Do you struggle to remember what you’ve read in the Bible?
You are not alone.
Many Christians read the Bible like they read a popular novel—they read it, enjoy it, and forget most of the details. The book is unmarked and still looks new!
But here is the problem…
St. Jerome taught that “ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.” If you take this seriously, it means when you forget a truth of the Bible, you forget a truth about Jesus. To draw close to Christ, you have to know how to retain what you read and make it a part of you.
What you need is the coupling of modern, practical reading skills with the ancient senses of Scripture. You want to read like a saint and a scholar.
Let’s see how to remember everything you read in the Bible—and how it can transform your life.
Come see.
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You Forget Because It Was Never Yours…
The famous proponent of the great books, Mortimer Adler, in his essay How to Mark a Book, drew a distinction every Bible reader needs to take to heart: physical ownership is not intellectual ownership. Many people own books. Few people understand them. You may own a Bible, but that does not mean you understand it. “Full ownership,” Adler wrote, “comes only when you have made the book a part of yourself.”
So, how is this done?
Well, Adler was talking about the great books—but the Bible is the great book. Even Christians who spend a lot of time reading other great books, like Homer or Plato, know that the Bible is different. How so?
The point of reading the Bible is not to know a book—it is to know a Person. Christianity is not a religion of a book but a religion of a Person, Jesus Christ. So, unlike other books, in the Bible you’re not primarily trying to understand a system of thought or the plot of a narrative—you’re coming to understand a living, relational Person.
In this way, retaining what you read in the Bible is less like learning a discipline and more like meeting a new person. It is relational (but not relative). When you build a new relationship, you learn things about the person, and it is vitally important to the new relationship that you recall what you know and build upon it. The relationship depends upon it.
But there are many reasons people fail to retain the knowledge of the Bible—and thus fail to retain their relationship to Christ. They read too fast. They fragment salvation history into atomized verses. They confuse memorizing popular verses with knowing the Bible. It is all jumbled and leads to a jumbled, shallow faith.
So, how do we fix this?
Let’s take Adler’s practical steps to attentive reading and couple them with ancient teachings on the hidden layers of the Bible.
In this way, the Bible comes alive—and reveals to you a living Person.
