Quotes about Study

The Bible wasn't meant merely to be read. It was meant to be prayed through, meditated on, and lived out. If all you do is read it, all you've done is audit the Word of God. And you don't get credit for an audit. You've simply been educated beyond the level of your obedience.

Neurologically speaking, that is what we do when we study Scripture. We are literally upgrading our minds by downloading the mind of Christ.

Learning is the heart of discipleship. You can't just take up your cross daily. You need to take up the Bible every day.

Don't walk away at the first sign of a contradiction or a problem. Sometimes scientific study needs to play catch-up to the Bible.

In a study, scientists report that drinking beer can be good for the liver. I'm sorry, did I say 'scientists'? I meant Irish people.

There were times when he could not read the face he had studied so long, and when this lonely girl was a greater mystery to him than any women of the world...

One learns more of Christ in being married and rearing children than in several lifetimes spent in study in a monastery.

I only ask in all kindness that the man who wishes at this time to have my books will by no means let them be a hindrance to his own study of the Scriptures, but read them as I read the orders and the ordures of the pope[5] and the books of the sophists.

As I have always both offered and desired peace so that I might devote myself to quieter and more useful studies, and have stormed with such great fury merely for the purpose of overwhelming my unequal opponents by the volume and violence of words no less than of intellect, I not only gladly ceased but also joyfully and thankfully considered this suggestion a very welcome kindness to me, provided our hope could be realized.

The only sure rule is to remember that the Bible is indeed God's gift to the church, to equip that church for its work in the world, and that serious study of it can and should become one of the places where, and the means by which, heaven and earth interlock and God's future purposes arrive in the present.

Many in the church have turned their back on serious study, and have embraced an anti-intellectualism which refuses to learn anything from scholarship at all lest it corrupt their pure faith. It is time to end this standoff, and to reestablish a hermeneutic of trust (itself a sign of the gospel!) in place of the hermeneutic of suspicion which the church has so disastrously borrowed from the postmodern world.

Among other beliefs, I hold more firmly than ever to the conviction that serious study of Jesus and the gospels is best done within the context of a worshipping community.