How Shall I Study My Bible?

by frederic w. farr, d. d.

PEOPLE are always asking, how shall I study the Bible? What is the best method? There is no short cut, no royal road, no magic method. Say to such an inquirer, “Read the Bible over and over again—not once, nor twice, nor thrice, but many, many times.” And that is all any one can do. Read it until you become familiar, cognizant of its contents, until you are so familiar with your Bible, be it Bagster or Oxford, that you can close your eyes and visualize the passage by locating it upon a particular page just where it belongs.

In riding upon a railroad train, you hear the trainmen call out the stations, and you refer to your time card to verify the call as each station is passed, and you wonder at the trained memory of the man who can repeat that long list of way stations without a mistake, and you ask him how he ever does it, and he smiles and replies that he has done it so long it is automatic, done without thought and without effort; and so the best product of Bible study becomes spontaneous and involuntary. You have read the Bible so frequently, so thoughtfully, so earnestly, so prayerfully that it comes to you without direct effort on your part where to locate a passage and you label it instinctively. And when the facts of Scripture are all in your head and heart, you can safely trust the Holy Spirit to interpret those facts, and you need not that any man teach you, and therefore the only thing to seek and to secure is to become familiar with the contents of the Word—thoroughly cognizant of all the facts of Scripture, and read them so often that you see them on the page where they occur, even with closed eyes. In that way, a man with one book, if that book be the Bible, has a large and liberal culture and an education that will serve manifold purposes in solving the problems and bearing the burdens and discharging the duties of daily life.

Christian workers must be taught and trained. To teach is to cause to know; to train is to cause to do; knowing and doing are related as a means to an end, as a cause and effect. “If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.” Theory precedes practice. How could a man ever do anything unless he knows how it ought to be done? We not only have to be taught, we have to be trained. We must learn the theory, we must acquire the practice and knowledge as a means to an end. I shall briefly mention seven conditions under which Bible study may be prosecuted with success.