Beginner’s Bible Study: The goal is not to understand the Bible, it is to become closer to God so we can glorify Him better.

We all need to have the proper goal when we start.  Reading the Bible and understanding it better will bring us closer to God, which will help us bring Him glory.  In the broadest sense, that really is what life is all about.  Sometimes we look so closely at the trees, we don’t see the forest.  Lets first spend a little time discussing this larger goal and how reading the Bible fits into this much larger goal.

Becoming closer to Jesus requires three major efforts for all of your life.  Imagine you have a 1,000 piece puzzle, or a better representation is a 10,000 piece puzzle.  Now divide the pieces into 3 “piles”.  You could spend all the time and energy you want on any 1 pile (or even any 2 piles), and you will never get the puzzle put together.  Even if you spent a year with one pile, and a year with the next, and a year with the third, you wouldn’t get the puzzle together.  You need to work with all 3 “piles” at the same time.  So it is with our relationship with Jesus.  There are 3 large areas of discipline, and we need to work at all of them.  Now thankfully Jesus doesn’t require us to be perfect at all of them, just working at all of them.  These three areas are:

  1. Prayer – Communicating with God  Both individual and group.
  2. Studying the Bible, his Word
  3. Living a constantly changing life (allowing the first two to do their work!)

We will look at these areas one at a time in the next few posts.

Have you ever experienced the Holy Spirit opening your mind and heart to something you read in the Bible?  Would you share the story with us?

Are there other major areas of our Christian life outside these three that I missed?

Does the puzzle analogy make sense to you?  Can you think of another analogy?

Beginner’s Online Bible Study *obbs*