Christian Women – Michelle Lesley

Originally published November 10, 2017

The mingled aromas of cakes and cookies, chips and dips and pasta salads, wafted from the kitchen into the living room and wove its way through the the quiet din of treble voices and joyful laughter sharing stories and recipes and tales of the work week.

Sunday School ladies were in the house.

I had invited them over for a time of fellowship and a brief discussion to gauge their interest in a women’s Bible study class I’d been hoping to start. Would any of them want to attend a weekly women’s Bible study? Which day of the week would be best? Morning or evening? Which book of the Bible or biblical topic would they like to study? My questions were met with a few polite and perfunctory answers until one of the ladies bravely ventured, “You know, we have good, solid preaching at our church, and we get great Bible study every week in our Sunday School class, but we never get to just sit around and visit and get to know each other better like we’re doing tonight. I think we need that more than another Bible study class.”

If I still had a hoop and could remember how to make a French knot, I’d embroider that on a pillow. Or maybe a pew cushion. She was right.

In recent years we’ve been privy to numerous churches who seem to be on mission to transform themselves into Six Flags Over Jesus. Pastors who deliver stand up comedy routines instead of preaching the Word. Helicopters dropping Easter eggs for the annual hunt. Disney-designed fire truck baptistries, video games, and bubble machines in the children’s department. Car, sports tickets, and vacation pacakge giveaways. Over the top Christmas variety shows. The evangeltainment force is strong on the high places.

But while churches need to be careful not to fall into the ditch of foolish fluff and worldliness, neither should doctrinally sound churches jump into the ditch on the other side of the road of turning every single church get together into a Bible study, worship service, or outreach project.

While churches need to be careful not to fall into the ditch of foolish fluff and worldliness, neither should doctrinally sound churches jump into the ditch of turning *every single* church get together into a Bible study.
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Some of you ladies are gasping in holy horror. (Don’t try to deny it. I can hear you.)

Please don’t hear what I’m not saying. Please. I am by no stretch of the imagination suggesting that churches should turn into amusement parks like the ones cited above. I’m not saying we shouldn’t hold copious numbers of worship services and Bible studies and outreach projects. We absolutely should. Preaching, teaching, discipleship, and evangelism should be the main focus of the church.

What I’m saying is that – in the hustle and bustle of studying and serving – we need to make sure we’re also leaving space for brothers and sisters in Christ to simply spend unprogrammed time together. Growing to know one another more intimately. Sharing our little everyday joys and sorrows. Laughing together. Deeply loving one another. Blowing off steam and having a little fun.

Those things don’t happen while we’re listening to a sermon, paying attention to a Sunday School lesson, or busily working on an outreach task. But they’re a vital part of growing in Christ together. As a family.

One of the many reasons local church membership isn’t optional for Christians is that it places us in the required environment for practicing the “one anothers” found throughout the New Testament. But how can we “through love serve one another” if we don’t know a sister well enough to know how best to serve her? How can we “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” if we never take the time to sit down with each other and find out what those burdens are?

How can we “through love serve one another” or “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” if we never take the time to sit down with each other and find out how we can best serve, or what those burdens are?
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If your church has solid biblical preaching, doctrinally sound Sunday School or Bible study classes, members who joyfully serve the Body when opportunities are presented, and who share the gospel with the lost, it’s OK to have the occasional event that doesn’t revolve around those activities, and instead provides the opportunity for simple fellowship between brothers and sisters in Christ. A church picnic. A men’s breakfast. A ladies’ night out. A potluck dinner on the grounds. A coffee klatch. A Christmas party.

If your church has solid biblical preaching and teaching, members who joyfully serve the Body, and who share the gospel with the lost, it’s OK to have the occasional event that doesn’t revolve around those things.
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And it’s not necessary to turn any of these events into a Bible study.

Why? Because when Christians get together, the talk invariably and organically turns to things of a spiritual nature.

