I pretty much loathe most books that fall under the genre “devotional”. Please never buy me Chicken Soup for the Soul, or some Christianized equivalent. I think too often people try to read the Bible like devotional material; that is they want a cute little story that will leave them felling encouraged, fuzzy, or confident. My major fuss with devotional material is that they treat the text as a three year old does a piece of play dough; they want to say something fun and they contort the scripture so that it fits their scheme. Devotionals are kool-aid, and pardon my analogy but I want a man-drink spiritually, give me a beer. With devotionals the holy is absent, you don’t have to query the text, wrestle with the text, pray over the text, cry over the text. No one ever remembers those ridiculous stories from Chicken Soup, they don’t impact your living in a profound lasting way; at least they don’t for me. But there have been moments; holy moments where after thrusting myself into God’s Word by His grace I, like Jacob, deem that spot Bethel, for God was there.
Don’t settle for Hallmark clichés that sound spiritual. Invest in a good expensive bible, if ever you are going to spend over a hundred dollars on one book, make it a good Bible. Consult commentaries, don’t scratch surfaces, dig into the depths and discover amazing underground worlds that lie beneath. Get a concordance, and make sure you own a Bible with cross references, and look up other instances of key words. Study through books, don’t play Russian roulette with the Bible; what God wanted to say was said within a structure, don’t violate that structure. Set aside time, chip away bit by bit, day after day, don’t move on two quickly, chew slowly and savor all the flavors. Stare at the text, and when it doesn’t makes sense, doesn’t stir your soul, keep staring, keep studying, keep praying, and beg God to ‘do’ that text in your heart. Pray! Soak your study time with prayer. Study that is not doused in prayer can quickly become dry archeology, arrogant academics, and flippant trivia. When study ceases to be mixed with prayer it ceases to be worshipful communion with God.
So go, pick up you Bible, seek to make it the air you breathe, the water you swim in, the food you eat, and the lens through which you view the world.
No Other Boast 
Great post, Josh. The closer you read the Bible and the more you break it down, the more you can see that what’s being said is too profound to be crammed into a catchphrase or a few simple lines. The more you question the text – why does it say this here? what is left out? how does this verse shed light on the verse from last chapter? – the more doubts it can raise because often I find that what I thought a passage meant doesn’t actually say that at all. The moments of uncertainty and doubt can be challenging for one’s faith, but when it starts to come together again in a new way, your faith and conviction is strengthened. Our faith must be painfully tested and purified to become a more authentic holy faith.
So it is essential to dive into the text head first, unafraid of how it might shake your safe foundations, because if you keep at it, it’s going to change you. You’ll see beautiful truths that you can’t glean off of a surface reading of a passage, and you’ll begin to see how profound something really is that before might have seemed easy to understand. And this never stops – there’s never a point where you finally have it all figured out – but God keeps revealing himself over and over no matter how many times you study his Word.
This is definitely something I need to work on. Reading yet another difficult book is often the last thing I want to do after spending all day trying to understand 4000 other things for school, so this usually only happens at a weekly Bible study I go to. But that’s a matter of my priorities not being where they should be.
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Josh, I’m so very thankful that you added the “best of” sidebar. I read on a feed reader, so this is my first time actually seeing it… although I remember you mentioning requests for what to add. This post is from before I started reading your blog, and what a good one it is! Ironically, you posted this around the same time I was reading huge chunks of Scripture at a time. For instance, I read Romans in three sittings. That enabled me to get through a whole lot in a relatively short time. It exposed me to what was there. God’s given me the grace to remember a lot of phrases, so I’m able to look them up in a concordance. But for all the benefits that had, it didn’t really soak in.
I first realized how important it is to read Scripture slowly while reading Desiring God in Jan. 2010. I’m not sure if it had this illustration, or prompted me to think of it. Reading big chunks of Scripture is like a torrential downpour. Some water sinks into the ground, but most of it floods and runs down the gutter into the sewer. Slowly reading Scripture is like a steady drizzle over many days. It allows the water to soak deep in the ground, which 1) nourish plants much longer, and 2) allows roots to grow deeper, so that when a tornado arrives, the tree isn’t uprooted.
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