Knowable Word

Helping ordinary people learn to study the Bible

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Don’t Make Meditation Too Difficult

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In his last post, my co-blogger Ryan mentioned meditation as a wonderful way to grow in our understanding of, love for, and obedience to God. Tim Challies would agree, and in his recent article, “Maybe We Make Meditation Too Difficult,” Challies encourages us all to find some way to work this practice into our spiritual disciplines.

What is meditation? Meditation is pondering the words of the Bible with the goal of better understanding and sharper application. Ideally, meditation leads us to understand the words we have read and to know how God may call us to work them out in our lives. It is one of the ways that we output wisdom after inputting knowledge.

Challies explains the natural tendency to turn meditation into something quite abstract, solitary, and scripted. He offers suggestions on ways we can each adapt the discipline of meditation to our own preferences and personalities.

Check it out!

A Visual Theology Guide to the Bible

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When the newest Visual Theology book arrived in the mail, my daughters had the same initial reaction: Whoa, this is cool! It’s easy to see why they were excited.

A mixture of text and eye-grabbing graphics, this book is a great introduction to the Bible. It is a manual and reference book that will serve the church for many years, and I’m glad that Tim Challies and Josh Byers have created it.

Part 1: Trusting the Bible

Making no assumptions that readers of this book were raised in church, A Visual Theology Guide to the Bible begins with an introduction to the Bible. The first part of the book then explains why we can trust the Bible.

The questions that are addressed in part 1 are some of the most common and most important of our time: How was the Bible written? What makes the Bible unique? Can we trust the Bible? I found the section on the formation of the New Testament canon (pages 40–49) fascinating.

The infographics, charts, and illustrations throughout the book are visually stunning and stuffed with helpful information. The bold colors and striking shapes complement a creative use of pictures and graphs. In part 1, the timeline for the authorship of Old Testament books (pages 38–39) is a highlight.

Part 2: Studying the Bible

The second part of the book concerns studying the Bible, and chapter six provides seven reasons to do just that.

  1. Know God
  2. Know God’s will
  3. Become godly
  4. Bear fruit
  5. Defend yourself
  6. Fuel your prayers
  7. Fuel your joy

After explaining each of these reasons briefly, chapter seven addresses the important matter of how to study the Bible. Readers of this blog will find themselves in familiar territory (with familiar terminology) here, as the book offers an excellent primer on the Observe-Interpret-Apply Bible study method. There are some nice pointers about Bible memorization in this chapter as well.

Part 3: Seeing the Bible

The third and longest part of this book offers an overview of different sections of the Bible. In chapter 8, the authors lay out the main thrust of God’s Word.

We, too, miss the main point of the Bible if we fail to see and discover Jesus in all the Scriptures. Yes, the Bible is a book about God. But even more specifically, the Bible is a story about God’s plan of salvation for us in Jesus Christ. As we read God’s Word from Genesis to Revelation, we discover the Son of God, who came to save us from our sins. (A Visual Theology Guide to the Bible, page 105)

It’s hard to miss the focus on Jesus in this portion of the book. Every chapter title connects a section of the Bible to an aspect of God’s plan to send Jesus. I appreciate the way these chapters set the information and narratives of these groups of biblical books within the larger context of redemptive history.

It’s hard to pick one favorite infographic from part 3. Here are three at the top of my list.

  • The timeline of the kings and prophets of Israel and Judah (page 143) is excellent. I have trouble remembering these historical sequences, so I’m sure I’ll use this as a reference.
  • On page 148, the Psalms are grouped and categorized by book, author, type (lament, thanksgiving, etc.), whether the psalm is an acrostic, and whether the psalm is messianic. I’ve never seen a chart quite like this.
  • A breakdown of the last week of Jesus’s life is on page 177. The events of this week are organized chronologically (by day) and by location (Bethany, Mount of Olives, etc.), with relevant locations in each Gospel listed.

A Great Resource

As I paged through this book, I couldn’t help but think about how timely it is. Biblical literacy is low, so the church needs an accessible introduction to our holy book. And the combination of succinct, punchy text and beautiful graphics meets modern readers where they are.

This book is part a larger visual theology project by Challies and Byers, about which you can learn more here. This endeavor seems to have a sound vision driving it. Challies and Byers use words where description and explanation are needed, and they use pictures and illustrations to highlight space, proportion, sequence, similarity, or time.

I highly recommend this book. It will appeal to children (starting, I’d guess, at age 8 or 9). But it is a great reference for Bible readers and students of all ages.

You can purchase this book at Amazon and the Westminster Bookstore, among other retailers. (At the time of this writing, the prices at Amazon and WTS were virtually identical.)

Disclaimer: The links to Amazon and Westminster Bookstore in this post are affiliate links.

The Hottest Thing at Church Today

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Tim Challies refers to a new trend:

According to a new study by Gallup, the hottest thing at church today is not the worship and not the pastor. It’s not the smoke and lights and it’s not the hip and relevant youth programs. It’s not even the organic, fair trade coffee at the cafe. The hottest thing at church today is the preaching. Not only is it the preaching, but a very specific form of it—preaching based on the Bible. And just like that, decades of church growth bunkum is thrown under the bus. As Christianity Today says, “Despite a new wave of contemporary church buzzwords like relational, relevant, and intentional, people who show up on Sundays are looking for the same thing that has long anchored most services: preaching centered on the Bible.” Praise God.

