Mark Dever on Personal Bible Reading
Jun. 4 2008At the New Attitude 2008 conference we sat down with speaker Mark Dever for a few minutes and interviewed him about how he reads the Bible and what he’s learned about reading the Bible over the years. Mark talked to us about how he decides what to read each week, how to get through an uninspiring devotional day (or week), and how he’d use dead people to encourage people to read every day.
Just keep going. Aim at obedience in a long direction set in a pattern for decades. If you just keep going you’ll gain so much by consistency and and faithfulness that there’s no way you can gain just by sudden experience.
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What is your personal practice of reading God’s Word?
What I always do is read what’s going to be preached on the coming Sunday wherever I’ll be in church. So this week I’ll be reading Psalm 16 because Kevin is going to be preaching on Psalm 16 at our church. And then I’ll also read anything else I’ve been thinking about or I’ve been interested in, or anything that’s been on my mind.
So what would a typical devotional time for you look like?
Well it can be a lot of different things but I’ll just pick one example. I get up, pray through my family, pray through my schedule, pray about other things on my mind, read the text of scripture and meditate on that, confess sin that comes out of meditating on that passage, pray for other people that come to mind, and then go to the membership directory for our church and pray through people in that.
How would you counsel someone--maybe a new christian or someone that hasn’t read the Bible much--to start a daily practice of reading Gods Word?
I think a great thing to do is use McCheyne’s reading through the Bible in a year plan where he gets you through the New Testament and the Pslams twice and the Old Testament. And there are several books keyed in with that (like D.A. Carson’s For the Love of God volumes) and that’s a great way to do it.
What’s your goal going into your devotional time? What are you trying to get out of your time or accomplish during that time?
I want to personally relate to God. I want to be freshly confronted, encouraged, challenged, changed. I want to intercede for those I love. I want to plead for God’s favor and mercy in people’s lives. And I certainly want to be reformed in my own thinking and resolve to live as I read his word.
What’s one thing you’ve learned after years of reading the BIble about how to read the Bible well?
That’s it’s more important that I keep doing it than what I get out of it at any particular time.
A lot of young Christians will have an exciting quiet time on Monday and a really exciting one on Tuesday and an awesome one on Wednesday but then something happens on Thursday and they actually don’t even do it and Friday they do it and they feel guilty and it isn’t that good and Saturday they do it but it’s late and they were discouraged...and then they just get discouraged because they’re not always having a super experience. That’s where I would look at them and say, “Just keep going. Aim at obedience in a long direction set in a pattern for decades. If you just keep going you’ll gain so much by consistency and and faithfulness that there’s no way you can gain just by sudden experience.”
How would you make the case from Scripture for a daily time of Bible reading to someone that’s not convinced they need it or who even opposes it?
I’ve certainly had that conversation before. I certainly can’t prove that there’s such a thing as a “quiet time” in the New Testament. But the very fact that the Psalmist tells us we’re to hide God’s word in our heart implies that unless that’s going to happen by osmosis, we’re going to have to get near the text with our eyes open and get it into our brains and your hearts.
So, I don’t know that you’re in sin because you didn’t have a quiet time today but I can’t imagine having the opportunity to meditate on God’s Word and not doing it. We don’t have a scroll that’s kept away somewhere with only limited chances to memorize it and carry it around with us, we actually have it available in our culture all the time. So we are able to be faithful and to do things that previous generations quite literally died for.
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