Obstacle: I Cannot Seem to Make the Bible Come Alive
What do you do when the Bible study doesn’t seem to be interesting anymore – here are three practical strategies to change that.
Listen to the conversation above, then read on.
Another common reason people give for not studying the Bible is that they feel they seem to make the Bible come alive. If that thought has ever crossed your mind, you are in good company — and this post is for you. Below you will find three practical strategies that address this obstacle directly and give you a concrete place to start.
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Obstacle: I Cannot Seem to Make the Bible Come Alive
The Issue
You know the Bible. You have taught it. You prepare carefully, go deep, and do everything you can to make it engaging for the people in your group. And yet something is missing — in them, and if you are honest, sometimes in yourself. The Bible feels like information to be delivered rather than something alive that you are discovering together.
The problem is not the Bible. It is the approach. When we consistently receive the Bible pre-digested from someone else — even an excellent teacher — we never develop our own appetite for it. The energy that comes from personal discovery cannot be transferred. It has to be experienced firsthand. The most powerful thing a Bible teacher can do is not teach better content — it is give people the tools to make their own discoveries.
3 Strategies to Overcome This Obstacle
- Shift from telling to equipping.Instead of sharing what you found in the passage, give your group the passage in advance and ask them to come with one thing they noticed and one question they could not answer. Start the session with their observations before offering your own. What they discover themselves will stick far longer than what you tell them.
- Ask inductive questions.The three foundational questions of inductive Bible study — What do I see? What does it mean? How does it apply? — work just as well in a group as in private study. Build your group sessions around those questions rather than a lecture format. The role of the leader becomes a facilitator of discovery rather than a dispenser of information.
- Study the Bible personally before you prepare to teach it.There is a difference between studying the Bible for yourself and studying it in order to teach it. Both matter, but they produce different results. Before you open a commentary or begin preparing your lesson, spend time in the passage as a learner — not as a teacher. Write down what surprises you, what confuses you, and what moves you. That personal engagement will come through when you teach in a way that prepared content alone never will.
Source: Adapted from Hendricks, Howard G., and William D. Hendricks. Living by the Book: The Art and Science of Reading the Bible. Moody Publishers, 2007.