I gave a lot of thought to what the lady from my Sunday School class said at our fellowship that evening. And instead of planning a weekly Bible study, I started planning the occasional ladies’ night out – a simple dessert fellowship at my house, or dinner at a restaurant. Every time we get together, we inevitably end up talking about spiritual matters. Once, we spontaneously gathered around and prayed for a sister who had shared some things she was struggling with. Another time, we brought up some Scriptures to encourage one of the ladies who was walking through a particular issue with her child. We’ve discussed and recommended good godly books (and warned against some poor ones) to each other. We’ve laughed a lot, and sometimes cried, but mostly, grown…together.

People talk about what they’re most passionate about. And Christians are most passionate about the things of God. We need to be sure we’re trusting and believing that, not fearing that if we don’t have a devotion at our dinner, or have our coffee in one hand while doing a missions project with the other, that church members will suddenly abandon Christ and start dancing around the Asherah pole. And we need to know God well enough to know that He is not somehow displeased when His people simply interact with each other over whatever comes to mind without a biblical outline and three commentaries on the table.

We need to know God well enough to know that He is not somehow displeased when His people simply interact with each other over whatever comes to mind without a biblical outline and three commentaries on the table.
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Also unbiblical and, thus, spiritually unhealthy, is the mindset that if we’re not meeting for organized preaching, teaching, or ministering, we have no reason for meeting at all. Not true. When I hear from women who attend doctrinally sound churches with that attitude, what I most commonly hear from them is that they’re lonely. They have no one they can call, or talk to, or pray with when they have a problem to sort out or joyful news to share because they don’t feel close enough to anybody in their church. That’s a crying shame. No healthy Christian in a doctrinally sound church should regularly feel isolated and lonely.

No healthy Christian in a doctrinally sound church should regularly feel isolated and lonely.
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Good preaching, teaching, and outreach are imperative for every church. But so are the heart to heart relationships between Believers in the Body. So do the studying, listen to the preaching, and work your fingers to the bone serving, but don’t leave out fun and fellowship. All Word and no play makes for an unbalanced, unhealthy church.

Good preaching, teaching, and outreach are imperative for every church. But so are the heart to heart relationships between Believers in the Body.
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Mailbag

The Mailbag: Can women serve on the pastor search committee?

April 9, 2026April 9, 2026 Michelle Lesley

Our church is currently searching for a new pastor. We have an advisory board (pastor search committee), appointed and led by our head deacon, which is comprised of six men and six women (individuals, not married couples) who have been instructed from Scripture about how to search for a pastor.

I don’t agree with women being involved because Paul speaks about women in the Bible (1 Timothy 2:11-15, 1 Corinthians 14:34, and Ephesians 5:23-27). Knowing that women can’t preach, why would there be women involved on this board! Also, the women on this board are not very active in our church.

I don’t feel like we can approach this as we would be basically run off from this church, since we’ve seen it done to one of our friends who went and spoke to our previous pastor about plagiarism. How do you think I should approach this situation?

I’m so sorry this situation is causing you angst, and I hope I can help alleviate some of it. There’s a lot going on here, so let’s take this step by step.

I’m familiar with pastor search committees. I’ve never personally served on one, but I know how they generally operate. The pastor search committee locates potential candidates for the position of pastor, sifts through all of them, finds the best candidate (or possibly two or three), and presents the candidate to the church to be voted on. You didn’t say how your church’s advisory board functions, so I’m just going to assume that this is the general way they operate.

May I take this opportunity to say I’m really glad the board at your church has been instructed from Scripture about finding a pastor and what makes a pastor biblically qualified or not. A previous church I was a member of had a pastor search committee that brought in some sort of consulting firm to train them that I surmise was light on (or possibly void of) Scripture, and heavy on more extra-biblical metrics like requiring a particular degree or level of formal education, charisma, pragmatic church growth methods, fundraising, etc. So the fact that your advisory board was trained with Scripture is something to be thankful for.

I don’t agree with women being involved because Paul speaks about women in the Bible (1 Timothy 2:11-15, 1 Corinthians 14:34, and Ephesians 5:23-27).

Yes, God, through Paul, does speak about women in the Bible, but does what He says in these passages apply to this particular situation of women serving on church boards and committees?

Ephesians 5:23-27 is about wives submitting to their own husbands and husband loving their wives as Christ loved the church. It is not applicable to women serving on church boards/committees unless one of these women has a husband who has told her he does not want her to serve on this committee and she has defied him and is serving anyway.

