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Welcome to Day 1489 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomBible Study – Start Now And Follow The Trail – 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 1489 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 continuing our series this week on Meditation Monday as we focus on Mastering Bible Study through a series of brief insights from Hebrew Scholar, Dr. Michael S. Heiser. Our current insights are focusing on study habits to build a strong foundation. Today let us meditate on:
 
Bible Study – Start Now And Follow The Trail·      Insight Twenty-Five: It’s Never Too Late To Start Studying the Bible
I’ve met people over the years who want to get serious about Bible study but think it’s too late. Some are new to the faith and “past their prime’ as they’d put it. Others have been Christians for decades but have never invested time to get into Scripture in a way that moves beyond occasionally reading the Bible. Most of the time, when people say those things. I know they aren’t making up an excuse. They do believe it’s too late. If that’s you, take this in the right spirit: that’s nonsense.
Studying the Bible is as easy as moving beyond reading in simple ways: looking up cross-references, using the concordance in the back of your Bible, reading through notes in a study Bible, thinking critically about what you see, and probing it with questions.
Experts like to say it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in something. That’s nonsense too, unless you want to be a sports Hall of Famer, perform surgery, practice law, or be a lead chef at a five-star restaurant. I’m not talking about getting a Ph.D. in biblical studies. That isn’t a requirement for being a serious Bible student. I’m talking about becoming proficient at using specific techniques and tools and then being tenacious in their use. Five minutes a day, every day, will achieve that. I know because I’ve done it.
Proficiency in Bible study is about perseverance, not intellect or intuition. Most of the things we’d consider ourselves good at are like that. Sure, you can read about a kid who has a photographic memory and became a chess grandmaster before he was ten, but 99.9 percent of chess experts aren’t that kid. They got to their proficiency through repetition.

Age is no obstacle to this, either. An eighty-year-old who devotes time every day to Bible study has a year’s worth of experience (and knowledge) by their next birthday, precisely the same as if a thirty-year-old did it. What matters is doing it. The mind has an amazing ability to store information and recognize patterns. It just has to be trained through repetition.
So don’t put off getting into Scripture. Everyone you know will be a year older at this time next year, but only those who engage in Bible study will know Scripture any better....