We’ve come to the end.

As stated in the introductory post, this series is designed to help you navigate the difficulties of engaging with the Bible. The Bible can feel overwhelming, intimidating, confusing, and mysterious.

But it doesn’t have to.

The Bible is God’s special revelation to us. It allows us to know God in ways we otherwise could not know Him. Nature proclaims the glory of God (Psalm 19:1–4), but the Bible is where God introduces Himself to humanity and describes what He is like. This is why we believe learning how to better understand the Bible allows us to get more of the inexhaustible God.

Over the course of this series, we’ve learned what the Bible is, how it got into the form we have it today, and how our English translations are still faithful to the original message (Parts 1–6).

Then, we learned how the Bible actually communicates to us. We discussed topics like authorial intent, historical context, literary context, grammar, the baggage and beliefs we bring to the text, and how to discern if a passage is prescriptive or descriptive (Parts 7–14).

Finally, we tackled Biblical Engagement. Here we learned the three ways we engage with the Bible: Reading, Studying, and Meditating. These three engagement methods allow us to receive God’s special revelation in different ways, but they all complement one another. Reading makes the Bible feel smaller, coherent, and we are able to notice repetition. Studying is where we investigate the text and arrive at faithful conclusions about the meaning of the text. Meditating is where we orbit around a small passage, word, concept, or verse and allow God to minister to us through it (Posts 15–18).

All of these concepts and practices work together to enhance our Biblical Engagement.

In concluding this series, we want to leave you with a few final thoughts:

Practice Yields Progress

The concepts and practices we’ve discussed will not be mastered overnight. They are a set of rhythms and skills that need to be developed and nurtured. You will get better at them as you consistently practice them. So, be patient, diligent, and persevere because God is worth the pursuit.

Confrontation Is Okay

Don’t be afraid to have your preunderstanding confronted. Humans tend to parrot those we listen to. Sometimes the insights we hear from others are helpful, sometimes they’re not. Regardless, we fill in the remaining gaps in our understanding with assumptions. These assumptions are often incomplete or inaccurate. This is why we always return to the text and seek to understand the intended meaning of the author. As we do this, our preunderstanding and assumptions get confronted, and we are left with a choice: will we cling to what we find preferable, or will we let go of what we wish the text means so that we can learn how to embrace and love what it actually means?

Too Much Work?

Maybe you like what we’ve outlined in this series, but you think it is too much work. That’s a common response. We don’t intend this to be a standard we use to club people over the head. Our heart at Get More Ministries is to help the people who are desperate for more of God gain traction in their pursuit of Him. We have dedicated both our professional and personal lives to pursuing God, and we’ve learned a lot about how the process of that pursuit plays out. So, we’d like to offer some light push-back to to this response:

1. This series is more focused on mindset shifts and expectations than actually prescribing a workload. We’ve introduced you to the mindsets, expectations, and rhythms we use in our academic and personal pursuit of God. These result in the experience of God through the Bible we’ve heard others say they wish they had.
2. Being a disciple of Jesus is about new life (John 1:12–13; 2 Corinthians 5:17), and that new life both requires us to live differently and results in us living differently when we pursue God (Ephesians 4:1–3, 11–16; Philippians 1:6). We’ve come to realize this is what many people desire more of, and we’ve also realized a consistent and intentional approach to Biblical Engagement places us on that trajectory.
3. Maturing into the new life of Christ plays out through incremental growth, so don’t assume you need to master our system of Biblical Engagement immediately. Begin working at it one concept at a time; one Biblical Engagement method at a time.

A Final Encouragement

We have met so many people who want more of God through Scripture but are terrified of Bibleing incorrectly. They sense that God is accessible through the Bible, but they also have an expectation that Bibleing has to yield a euphoric experience where they walk away feeling “man, God really spoke to me today.”

This is a burdensome expectation.

We as humans cannot ensure that expectation is met. That’s God’s role. Our role is to faithfully show up and know the following two things:

1. The Bible is God’s special revelation, which means He’s already speaking to us when we engage it. We do not need to assume the burden of ensuring He’s speaking to us. That’s literally what His written Word is for. This is why simply Reading the Bible is a valid method of Biblical Engagement because God is speaking to us when we Read His Word.
2. This removes the pressure we place upon ourselves to make sure we’re Bibleing in a way that God will acknowledge and respond. He’s already with us when we engage Scripture. We just need to be faithful and consistent in showing up.

God speaks to us through His Word. Thus, we learn more about Who He is, what He’s like, and how He’s designed us to be when we engage the Bible. These realizations produce incremental growth, which leads to maturity in Christ.

This realization has been incredibly encouraging for us, and we hope it is for you too.

Closing Thoughts

We hope this series has helped you. We hope it has given you the framework you’ve needed to pursue the longing you’ve had for more of God. We hope you will be able to look back and see how your understanding of God has grown and how it has resulted in maturity in Christ. Our prayer for you is the same one that Paul prayed for the Colossians:

“For this reason also, since the day we heard this, we haven’t stopped praying for you. We are asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, so that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, so that you may have great endurance and patience, joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the saints’ inheritance in the light. He has rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son he loves. In him we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”

(Colossians 1:9–14 CSB17)

May you continue seeking more of God through His Word, and may He fill you with the fullness of Himself.

Happy Bibleing!