First Corinthians 14:34 is about keeping order in the worship service, not about women who have been asked by church leadership to serve on a board/committee (which is not a worship service) to offer their input and help search for a pastor. So this passage doesn’t apply, either.

First Timothy 2:11-15 is about as close as you’re going to come to a passage that’s applicable to this situation. Women are not to “exercise authority over a man”. (The “teaching” part doesn’t apply because the women on the board/committee aren’t teaching or preaching to the men, they’re working with them discussing candidates, reviewing resumes, etc.).

Now these women are not exercising authority over men merely by being appointed to this advisory board. If a woman were the head of the committee, or if there were more women than men on the committee, then you’d have an authority issue.

But the way things stand, the only ways I can think of that these women might attempt to exercise authority over the men on the board is by a) being bossy, telling the men what to do or not to do, insisting on their own way, etc., or b) forming a voting bloc to thwart a decision the men are all in favor of. (You did not mention whether the head deacon is included in the “six men” or whether he is the seventh man on the committee. If he’s the seventh man, and a voting member of the board, the women won’t be able to form a voting bloc.)

Furthermore, these women are not exercising authority over the men of the congregation merely because they’ve been asked to help find the next pastor. They are church members representing the congregation, sorting through pastoral candidates, and offering input.

Knowing that women can’t preach, why would there be women involved on this board!

Because they’re members of your church, representing your congregation, sorting through pastoral candidates, and offering input. There are men in your congregation who aren’t biblically qualified to preach, either, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t serve on this board. Being qualified to preach has nothing to do with serving on this board. They’re two separate issues.

Just because God prohibits women from leading the church in some ways doesn’t mean He prohibits women from serving the church in every way. We have to be sure we’re not placing restrictions on women that go beyond Scripture. That’s legalism, and that’s a sin.

Just because God prohibits women from leading the church in some ways doesn’t mean He prohibits women from serving the church in every way.
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When you get a new pastor, he’s going to be the pastor of the men and the women of your church. There’s nothing wrong with some of the church’s women offering input on the various candidates. There are often things women pick up on about people (such as the pastoral candidate, his wife, or his children) that men don’t pick up on, because God created women to be generally more intuitive about people, body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, and so on. Women’s input is valuable in a situation like this.

Also, the women on this board are not very active in our church.

This is problematic. (Or it could be, depending on what you mean by “not very active”.) The picture I get from the phrase “not very active” is a person who misses church a lot (without a good, biblical reason) and isn’t plugged in and serving. If that’s the case, these women shouldn’t be serving in any capacity, let alone a position of responsibility like this board, because they aren’t faithful and committed to the church. The same goes for any men on the board who “aren’t very active”. You don’t get to be “faithful in much” until you’re first “faithful in little,” because if you’re “unrighteous in little,” you’re going to be “unrighteous in much”. (Luke 16:10)

I’m not privy to the details about your friend approaching the previous pastor about plagiarism. Perhaps he was committing the sin of plagiarism, and your friend went to him humbly, lovingly, in obedience to Matthew 18:15-20 and expressed her concerns firmly but kindly, and the pastor was evil and kicked her out of the church when she did nothing wrong. Maybe that’s why that pastor isn’t there any more.

On the other hand, maybe your friend didn’t handle the situation biblically. Maybe she falsely accused the pastor, and sinfully left in a huff when properly confronted with her own sin.

I’m not saying either of those things definitely happened, I’m saying I have no way of knowing exactly what happened. But this isn’t about your friend. This is about you.

The first thing you need to do is to speak to your husband about the situation – because while Ephesians 5:22-33 doesn’t apply to the women whose husbands are OK with them serving on the advisory board, it does apply to whether or not your husband (if you’re married) is OK with you “approaching this situation” with anyone. If he’s a Believer and a member of the church, it might be best for him to handle things.

If he’s not OK with you approaching someone about this situation, don’t. Respect and submit to his decision, or you will be the one in violation of the Ephesians passage you cited.

If your husband is OK with you speaking to someone about the board, I would suggest setting up an appointment with the head deacon, maybe inviting him over for coffee with you and your husband or something like that, and – calmly, kindly, and rationally – express to him only your concerns about people who are not faithful members of the church serving on the committee. Because, as you’ve explained things to me, that is really the only biblical issue here.

