Free Living by the Book/Living by the Book Workbook Set by Howard G. Hendricks, William D. Hendricks

1 . Perhaps like her you’ve made an honest effort somewhere along the way to sit down and study God’s Word. You heard others talk about mining the riches of Scripture, and you wanted to grab a few nuggets for yourself. But after pouring a lot of time and energy into the process, things just didn’t pan out. The few specks of gold you did find weren’t worth the trouble. So in the end, you walked away from Bible study. Maybe others were profiting by it, but not you.
    May I suggest two reasons you failed to hit pay dirt: First, you didn’t know how to read. Second, you didn’t know what to look for.
    Now I don’t mean to insult you, but I do mean to instruct you. Our culture has made a radical shift in the last century from a word-based society of readers to an image-based society of viewers. The media of our time are movies, television, and the Internet, not books. As a result, unlike our forebears of just a few generations ago, we don’t know how to read. To a large extent, we have lost that art.
    And yet the Bible is a book, which means it must be read to be understood and appreciated. We’ve got to recapture the skills of reading if we want to become effective Bible students. So in this and the next few chapters, I want to offer instruction on how to read. Then later I’ll talk about what you need to look for.
    On eleven different occasions, Jesus said to the most well-read people of His time, “Have you never read?” Of course they had. They had spent all of their lives reading. But they didn’t
understand
what they had read.
    They were like a student I once came across in the library, dead asleep in front of a book. I thought I’d have some fun with him, so I stuck my head right down next to his ear and said, “Boo!” He just about went through the ceiling.
    “What in the world are you reading?” I asked him after he had rallied. “If it’s that exciting I want to be sure to assign it for one of my classes.”
    He laughed.
    “Is it funny?” I asked him.
    “It’s tragic,” he replied.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, I just realized I’m on page thirty-seven, and I don’t have the foggiest idea of what I’m reading.”
    He’s right. That is a tragedy. If you don’t understand what you are reading, then you are not reading—you are wasting time. I’m afraid that many people come away from the Bible having basically wasted their time, because if their life depended on it, they couldn’t tell you what they read.
    Is that the case for you? If so, let me give you three suggestions to help you to learn how to read:
L EARN TO R EAD B ETTER AND F ASTER
    There is a direct correlation between your ability to observe Scripture and your ability to read. So anything you can do to improve your reading skills will be a quantum leap in the direction of improving your observation skills as a student of the Bible.
    Yet I’ve discovered that an increasing number of graduates from our nation’s high schools and colleges have a very hard time reading. In fact, Iasked one of my seminary classes, “If you graduate from the university and you can’t read, you can’t write, and you can’t think, what can you do?”
    One wag hollered out, “Watch television.”
    Sad, but true. Years ago one of my children was halfway through first grade before I realized they weren’t teaching him how to read. So I went to complain to the teacher.
    “You don’t understand, Mr. Hendricks,” she told me. “The important thing is not that your child know how to read. The important thing is that he be happy.”
    Against my better judgment, I decided to let it go for a while. But at the end of the year I discovered that my child was disgustingly happy, yet couldn’t read. In fact, I went back to the teacher and said, “Did it ever occur to you that children might be happier if they knew how to read?”
    It cost me almost a month’s salary to put my child in a remedial reading program. But it was one of the best