Why is it important to study the Bible? In this video, author and Bible teacher, Katie Orr, breaks down that question and explains how Bible study and our understanding of the Bible affects every part of our life, but most importantly, our view of God.
The entire video is above, and the complete transcript is below.
I’ve coached a lot of women on how to study the Bible. And I have gone through my own journey of studying the Bible. It’s been ups; it’s been downs. Before I started really taking it seriously though, I had to get to a point where I was asking myself, “Why is it important to study the Bible?” Not just do it because it’s what we’re supposed to do as Christians, but why study the Bible?
It was so important for me to hear and to understand – and this is what I try to tell women over and over and over again – that, as A.W. Tozer so well put, “The most important thing about us is what we believe about God.”
If our view of God is off, which it always is in the sinful world. My view of God is always skewed. So I need to do the work of continually conforming my mind to Who God really is. The only way I know Who God really is, is through His revealed Word. He has given us the Bible, His Word. We call it the Word of God because it is that very thing. It is God’s words to us, revealing to us Who He is. And so I can’t know God better without being in the Word of God.
That is why it’s so important. Once I started to see that my view of God was so off – I saw Him as powerful, I saw Him as holy, I saw Him in right ways in a lot of ways, but I did not see Him as near, I did not see Him as intimate, I did not see Him as a God Who knows and sees me.
That affected my actions. So when I sinned, when I messed up, instead of running to a gracious, loving God, I ran away from a God that I thought was crossing His arms and tapping His foot and saying, “Katie, why can’t you just get it together?”
But when I started getting in the Bible and I started seeing that that is not Who God is, it changed my life – my entire Christian life, understanding how and why to study the Bible.
Another trap that I find, at least women tend to – I’m sure men struggle with this too – but we get into this trap then of studying the Bible, because we do want to know God better. We start to enjoy reading and studying the Word, but then we get into this trap of feeling like it’s something to achieve. It’s just something on my to-do list that I’ve got to get done and if I don’t get it done, someone’s going to find out about that and I’m going to be kind of like a second-class Christian or something, because I don’t read my Bible everyday.
When I starting seeing that the Word of God is something to enjoy instead of something to do, something to achieve, that was another place in my life that really propelled me forward spiritually.
I had to realize that the end goal of Bible study was not just to do it. The end goal of Bible study is to worship God. So I studied the Bible so that I know God better and that I worship Him more and more.