Unless you have clear, concrete, irrefutable evidence that one or more of the women on this board are behaving in an obviously and verifiably sinful way, there’s nothing else to “approach”. These women have been asked to help find a new pastor and offer input according to Scripture, and there’s nothing unbiblical about that.

Because Scripture doesn’t prohibit women from doing the tasks required of pastor search committee members, this is an issue of Christian liberty. If you, as a woman, would feel uncomfortable serving on a pastor search committee, then by all means, don’t sin against your conscience and agree to serve. If you’re married and your husband doesn’t want you to serve on a pastor search committee, you should respect and submit to his decision and not serve. If a church wishes to make a policy that only men may serve on a pastor search committee, they are well within biblical parameters to do so.

That being said, the role of women on a committee that makes decisions impacting the church’s direction, policies, ecclesiology, etc., is that of helping and offering input. It would not be biblical for decision-making power in these matters to rest solely or primarily in the hands of women.

You might think of it like a marriage. In a healthy, godly marriage, husbands and wives work together. They discuss how to handle various issues, the wife offers suggestions and input, and she handles tasks that are within her jurisdiction. The wise husband listens to the wise counsel of his wife and uses it to make the most well-informed and godly decisions he can.

That’s how women should function on a church committee.

In order to facilitate that dynamic, here are some parameters for structuring a standing church committee that I believe would be wise (this is my opinion born of knowledge of Scripture and decades of church experience, not law; there could also be exceptions depending on the purpose of the committee):

Committees should be chaired by men
Committees should be comprised of less than 50% women.
Unless they have some sort of needed expertise uniquely related to the purpose of the committee, women should not serve on committees which oversee ministries, activities, or events comprised only of men (e.g. the men’s ministry, security team, the men who fix widows’ cars, do repair work for them, etc.)

With a little wisdom, women can biblically serve on church committees, conscience and church policy permitting.

If you have a question about: a Bible passage, an aspect of theology, a current issue in Christianity, or how to biblically handle a family, life, or church situation, comment below (I’ll hold all questions in queue {unpublished} for a future edition of The Mailbag) or send me an e-mail or private message. If your question is chosen for publication, your anonymity will be protected.

Speaking Engagements

Upcoming Events: Ladies, You’re Invited!

April 8, 2026April 7, 2026 Michelle Lesley

Looking for a super, doctrinally sound women’s event to attend? Let me tell you about some I’ve got coming up!

Nothing in your area? I go where I’m invited! There’s still plenty of time (and plenty of space available on my calendar) to plan an event for summer or fall 2026 and to begin thinking about plans for 2027! Find out how your church or organization can set up an event at my Speaking Engagements page. I’ve even got lots of tips, tricks, and helpful hints for you on everything from budgeting to promoting your event!

Florida

There’s still time to get in on this one if you hurry! This will be my first conference in Florida, and I’m hoping all of you lovely ladies across the Gulf will be able to join Amy Spreeman and me NEXT WEEKEND, April 17-18, for the Rooted In Truth women’s conference at Crossroads Baptist Church in Fort Myers, Florida. Women from the surrounding area are invited to attend, but you must register. Scan the (top) QR code on the flier above to register. (If, for some reason, you don’t have the technology to scan the code, ask a friend who does to help you out!)

Wisconsin

Hey, all you northerly ladies, I’m coming your way October 16-17 for a women’s conference with Amy Spreeman at Bethel Baptist Church in Green Bay, Wisconsin. This event is open to women in the surrounding areas, but registration is required. We’re still working on the details for this one, so save the date and keep an eye on my Speaking Engagements page, where I’ll post all the info as soon as I’ve got it.

Canada

Even further into the frozen tundra… I’m so excited to be speaking at my first event in Canada! Ladies, bundle up and come join me November 6-7 at The Beauty of Holiness women’s conference at Westminster Chapel, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This event is open to women in the surrounding areas, but registration is required. Get all the details and find out how to register at the conference website.

We are working on adding more events to my calendar, and we’d love to add yours! Click on over to my Speaking Engagements page for all the info. And if you’d like for both Amy Spreeman and me to speak, click here!

