How to Read Scripture

In June of 1990 we moved to Fort Worth, Texas and began to search for a church to attend. After visiting 2 other churches that were closer to where we lived, we discovered St Bartholomew Catholic Church on the southwest side of the city.

From the very first day we attended we knew that this church was different, this is where we needed to be. This was home, and remained that way until we moved to Odessa, Tx  in 2016.

Why did we consider it to be home? Three very distinct reason gave us this feeling. First as we walked in the door for the first time, there were people at the entrance to say hello to us, shake our hands and welcome us to St Bartholomew.

Second, before mass started the Pastor was walking around with a microphone asking new comers and visitors to introduce themselves.

Third, the Pastor gave his homily, not at the ambo, but out in front of the altar and he had his bible with him and read from it as he gave his homily.

That Pastor's name was Father Richard "Beau" Beaumont. Beau became our friend, teacher, mentor and above all, a model for us to follow. From delegating responsibility for ministry in the community to teaching bible studies, Beau was an exceptional pastor. I was given the great honor and privilege of being the homilist at the celebration of his 50th anniversary of Ordination to the Priesthood in May 2008, on the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, his anniversary date.

Beau taught a great many people on how to pray and how to read scriptures. One ministry in the community captured his homilies and bible studies on tape and produced written pamphlets and books for the community to learn and study from.  One such pamphlet was called "How to Read Scripture" and that is the subject of this blog. It was taken from a homily Beau gave and was written down to pass it to others to learn from.

How to Read Scripture

by Father Richard Beaumont

"I want to give you some suggestions about how to read scripture; because if you begin in the wrong way, you may get discouraged too easily and give up.

The first thing I want to suggest is not in itself the most important, but from a practical standpoint, I think it is the thing you need to remember the most: Read Scripture slowly. There is no hurry. There is no plot that you have to figure out. You don't have to figure our "who done it." You should already know that much about it. Jesus done it. He done all the good things. There is no timetable. You do not have to finish the Bible within a month or a year or ten years. The purpose of reading the Bible is to put yourself before the word of the God. The Epistle to the Hebrews says that the Word of God, speaking not about Jesus Himself, but about the Scriptures, is living and active and that it penetrates and divides.

So what we do, then, in reading Scripture is to put ourselves in the presence of that active, living Word and let it work within us. We read Scripture in an entirely different way than the way we read a novel, the way we read the daily paper, or the way we read a textbook. Even within the Bible, we read the different books in different ways. Just within the past week or two, for example, I spent 45 minutes just reading one chapter of Matthew's Gospel. Now I'm a slow reader, but I'm not that slow. Speed reading is not the way you want to learn the Word of God. You know the basic lines of the story. Much of it you've already heard. So, please, when you begin to read Scripture, read it slowly, let it speak to you, give it time, read it phrase by phrase, even, rather than verse by verse, let it sink in. Not all of it will sink in the first time or the 10th time. I saw things last week in Matthew's Gospel that I have not seen all the other times I've read the Scripture, but if I just went out and covered as many verses as I could in a certain length of time, then I would never see anything new. Let it speak to because it's living. Believe that.

Now there are other things more important in themselves about reading Scripture than just reading it slowly, One is to read it in faith, which means you need to believe that it is the Word of God and that it's a living and active Word that god wants to communicate with you. When I speak about faith, it means more than just believing that what is said is true, far more than that. It's a living faith meeting the Word of God; when they come together, there are fireworks inside. Let that happen.

There is another thing that's also more important than speed with which you read and that is prayer. Prayer in the more direct formal sense of trying to begin all Scripture reading with prayer; preferably not memorized prayer and preferably not the prayer to the Holy Spirit, because you can rattle through that and perhaps never pray. you can read Scripture in any position that you can get the most out of it. If you are a weirdo and like to read standing on your head because it circulates the blood in your brain, go ahead. How you do it is beside the point.

