Hank's Bible Study Resources

This is part one of Feed Yourself, a series on learning to study the Bible with your own two hands. Ten posts, one toolbox, and by the end of it you will never have to take a teacher’s word for anything again.

Let me ask you an uncomfortable question. When was the last time you learned something from the Bible that no one handed you? Not a sermon clip. Not a reaction video. Not a thread somebody shared to the group chat. You, the text, and thirty minutes of honest work.

For a lot of sincere believers, the answer is never. And nobody ever told them that was a loss.

We are the best-resourced generation of Bible readers in the history of the church, and we may be the most dependent. We know our favorite teacher’s take on a passage before we know the passage. We consume hours of Bible content a week and spend minutes in the Bible itself. The feed decides what we study, when we study it, and what conclusion we reach before we ever open the Book. I want to be careful here, because the teachers are not the problem. Dependence is the problem. A believer who can quote his favorite channels but cannot sit down alone with Scripture and find the meaning of a chapter has traded a birthright for a feed.

This series is about getting the birthright back.

The Bible Blesses Teachers

Before anything else, let me say plainly what this series is not. It is not a call to throw out your teachers. Scripture will not let us do that. When the Ethiopian eunuch sat in his chariot reading Isaiah, Philip did not congratulate him on his independence. He asked, do you understand what you are reading? And the man answered, how can I, unless someone guides me? (Acts 8:30-31). Philip climbed up and taught him Christ from that very passage, and a man went home to Africa justified.

Teachers are not a concession. They are a gift, given by the risen Christ Himself.

“And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.”

Ephesians 4:11-12 NKJV

But look at what the gift is for. Equipping. The word Paul uses describes mending nets and setting broken bones, making a thing fit for its work. A teacher succeeds when the people he teaches become able. A ministry that produces permanent dependents has not equipped anyone. It has just built an audience. Christ gave teachers to the church so that the saints could do the work, and that includes the work of handling the Word.

The Ones the Holy Spirit Called Noble

There is a congregation in the book of Acts that gets a compliment no other church in Scripture receives, and it is worth asking why.

“These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so.”

Acts 17:11 NKJV

Think about who was preaching in Berea. Paul. The apostle. The man who wrote a third of the New Testament, taught personally by the risen Christ. The greatest Bible teacher most of those people would ever hear in their lives was standing in their synagogue, and the Holy Spirit praises them because they went home and checked him against the text. Daily. To find out whether these things were so.

Paul was not offended. Luke wrote it down as a commendation. And here is the word that should stop us in our tracks. Luke says they searched the Scriptures, and the word he chooses is a courtroom word, the term for examining evidence and cross-examining witnesses. The Bereans put the sermon on trial, and the sermon was Paul’s.

If Paul’s audience owed the Scriptures that kind of diligence, our audience owes YouTube nothing less.

A Workman’s Word

Paul hands Timothy the same standard with a different picture.

“Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”

2 Timothy 2:15 NKJV

A worker. Not a spectator, not a subscriber. The phrase rightly dividing translates a word for cutting a straight line, the way a mason squares a stone or a farmer plows a furrow that does not wander. Both of the words in that table describe labor. Neither one describes consumption. Somewhere along the way we started treating Bible study as something that is done for us and served to us, and Scripture keeps insisting it is something we do.

What This Series Will Hand You

Here is the rule that governs everything that follows. A teacher is a guide, never a substitute. Every tool in this series exists so that you can walk into any sermon, video, or podcast able to test what you hear, the way the Bereans tested Paul.

And here is the good news. The tools are not exotic. Most of them are already printed in the Bible on your nightstand, and the rest are free. Over the next nine posts we will learn to read whole books instead of fortune-cookie verses. To find out who a book was written to and why that changes everything. To recover the cultural background the first readers took for granted. To bridge honestly from what a passage meant to them to what it demands of us. To follow the cross references in your margins, which are a better study tool than most of what people pay for. To do a real word study with nothing but a concordance. To read each kind of biblical literature by its own rules. And to turn the differences between your translations from a source of anxiety into free scholarship. Then we will take one short letter and put every tool to work on it, start to finish, so you can see the whole method run.

None of it requires Greek. None of it requires seminary. All of it requires the one thing no channel can give you, your own time in the text.

No Shame in Having Been Fed

Let me close where some of you are sitting. Maybe this post stung a little, because you know your Bible intake is mostly secondhand, and you feel caught. Hear me. There is no shame in having been fed. Every one of us started on someone’s spoon. The eunuch needed Philip, Timothy needed Paul, and I needed the patient men who taught me over the past five decades. Being fed is how everyone begins.

But it is not how anyone is meant to finish. The writer of Hebrews scolded believers who still needed milk when they should have been handling solid food, and teaching others themselves (Hebrews 5:12-14). Not because milk is bad, but because growing up is the point. There is a table set for you, spread by the Spirit of God through prophets and apostles, and you have been eating from someone else’s plate at it.

This series is about pulling up a chair. Bring your Bible next week. We start with the single cheapest, fastest fix in all of Bible study, and it will take you ninety seconds to prove it works.

Discussion Questions

1. Be honest about your own intake. What is the ratio of Bible content about the Bible to time actually in the text for you in a typical week?
2. Read Acts 17:10-12. Why do you think Luke connects the Bereans’ daily searching of Scripture with the fact that many of them believed?
3. Ephesians 4:11-12 says teachers are given for the equipping of the saints. What would it look like for a ministry you follow to succeed at that? What would failure look like?
4. What is the difference between honoring a teacher and depending on one? Where is the line for you?
5. Read Hebrews 5:12-14. What does the writer say trains a believer to discern good and evil? Note the word “use” in verse 14.

Going Deeper

This week, before the next post, try a fast. Not from food, from commentary. Pick one short book of the Bible, Philippians is a fine choice, and read it three times this week with no videos, no podcasts, and no study notes. Just read it and write down three questions the text raises for you. Keep the list. By the end of this series you will have the tools to answer your own questions, and that list will prove it to you. If you want a book-length companion to this series, Fee and Stuart’s How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth covers much of the same ground and has served a generation of students well.