Never planned an event, and you’re a little nervous about all the details? No need to reinvent the wheel! Grab some great ideas from previous events I’ve spoken at. And check out my article Women’s Events on a Shoestring Budget and Other Practical Tips for all the “how to’s”!

To keep an eye out for an event near you,
or to schedule me for your own event, check out my
calendar of events and booking information on my
Speaking Engagements page.

Hope to see you soon!

Bible Study

10 Simple Steps to Plain Vanilla Bible Study

March 11, 2026March 10, 2026 Michelle Lesley

Originally published April 22, 2016

Baskin Robbins is one of my favorite places to get ice cream. Not only is their ice cream good, but they boast a plethora of flavors to choose from. I love to start at one end of the counter and work my way through all their offerings, getting a little “taste spoon” here and there if a particular flavor piques my interest.

Flavor_Enlarged_Peanutbutter'nChocolate2 — Photo courtesy of BaskinRobbins.com.

Having a myriad of options is great when it comes to ice cream, but when it comes to studying the Bible, the tsunami of materials, methods, and other choices out there can be overwhelming. Where do I start? How do I know if a certain Bible study book or teacher is doctrinally sound? Is the study method I’m using in line with good hermeneutics?

It can be enough to make you throw your hands up in the air and head for your local Thirty One Flavors to drown your sorrows in Peanut Butter ‘N Chocolate.

Sometimes it can help to get back to plain old, simple, vanilla Bible study. I’ve been saying for a while now that Christian women should, for the most part, put all the “canned” Bible study books, workbooks, and DVDs aside and simply pick up their Bibles and study them in a systematic way. After all, up until somewhere near the latter half of the 20th century, that’s generally how people studied the Bible. And it worked. People grew in their faith to godly maturity just fine. So, why can’t it work today?

It can. It does. It will.

Unfortunately, the blessing of lots of options, methods, resources, and information, and the marketing of that blessing by celebrity Christians and Christian retailing, has bred a generation of Christian women who are fearful that they aren’t as smart or as capable of reading and understanding God’s Word as all the “experts” out there. They look at the simplicity of picking up their Bibles and studying them like calves looking worriedly at a new gate.

“What does that mean?”

“How do I do that?”

“I’m scared I’ll get it wrong!”

It absolutely breaks my heart to hear this angst from women who, I’m certain, genuinely want to study God’s Word correctly so that they can know Him better and grow in their faith. And it makes me livid at the churches who haven’t trained them properly, the plantation-style women’s “Bible study” marketing that has kept them ignorant and dependent slaves to Christian retailers, and whatever other forces have conspired to keep these precious ladies away from the pure milk of the Word.

So let’s reboot, get back to basics, and get as many women digging into the Word as possible.

First, it’s important to start out with a biblical perspective:

1. God is kind, and He loves you.

Yeah, I know, that’s pretty basic. But it’s worth bringing to the forefront for this discussion. This is a God who loves you and wants you to know Him. He has revealed Himself to you through creation, through Christ, and through His written Word. He has indwelt you as a Believer with the Holy Spirit to help you understand Scripture. He has told you that you can ask for wisdom and promises to provide it. In His kindness God has bent over backwards to provide you with ways to know Him. He is not some mean ogre sitting up there just waiting for you to get something wrong so He can chastise you. He wants you to understand His Word.

2. The Perspicuity of Scripture

There’s this really great, comforting, reassuring doctrine called the perspicuity of Scripture. The gist of it is that Scripture is, for the most part, clear and understandable, especially for Believers, because of the aforementioned indwelling of the Holy Spirit. But even lost people tend to understand a lot of what Scripture says (that’s why you hear so many of them arguing against it – they couldn’t do that if they didn’t at least partially understand it).

So, by and large, if you’re reading the Bible in an orderly way you should be able to understand it fairly well. You don’t have to have a seminary degree or be an “expert.” There are dirt farmers and country preachers out there who have a better grasp of Scripture than some celebrity pastors in multi-million dollar churches with thousands of congregants, and a string of seminary degrees behind their names.

OK, now that we have a biblical perspective on studying the Bible, how do we do it in a systematic or orderly way?

3. Pray

Don’t see this as childish or unimportant and skip it. Start your Bible study time by asking God to help you understand His Word, to learn what He wants you to learn from it, and to obey its instruction. Even if you’re pretty well versed in the Scriptures, praying like this before opening God’s Word will remind you of its holiness and your proper place of humility and submission to it.

4. Read the Bible the way you would any other book.

When you pick up a novel, do you read one sentence out of the middle of chapter 4, followed, the next day, by a paragraph from chapter 37, and, the next day, a couple of lines from chapter 1? Of course not. You wouldn’t know what was going on and what the characters meant by what they were saying. If you wouldn’t read something as inconsequential as a novel this way, why would you read the Bible in such a haphazard manner? Yet this is precisely the way people often approach daily Bible study.

My pastor said something awesome about this in his sermon the other day:

The Bible isn’t Google for self-help.

And he’s so right. We don’t just parachute in to a random passage, hoping to glean a nugget of truth. Pick a book of the Bible (maybe Genesis or one of the gospels if you’re new to all this), start at the beginning, and read a little each day until you reach the end. It’s really that simple.

5. Context, context, context

It’s important to read and understand Scripture in its context: how a verse fits with the verses immediately surrounding it, within its chapter, within its book, and within the overarching narrative of the Bible. This is really the biggest key to comprehending Scripture. Fortunately, the main way to do this is by reading the Bible in an orderly way (see #4- You did already read #4, right?)

Another invaluable practice is to make use of the cross-references and footnotes in your Bible. Cross-references will help you get a better idea of how the passage you’re reading fits together with other, related passages. Footnotes are there to add a touch of clarity to particular words and passages.

6. Get a plan, Fran.

If structure helps you, choose a good Bible reading plan. For the beginner, start off with one of the shorter plans so you won’t get overwhelmed. When you’re ready, I highly recommend the chronological plan. It is extremely helpful for learning the big picture of Scripture.

If you decide to choose a reading plan, though, hold its schedule loosely and don’t be beholden to its time frame. Work through the readings at your own pace. Take the time to let the Scriptures sink in and spend as long as you need to on any given section. God doesn’t give gold stars for finishing the Bible in a year.

7. Understand the background and setting.

There are some passages in Scripture that are a little more difficult to understand if you don’t know the customs of the time or what was going on historically and politically. In these cases a good study Bible, commentary, and other resources can be beneficial. I’ve touched on the specifics of some of these resources here and here. Many of these helpful materials can be found on-line for free.

8. Take notes on the text.

Hmm…an orderly method of reading…footnotes…extra resources…taking notes…this is starting to sound like…well…studying! Yep, that’s the idea. Isn’t it interesting that we often take a more serious and scholarly approach to studying for a class or a test than we do to studying our Bibles?

If you were a better student than I was in high school and college, you probably took notes on your text books as you read them. You wrote down things you wanted to remember, things that seemed important, things you didn’t understand and wanted to work on more later, things that were especially meaningful, even questions that occurred to you. Those are all good things to write down as you study your Bible, as well.

9. Listen to good preaching.

As a Christian, you should already be doing this at least weekly at the church you’re a member of. But try to sneak in some extra listening – to your own pastor or another doctrinally sound pastor – as often as you can during the week. Listening to someone rightly handle and explain God’s Word helps you to understand it and trains you to rightly handle it yourself as you study.

I once read that children who read a lot are better spellers. Not because they study spelling more, but because they’re exposed to more words and have the correct spelling of words constantly in front of their eyes. They sort of soak up good spelling by osmosis, and when it’s time for the spelling test, they simply write down what they’ve absorbed. Listening to good, expository preaching can have the same kind of helpful impact on your Bible study skills.

10. Practice makes perfect.

Studying the Bible is just like any other skill. You’ll probably fumble around a good bit when you’re first getting started, but if you stick to it, you’ll find that it gets easier and you get better at it as time goes by. Don’t be afraid to start. Jump right in there and try. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

Ladies, simply picking up the Bible and studying it each day is such a joy. I have been doing it for years, and I love it. The excitement of “digging for buried treasure” in God’s Word and uncovering the truths of Scripture for myself has been far more meaningful to me and has grown me so much more than any workbook or curriculum I’ve ever used. I hope you’ll put aside your book studies and devotionals, and give it a try yourself!

