I Love The Word

A New Year in the Bible

2 Tim 3:16-17

Pastor Jefferson M. Williams

Chenoa Baptist Church

1-06-2026

Learning to Read

I became a Christian on December 31, 1990. Soon afterward, my brother, who worked at a Christian bookstore bought me a NIV Study Bible with my name on it.

I treasured that Bible. I bought a case so I could carry it around. I put it on my desk where people could see it.

There was just one problem. I didn’t read it. It was a huge book with lots of strange names and things that I didn’t understand.

At that same time, I started listening to Christian music and artists like Steven Curtis Chapman, Michael W. Smith, Rich Mullins, Twila Paris, and Michael Card whose music was full of Scripture.

About six months into my Christian journey, I decided that I needed to read the Bible to understand God better and how to walk as Jesus did.

For months, I sat on the deck of my North Carolina chalet (which Maxine says was a shack) with a guitar and highlighter and read book after book, making notes of life events and things that God spoke to me. A lot of the notes are places where I found lyrics that I loved that came straight out of the Bible.

Eventually, I finished the whole Bible and I’ve been reading and listening to it ever since.

The number one way God speaks to us today is through His Word.

If that’s true, then why don’t more people read it?

Many of you made a New Year’s resolution to read your Bible. You know howe I know that? Because the number one podcast in Apple podcasts this week is “The Bible in a year.”

That may be your desire but you don’t even know how to start.

We are going to be in many different passages this morning, but you can turn to 2 Timothy 3:16-17 and hold your place there.

Prayer.

Famine in the Land

Research tells us that 88% of Americans own at least one Bible and the average household has five Bibles.

Now with the YouVersion Bible app (and others), more people have access to the Bible in their language than at any time in history.

But research also tells us that 48 % of Americans are completely disengaged from the Bible and 9% report that they read it sporadically.

The 2019 Discipleship Pathway Assessment study from Nashville-based LifeWay Research found those who regularly attend Protestant churches are inconsistent in their reading and thinking about Scripture.

A third of Americans who attend a Protestant church regularly (32%) say they read the Bible personally every day. Around a quarter (27%) say they read it a few times a week.

Fewer say they only read it once a week (12%), a few times a month (11%) or once a month (5%). Close to 1 in 8 (12%) admit they rarely or never read the Bible.

In the latest study, churchgoers aged 50 to 64 are more likely to say they read the Bible every day (35%) than adults under 50 (30%).

New Testament scholar Kent Barding wrote:

“Christians used to be known as people of the book - they memorized it, meditated on it, talked about it, and taught it to others. We don’t do that anymore, in a very real sense we are starving ourselves to death.”

The prophet Amos says the same thing:

“The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign Lord, “when I will send a famine through the land—not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. (Amos 8:11)

Michael Card has a song called “So Many Books” whose chorus is:

“So?many?books, so little?time

So many hunger,?so many blind

Starving for words, they must wait in the night

To open a Bible and move towards the Light”

All these stats aren’t meant to shame you or make you feel guilty if you aren’t in the habit of reading your Bible.

John Piper has tweeted, “Most Christians neglect their Bibles not out of conscious disloyalty to Jesus, but out of failure to plan a time and place and method to read it.”

If we believe the Bible is the primary way that God speaks to us, then we have to develop a plan for reading it, meditating on it, memorizing it, and making it part of our daily lives.

Eating your Bible

Author Nate Picowitz has encouraged us to “eat our Bibles.” How do we do that?

Jeremiah said,

“When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart’s delight, for I bear your name, Lord God Almighty.” (Jer 15:16)

Ezekiel literally ate the words of God:

“And he said to me, “Son of man, eat what is before you, eat this scroll; then go and speak to the people of Israel.” So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat.