I’ve been encountering difficulties reaidng Scripture. Sometimes I think the Biblical stories can become a bit too boring for me. Sometimes te literary style is just too difficult to read. I also encounter difficulties in reading because sometimes I read and I have no ideas what is the story talking about or what it supposes to teach me about God.
Many people told me to read and imagine, I tried, but it is hard 4 me to put myself in the scene. Can anyone help?
Welcome and thank you for your honesty. I think we all start reading the Bible this way.
You’re exactly right. Those are the questions we all have. I can’t quibble with any of the preceding comments. Those are all things that people do who want to “get into the Word.”
One of my tricks is to look for short books in the Bible. I read these so that I don’t feel overwhelmed, even though the short books are really “deep” as any of the longer ones.
Another thing that has worked for me is to read commentaries. Commentaries can drag things out, too. You might not like them, they may not help you.
To keep this short, another way to learn about the Bible is to read books on Catholic spirituality. These are books written for an adult intellectual level. I haven’t gotten far into it, but I took a recommendation from somebody here and got Ralph Martin’s “The Fulfillment of All Desire.”
Truthfully, I have looked at a couple other books on spirituality and they seem to have a feature in common that I like. They will talk about a topic and bring in the verses from scripture that they want to discuss. So, this way, they filter out the majority of verses that may distract or confuse the issue.
I’ve noticed that there are books on discipleship – how to be a disciple of Christ. Or, there my be a focus on prayer or pure spirituality – getting closer to God. Or, like you say, Christian conduct – how does God want us to live our life. These are usually very focused on scripture, so it puts you in the ballpark.
I haven’t been especially attracted to writings of saints, for example, where the focus may not be as much on scripture as I would like.
I went to group scripture studies for a couple of years, until I got my own bearings and sense of direction about what I wanted to do with studying scriptures.
I think a guy by the name of Mike Acquilina has a book with a title something like 150 verses of scripture that you should be familiar with. I haven’t read it. It may or may not be something you like. But, for a long while, I compiled my own list of verses that were very important to me and were very inspirational. This may be a very handy thing for you to do – write your own list of 150 verses (or more) that really stick with you.
I’ve never tried a web search on “favorite verses from the Bible” but there may be something out there that is very meaningful for you.
Read Psalm 1, slowly. A book I have says it’s the key to understanding all the Psalms. If you’re not the blessed man (woman) of Psalm 1, the rest of the psalms may not make sense to you (this author says).
The blessed man of Psalm 1, first and foremost, is Jesus Christ.
