Starting a daily Bible Study pt. 3

This week I’ve been writing a series of posts with some ideas on how to implement and use the GPS daily Bible reading guide. So far, I’ve written about the need to find a specific time each day to spend in daily devotion as well as the idea of establishing a “sacred space” for you to focus. Today, I want to talk about one of the most critical elements of this process we might think of as “reflection.”

The pace of our modern lives does not lend itself to spending a great deal of our time in reflection. Consequently, for many of us, it has become a foreign idea. In the context of daily Bible study, we might think of reflection in two different ways.

First, reflection is simply engaging in serious thought and consideration. It implies that we are giving an ample amount of time as well as the appropriate amount of “brain space” to thinking about what we have read and what God might be saying to us as we engage the Bible. Establishing “sacred space” is a key element of this in that serious thought also implies the elimination of other distractions. In this way, we might think of reading and studying the Bible as focusing on a beautiful piece of art or the experience of soaking up the image of a beautiful mountain sunrise. It’s about taking time to appreciate the full picture.

We might  also think about reflection in another way. None of us have ever seen our own faces, and yet we all have some sense of what we look like because we have seen a reflection of ourselves. In the same way that we might look into a mirror to understand what we look like so we also look into the Bible to see who we are in light of the word from God that we find there. In other words, reading the Bible is about growing in the knowledge of God, but it also about growing in our understanding of ourselves. We are meant to find ourselves in the story, and allow that story to speak truth into our lives.

Let me give you an example of what that looks like.

When I first became serious about studying the Bible my freshman year of High School, my youth pastor gave me a really easy to remember process for engaging in reflection. The process he outlined for me was centered around three simple questions.

• What does this text say about God?
• What does this text say about us?
• What does this text say about the relationship between God and us?

He even gave us an acronym to remember these three questions: GUR. [God, Us, Relationship] This process of reflection still guides me today, and I share it with the hopes that it might be a benefit to others as well.

Tomorrow, I will share the last post of this series in which I will be talking about the benefiting of creating an “archive” of our walk with God.

Categories: Bible Study, GPS