Challies goes on to commend this trend, delighting in the reality that God’s children do, in fact, desire the pure milk of the word. However, he also wisely cautions:

I’m glad to read these results. I’m glad that God’s people are choosing God’s Word. But I don’t want pastors and their churches to jump on the biblical exposition bandwagon. Instead, I want them to search the Scriptures, to see what God says about the relationship of his people to his Word, to understand the purpose of the weekly gatherings of the local church, and then to commit from this day forward to preach God’s Word to God’s people.

Here’s the thing: Eventually Gallup or Barna or someone else will come up with a new poll that will display new results and mere bandwagoners will veer to this new course. Their deep-rooted pragmatism will drive them to the next big thing. But people who are convinced from the Bible that there is nothing better than to preach the Bible will stay the course. Even when Bible-based preaching is the very last thing people want, these pastors will know it is the very first thing they need.

His reflections are well worth considering. Check it out!

One Very Good Reason to Read Your Bible

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Tim Challies writes of “One Very Good Reason to Read Your Bible.” And he’s absolutely right. This is about the best reason I can think of.

One of the great dangers in the Christian life is living first for self. One of the associated dangers, then, is seeing personal devotion as a practice that goes no further than my own mind, my own heart. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Your intimacy with God, your knowledge of God, your time with God, works its way outward to everyone around you. The good you can do them every day is the good of spending time with God.

Challies expands on how your daily Bible reading will benefit your spouse, your children, your neighbors, and your fellow church members. If you think you are not smart enough, or you are too busy—or if you ever struggle with finding the Bible too boring or Bible study too complicated—please lift your eyes off yourself and consider the good God would have you do for those around you. There is too much to lose if you don’t read your Bible.

Challies’s article is excellent and worth full consideration. Check it out!

The Only Way to Learn

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Last week, Tim Challies wrote a great article called “The Hidden Beauty of a Bad Sermon.” Challies describes all the poor sermons he sat through at his church, because they were training young preachers. And Challies simply knocks it out of the park when he describes the only way a young preacher can learn to preach:

A man can read a hundred books on preaching and watch a thousand sermons on YouTube, but the only way he will really learn to preach is to preach. Sooner or later he will simply need to stand behind a pulpit, open his Bible, and launch into his introduction (assuming he remembers to actually prepare one). There are not many preachers who get away without preaching a few stinkers along the way. There are not many preachers who can become skilled without first being novices, who can grow into excellence without first being mediocre or average.

In light of my recent reflections on why it’s hard to delegate responsibility and how we need to take more risks in training ministry apprentices, I found Challies’s article timely. Though Challies singles out preachers, his comments apply equally to any teacher or Bible study leader.

Young preachers, new preachers, preach bad sermons. They preach bad sermons as they learn to preach good sermons. And in some ways, those bad sermons serve as a mark of a church’s health and strength because they prove that the church is fulfilling its mandate to raise up the next generation of preachers and the one after that. They prove that the church refuses to be so driven by a desire to display excellence that they will not risk the occasional dud. They prove that the congregation is mature enough to endure and even appreciate these first, messy attempts. There is hidden beauty, hidden value, in these bad sermons.

I wish I could quote the whole article. Check it out!

Infographic Comparing Study Bibles

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I’ve reviewed a number of study Bibles this year, and I was planning to write a post comparing and contrasting them so you’d have the basic info all in one place. But Tim Challies beat me to it, and his infographic is much prettier than mine would have been.

Challies compares the following 7 study Bibles (links go to my reviews):

I’ve also reviewed the following volumes:

In the next few weeks, I’d like to create a chart evaluating each study Bible in light of the overall blessings and curses of study Bibles. But the Challies infographic gives you most of the basic information (translations available, number of pages and articles, etc.) at a glance.

Check it out!

The Delicious, Undiluted Word

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Tim Challies draws a comparison between drinking his coffee straight and hearing the Bible taught straight (section-by-section rather than jumping around verse to verse).

Then one day we visited another church in the area and an amazing thing happened: The pastor simply preached a text. He opened the Bible, he told us what it said, and he told us why it mattered. It was a tough text, but he did not water it down or run from it. He felt no need to add to it or adapt it. He just preached it. And it was amazing. Once we had tasted that undiluted Word, we realized how delicious it really was. We were ruined to anything less. We still are.

He’s absolutely right about how delicious the undiluted word is.

But he couldn’t be any more wrong about coffee, though. The foul stuff poisons no matter how one takes it.

Check it out!

What Did It Mean to Them?

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Last week, Tim Challies reflected on the “One Indispensable Rule” that must guide our interpretation and application of Scripture.

Proper understanding and interpretation is dependent on one indispensable rule: Before you ask, “What does it mean to us now?”, ask “What did it mean to them then?” In other words, before you attempt to apply the Bible to your life and circumstances, anchor it in the lives and circumstances of its original recipients. Application must be related to meaning.

Challies gives an example of a common error. In our efforts to get practical, we read verses apart from their context and arrive at applications the original audience never would have known. Sometimes our applications might still be good, but false teachers can use the same methodology to promote evil ends. It’s worth it to learn to read the Scriptures well!

Challies’s short article is well worth reading. Check it out!

A Revival We Can Get Behind

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Last week, Tim Challies posted some reflections on a recent upsurge among evangelicals to help ordinary Christians become people of the Word. Within a matter of months, we saw the publication of my book, the publication of Kevin DeYoung’s new book, and the launch of John Piper’s “Look at the Book” conference and online video series.

Challies writes:

Nobody planned this unusual confluence of events, and I doubt that the teams that came up with these similar book and conference titles had anyone in common. I’m hoping this is an indication that God is on the move to exalt his Word even higher within the Church. That’s a revival I can get behind 100%.

Challies goes on to reproduce Tedd Tripp’s entire Foreword from my book.

If you’d like to see more, check it out!