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Welcome to Day 1434 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomBible Study Requires Discipline – Meditation MondayWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. This is Day 1434 of our Trek, and it is time for Meditation Monday. Taking time to relax, refocus, and reprioritize our lives is crucial in order to create a living legacy. For you, it may just be time alone for quiet reflection. You may utilize structured meditation practices. In my life, Meditation includes reading and reflecting on God’s Word and in prayer. It is a time to renew my mind, refocus on what is most important, and making sure that I am nurturing my soul, mind, and body. As you come along with me on our trek each Meditation Monday, it is my hope and prayer that you, too, will experience a time for reflection and renewing of your mind. 


We are going to begin a new series this week on Meditation Monday, which will focus on Mastering Bible Study through a series of brief insights from Dr. Michael Heiser. Our first few insights will focus on study habits to build a strong foundation. Today let us meditate on:


Bible Study Requires Discipline·      Insight Three: Bible Reading is not Bible StudyYou should read your Bible. That’s obvious for Christians, and I’d dispense that piece of advice to anyone. But reading the Bible is not where our engagement with the Bible ends. It’s where it begins. You need to go beyond reading the Bible to a serious study of the Bible. The first step is to realize there’s a significant difference between reading and studying.


Reading is casual, something done for pleasure. The motivation is personal gratification or enrichment, not mastery of the content. Bible reading has as its aim private delight or personal application for our lives and relationship with God. Bible reading is inherently devotional and low maintenance.


Bible study, on the other hand, involves concentration and exertion. We have an intuitive sense that study requires some sort of method or technique and probably certain types of tools or aids. When we study the Bible, we’re asking questions, thinking about context, forming judgments, and looking for more information.


It’s not hard to illustrate the difference. Almost anyone can make a cup of coffee, but they’re not baristas. We know instinctively that both perform the same basic task, but what distinguishes the barista is a lot of time, effort, research, and experience in learned technique. It’s the same with Bible study.


Let’s try another coffee illustration. Let’s say you and your friend were from the moon and didn’t know what coffee was. You’re only mildly interested in the topic, so you decide to look it up in a dictionary. You read that coffee is ‘a popular beverage made from the roasted and pulverized seeds of a coffee plant. Good enough. You learned something. Your friend wants to know more —a lot more. How is coffee made? What’s the process? Is there more than one process? If so, why would there be different processes? Is there more than one kind of coffee bean? Where are the beans grown? Does that make any difference in color, aroma, or flavor? Is climate a consideration? How is coffee different than tea? If it’s a popular beverage, how much is consumed? Does consumption vary by country? State? Gender? Age? Whoa. She’s way over the top. And we know why. Her intensity of interest and willingness to expend effort tells us her aim is studying, not just reading. There’s a big...