Last week our intern Eric Johnson wrote a helpful blog post with the catchy title, The Very Best Way to Read the Bible.
Perhaps not coincidentally I was listening to Ian Morgan Cron’s fictional reflection on the life of St. Francis (Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale) while commuting back and forth to a pastors’ retreat. In this book, I was introduced to Francis’ very best way of reading the Bible.
Most of the time we read Scripture, we take something like this approach:
- Read
- Understand (or seek to understand)
- Do
Francis’ approach reverses the order of the last two, so the sequence becomes:
- Read
- Do
- (in the doing), Understand
I like this approach because it emphasizes that it is in doing what God invites through the Bible that we better understand what God is saying to us.
Perhaps doing (obedience) and understanding are meant to be woven together seamlessly.