I've Been Reading My Bible For Years. Last Tuesday, I Realised I Don't Actually Understand Any Of It.

It was a Tuesday night, around 10pm.

My grandchildren were asleep down the hall.

I was sitting at the kitchen table with my Bible open to Leviticus.

The same place I'd stopped the last three times I tried to read through the year.

I'd been staring at chapter 5 for twenty minutes.

I was reading the words.

I understood what the individual words meant.

But I had no idea why any of it was in my Bible, or what I was supposed to do with it.

I closed the book quietly. And I felt, again, that small familiar shame.

That I'd been a Christian for forty-four years and I still didn't really understand my own Bible.

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I'm Linda. I'm 61.

My daughter is grown and my grandkids are getting to the age where they ask the questions I cannot answer.

I try.

I've tried for years.

Reading plans, devotionals, the Bible app, the podcast where the guy reads the whole Bible to you.

I've been showing up. What I can't do is understand what I'm reading once I get there.

The problem was never consistency. It was comprehension.

Here's what I finally figured out.

Every plan I had ever tried handed me three chapters of Leviticus and expected me to already understand them.

I didn't.

Nobody had ever taught me what Leviticus was actually for.

Or what to do with the genealogies in Matthew. Or what "justified by faith" means.

I was reading the words and the meaning wasn't landing.

Every time I pushed through anyway, I ended the week feeling stupid.

Showing up faithfully in that state made me feel further from God across the week.

That is why I kept quitting.

It's always the same wall.

Genesis is fine.

Exodus is mostly fine.

Then Leviticus hits and I'm reading about sacrifices and dietary rules and I don't know why any of it matters to me.

I've been hitting this same wall for years.

Every pastor I've asked has told me to push through.

None of them ever told me what it's for.

I didn't know that yet. At that point, I was still trying to fix the wrong thing.

None of it worked because none of it was solving the problem I actually had.

I figured it out, finally, in a small group of women drinking bad coffee in the church basement.

Two Wednesdays later I was at our women's morning group.

Six of us in the church basement with bad coffee.

I finally said it out loud.

"Do any of you actually understand what you're reading when you open your Bible?"

Then Margaret, who has been in that church longer than I've been alive, said:

Paula, the pastor's wife, laughed and said:

Then Megan, who almost never talks, started crying:

We all sat there for a minute. It was one of those moments where nobody has anything to say because we've all said it at once.

We were all reading faithfully.

None of us understood.

I drove home from that meeting feeling something I hadn't felt in years.

Not better.

Just not alone.

But not alone doesn't fix it.

I still didn't have an answer.

I got one the next morning, from someone I barely knew.

My mother-in-law came over for lunch on a Saturday.

She is 74 and she has read her Bible every morning for half a century.

I didn't plan on saying anything.

I just watched her flip through a spiral-bound book on the kitchen counter before she opened her Bible.

"What's that?" I asked.

She held it up. "It's my study companion. I wish I'd had it fifty years ago."

"Here's how it works," she said.

"It's a 52-week study."

"One theme a week."

"Before you read anything, there's a short piece at the front of the week that tells you what you're about to get into."

"What it's about, why it was written, what to watch for."

"Then seven short readings for the week. You read them out of your own Bible."

"Doesn't matter what version you have."

"And then three questions at the end of the week to actually think about what you read."

I asked her if it worked with any Bible.

"Any Bible. I use an old NIV I got at my wedding."

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That night, after the kids were in bed, I ordered one.

I didn't overthink it.

It was twenty-nine dollars.

I'd spent more than that on three journals I never finished.

Two days later a package showed up.

I sat at the table with my Bible and opened it.

I turned to the first week.

The introduction at the top of the page was a paragraph long.

It explained that the Gospel of John was written late, after Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and that John had one specific thing he was trying to prove: that Jesus was God in a body.

And that John opens his gospel by deliberately echoing Genesis, "In the beginning," to show that Jesus was there when the world was made.

Then I turned to John 1 in my own Bible and read the first fourteen verses.

And for the first time in forty-four years I understood what I was reading.

"In the beginning was the Word"

was John telling me, in the plainest way he knew how, that Jesus is God, that He was there at creation, and that He came down in a body to rescue us.

I closed my Bible and my journal.

I sat at the kitchen table and I cried for about ten minutes.

Quiet tears. A kind I hadn't had before.

That was week one. Here's what the next two months looked like.

START WEEK 1 TODAY

If you've been faithfully reading your Bible for years and still don't really understand it, I want you to know something.

You have been faithful.

Every plan you have tried has handed you the chapters and expected you to already understand them, and nobody ever taught you how.

That's the missing step.

The study I use sits next to my Bible every morning.

It explains what I am about to read before I read it.

Two minutes of what's happening this week, why it was written, what to watch for.

And then I open my own Bible and it lands.

It is still in stock as I'm writing this.

The whole thing, right now, is up to 62% off, and a free pen pack comes with every order while they have them.

I'm telling you this because it is true and because if I had known about this five years ago, my last five years of Bible reading would have been completely different.

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