me’” (Gen 16:13). Just as the people in the Biblical stories are not flat paper dolls, God is not two-dimensional either. The Bible reveals a God who laughs, sings, cries, and loves. He is jealous, wise, sincere, kind, angry, sick at heart, astonished, and pure. Look for Him in His multi-dimensional beauty, and you will wonder how you ever thought that the Bible could be boring.
What lesson do I want you to learn? Stop treating the Bible like it is a rule book or a boring list of facts. Get excited about the stories of real people interacting with God throughout history. Some of them were rebellious, and others were faithful to God. The faithful people were not always full of faith. Instead, they were broken people living for God while in the middle of a sinful world, just as we are. Open your Bible and interact with its stories. As you do, the Holy Spirit will impress in you the lessons that you should learn. I invite you to get excited by the adventure and people and most of all, the God of the Bible. Let God’s Spirit fill you with life from His word. In short, don’t just read the Bible. . . Enjoy it.