If you find you fall asleep every time you pray in one position, then it's time to change positions. Sometimes that's not bad by the way. When you find yourself trying to really come in contact with the Lord in prayer or in Scripture, and all of your Scripture reading ought to be prayer even if it's a serious study, an you find yourself getting drowsy and falling asleep, most of the time it's because you have been too wound up and God is simply giving you the peace that needs to be in your heart. So sometimes when you come before the Lord in prayer and He puts you to sleep,  the thing to do is not fight it. Go to sleep. Take a nap. You don't even have to move. Just fall asleep. Sometimes that's more important for you. In our society we get keyed up. We get tense very easily. A lot of things come at us. you have to discern what it is. Of course, you can't go on for five years falling asleep every time you open your Bible!

Back to prayer. Just talk to the Lord. Just tell Him what's in your heart. if you're just beginning, say, "lord, I'm new at this. Show me where to go and how to read. Speak to my heart so that this will not be an empty exercise but real contact and communion with You in Your Word." Now, don't try to memorize  what I've just said. Just in your own words talk to the Lord. I don't mean spend 20 minutes talking to the Lord and then two minutes reading the Bible. Let Him have most of the time. If you're going to give 15 minutes altogether, then give about a minute to just get yourself aware of God's presence and speak to Him, then shut up for 14 minutes and let the Lord speak to you through His Word. "Be still," Scripture says, "and know that I am God."

Now there are some other practical things I'd like to just mention. hopefully, I'm talking to people who want to make a decision to do this not as a trial for two days, three days, or three weeks, but who want to begin a habit that will last the rest of their lives: to daily read God's Word. Those are the people I am speaking to primarily, and that goes along with the idea that there is no timetable. See, if you're going to last three weeks at it, then I guess you better pick and choose carefully what parts of Scripture you're going to read. But what I am asking you to do is become daily, regular readers of the Bible; and for that reason, I recommend that you give significant portion of your Bible reading time to the to the Old Testament first because you will not completely understand the New Testament until you understand the Old. That's true despite the fact that it's a well known cliché, almost, that the New Testament is so much easier to understand than the Old Testament. Maybe it just seems to be easier to understand. You can't completely understand the New Testament if you don't know the Old Testament. I think I've shared with you before my own approach to John's Gospel over the last 30 years or so. Like many, when I was very new at Scripture reading, I enjoyed the Gospel of John because it is a prettier Gospel. It's a more beautiful Gospel. The images that it gives are more beautiful. Then as I learned many other parts of Scripture, John became less and less important to me almost to the point where I didn't look forward at all to reading John's Gospel. Then after that, came another stage when John again became important to me because I began to see things in it I never saw the first time. There's a whole layer underneath that you don't see until you know many other parts of Scripture and then you begin to understand John's Gospel a lot better.

It's hard for somebody just to jump into the Old Testament, period; so I recommend that you alternate. You can do that by reading from the Old Testament for 5 minutes, or 10 minutes, or however many minutes you're going to give to the Lord, then conclude with some New Testament reading.  Go back and forth. Generally, that is what I do. Currently I am reading from the Book of Psalms and the Gospel of Matthew. There is real advantage to doing that beside avoiding getting bogged down in some difficult places, like the Book of Psalms. To sit and read the Book of Psalms one after the other could get a little hard, and I don't recommend you do that. But also, what is said in the Old Testament is verified in the new Testament. The new Testament refers back to the Old Testament many time explicitly, and you'll find these strands going back and forth and being woven over and over and over again so that you have a really strong fabric of faith that is being developed in you simply by reading the Word of God.

Now I've kind of hinted at, but haven't said, that generally speaking I recommend that people have a definite sequential reading of the Scriptures. That is, that you begin in a particular place, or at least at the beginning of a particular book, and read the book all the way through. I'll tell you what I do, but I'm not saying you should do this necessarily. I begin in the beginning of the Old Testament and read all the way through the Bible; and with two readings going on, many times my readings are in the Old Testament and the New Testament. Sometimes both readings are in the Old Testament because it's bigger. Have some kind of pattern where you do not delude yourself by always going to the passages that you like. You can't learn that way. You're not letting God speak to you His whole Word if you restrict yourself only to those passages that please you.

The suggestions I've given to you up to this point are by no means complete. I could talk to you about a lot of other things, suggest other things that you ought to do, things that you ought to try to avoid, things that will help Scripture reading be more valuable for you; but I can't just keep going forever."