Bible Study, Throwback Thursday

Rightly Dividing: 12 Do’s and Don’ts for Effective Bible Study

March 4, 2026March 4, 2026 Michelle Lesley

Originally published August 19, 2014

Bible study. As Christians we want to do it, we know we’re supposed to do it, but have you ever stopped to think that there are right ways and wrong ways to do it? Let’s take a look at a few do’s and don’ts of “rightly dividing God’s Word” in Bible study.

Do use a good translation, not a paraphrase. You want to get as close to the original wording as possible. There are a number of easy to read, accurate translations out there. The Legacy Standard Bible (LSB), English Standard Version (ESV) and New American Standard Bible (NASB) are two of the best. Try some translations on for size at BibleGateway.com.

Do read the entire Bible from cover to cover at least every few years. It will give you a better understanding of the “big picture” of the Bible and how all the little pieces inside it fit together. (I highly recommend a chronological reading plan since the books of the Bible aren’t always arranged chronologically.)

Don’t neglect the textual context. Every Bible verse has what I call a “micro-context” (how it fits in with the verses immediately before and after it) a larger context (how it fits in with the chapter and book it’s in) and a “macro-context” (how it fits in with the big picture of the Bible). When we fail to take verses in context, we are mishandling and misappropriating God’s precious and holy Word.

Do consider the cultural context. Who wrote the passage, and what do we know about him and his perspective? To whom was the passage written- Jews or Gentiles? Those under the Law or those under grace? Men or women? Pastors or lay people? How did the culture at the time view the topic – God, Judaism, the church, etc. – the passage is about? At what period in history, in which country, and in what language was the passage written? A good study Bible or study Bible app can be a tremendous help here.

Don’t confuse descriptive texts (passages that describe something that happened to somebody) with prescriptive texts (a command we’re to obey). Just because you read that Noah built an ark or that Judas went out and hanged himself, doesn’t mean that God is telling you to do the same (thank goodness!). Those are descriptive passages. God is simply telling the story of what happened to someone else because it somehow fits into His bigger story of redemption.

Do consider the type of literature and literary devices you’re reading. Is this book of the Bible history? Poetry? Law? Prophecy? Epistle? Is the particular passage a song, metaphor, hyperbole, comparison, allegory, parable? The Bible uses various vehicles to drive truth home, and they must all be understood in different ways.

Don’t feel like you HAVE to use a Bible study or devotional book or workbook. It really is OK to just pick up the actual Bible and study it. God made His Word understandable, made you smart enough to understand it, and gave you the indwelling Holy Spirit to illumine your understanding.

Do, if you decide to use one, choose a doctrinally sound Bible study book or workbook that treats Scripture as the “swimming pool” you dive into and swim around in, not the “diving board” the author springs off of into a pool filled only with her own personal stories, anecdotes, and opinions.

Do read the Bible in orderly chunks, not in single verses. Think about the way you would read a magazine. Do you pick it up each day and read a random sentence or paragraph? Do you read the third page of an article before you read the first page of it? You’ll best understand a book of the Bible if you start at the beginning and read the chapters in order to the end.

Don’t give in to the temptation to read yourself into Scripture. The Bible isn’t our story. Approach every passage remembering that the Bible is God’s story of redemption through Christ from His perspective, and we study it to learn about and draw closer to Him.

Don’t underestimate how helpful your Bible’s cross-references to related verses can be. Reading several different passages on a particular topic you’re studying can give you a broader understanding of what the Bible has to say about it.

Do let clear passages interpret unclear passages. This is another reason cross-references are so handy. If you come across a passage you just don’t get, try reading related passages that are clearer, and understand the unclear passage in light of the clearer ones.

Lengthy tomes have been written on the topic of biblical hermeneutics and Bible study methods, so I’m sure I could go on at length, but it’s your turn:

Have you ever found it difficult or daunting to study the Bible?
What are some of the benefits of rightly handling God’s Word?
How has a right understanding of Scripture helped you to grow
in your walk with the Lord?