How to Study the Bible for Beginners — The Slow Way
⏱ 15 min read
What does the woman do who has been a Christian for thirty years and has, in the honest place she does not say out loud, never really read the Bible — only read around it, in the daily devotionals and the verse-of-the-day apps and the sermon-bullet-point reminders, with the bible itself sitting on the shelf as the unread book she has always meant to come back to?
That is the question this slow read sits inside of. Not the question of whether to study the Bible. The question of how to start — late, in the middle of an ordinary year, without a Bible college background, without a study group, without anyone but yourself in the chair and the lamp and the book that has felt, for a long quiet stretch, slightly inaccessible. Charles Spurgeon, who spent four decades teaching first-year students at the Pastors’ College in London how to read the Bible the slow way, has counsel for this exact reader — and it is gentler, and far less intimidating, than the counsel she is usually given. The Stilling Waves Bible Study Workbook for Women carries this slower kind of study into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly, and let the practice be the small evening shape it actually wants to be.
The instinct of most modern bible-study literature is to begin with method. The inductive method. The chronological reading plan. The four-step exegesis. The colour-coded highlighting. There is nothing wrong with any of these, and at the right stage in a reader’s life they all carry weight. But they are not where Spurgeon begins. Spurgeon begins with posture — the posture of the soul that has approached the Bible like a person, not like a textbook. Until the posture is right, the method does not produce what the method is supposed to produce. The verses are technically read but they have not been met. Spurgeon’s counsel for the first-year student is to learn how to meet the verses before learning how to dissect them. (For the inductive-method version of this question, inductive bible study for beginners — a 4-step method walks the dissect-it frame. For the woman who has decided to slow down to one book at a time, a Christian women’s study guide — when you want to go slow with one book is the companion. And if you want the journal-the-verse cousin of this practice, how to bible journal for beginners walks the writing-while-reading method.)
A note on starting later than you meant to
The honest thing first.
If you are a woman in her forties or fifties or sixties who is just now beginning to study the Bible for herself — having gone to church for decades, having raised children in the faith, having said the right things at the right times, having never quite sat down with the book herself in any sustained way — you are not late. You are starting. The Christian life is not a race against the early bloomers who memorized the Westminster Catechism at twelve. It is a long slow walk, and the woman who starts at forty-five has thirty years left in which to walk it well. The shame at the late start is not from God. It is from the cultural pressure of a Christianity that has prized the precocious and undervalued the patient. Spurgeon, who pastored thousands of late-starting believers in Victorian London, was emphatic about this. The slow-starting reader was, in his pastoral experience, often the deeper one by year ten.
So set the shame down. The starting is the practice. The slowness is not a defect of the starting. The slowness is the shape of how the older Christians actually read.
The first passage: Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth
Spurgeon writes, in Morning and Evening, the sentence that is the foundation of the slow approach to scripture.
“Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth! O that he would walk with me; I am ready to give up my whole heart and mind to him, and every other thought is hushed. I am only asking what he delights to give. I am sure that he will condescend to have fellowship with me, for he has given me his Holy Spirit to abide with me forever. Sweet is the cool twilight, when every star seems like the eye of heaven, and the cool wind is as the breath of celestial love.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice what Spurgeon is doing here. He is modelling, in one paragraph, the posture in which the Bible can actually be read. Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth. The reader’s first move is not to interrogate the text. The reader’s first move is to listen for the One who is speaking in the text. The book is not the destination. The book is the medium through which the Lord is speaking — and the reader’s job is to be a hearer first, an analyser second.
Every other thought is hushed. This is the line worth keeping near the page. The modern reader picks up the Bible inside the cacophony of an unhushed day — the email still on the phone, the dishwasher running, the radio half-on, the children’s homework unfinished on the table. The verses are not heard, in that cacophony, because the soul has not yet hushed the other thoughts. Spurgeon would gently insist on the hushing as the precondition of the reading. Put the phone down. Turn the radio off. Let the day’s noise settle for sixty seconds before the page is opened. The hushing is not a luxury. It is the doorway into the reading.
I am only asking what he delights to give. This is the line that releases the shame. The first-year reader is not asking the Lord for something He is reluctant to provide. She is asking Him for what He delights to give. The Lord delights to be heard, delights to speak, delights to walk with the slow-starting reader through the verses she is finally sitting down with. The reading is not an imposition on Him. It is a fellowship He is more eager for than the reader is.
For the woman who has felt, for years, that the Bible is slightly closed to her — that the people who get it have a kind of access she does not — Spurgeon’s word here is the doorway. He delights to give. The Lord is on the side of your beginning. The Lord is the One who has been quietly putting the desire to begin into your interior in the first place. The shelf-bible is not closed against you. It is waiting.
The second passage: Come, then, my Lord, and give me Thy love with Thy grace
Spurgeon, in Till He Come, gives the small daily prayer the first-year reader can pray before opening the page.
“‘Come, then, my Lord, and give me Thy love with Thy grace.’ Take good heed, Christian, that thine own heart is in right tune, that when the fingers of mercy touch the strings, they may resound with full notes of communion.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Till He Come
Read it twice.
The image is the one to keep — thine own heart is in right tune, that when the fingers of mercy touch the strings, they may resound with full notes of communion. Spurgeon is borrowing the harp from the older devotional stream. The reader’s heart is a stringed instrument. The Lord’s mercy is the hand that will touch the strings during the reading. The reader’s job, before opening the book, is to make sure the strings are in tune — that the heart is not so jangled by the day that the touch of mercy will produce only dissonance.
The tuning is the small evening pause. The two slow breaths before the page is opened. The brief silent prayer — Lord, tune me. The lowering of the shoulders. The release of the day’s small clench. Then the page is opened. The Lord touches the strings. The reading resounds with the full notes of communion the tuning has made possible.
This is what how to study the bible for beginners actually looks like in Spurgeon’s frame. The tuning before the reading. The hush before the page. The small posture-work without which the verses are technically read but not actually heard. The modern reader skips the tuning, opens the book in the jangled state, reads three verses, feels nothing, closes the book, concludes that bible study does not work for her. Spurgeon would say it has not yet been tried. The reading has been attempted. The tuning has not.
Take good heed, Christian, that thine own heart is in right tune. The instruction is to take heed — to give some active attention to the tuning, not to expect the tuning to happen on its own. The first-year reader becomes, slowly, a person who knows how to tune herself before reading. The tuning takes thirty seconds. The reading that follows is a different reading than the one that would have happened without it.
The somatic that goes with the slow reading
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it, and the body is where the tuning actually happens.
Sit in the chair you will read in. The book is in your lap, unopened. Set both feet flat on the floor. Place both hands on the cover of the book without opening it. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the shoulders lower by an inch. Take one more slow inhale. On the exhale, let the small clench in the jaw release. Take a third slow inhale. On the exhale, say silently, Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth. Hold the silence for five seconds. Then open the book.
That is the tuning. Thirty seconds. The body has been brought to a stop. The breath has slowed. The shoulders have lowered. The jaw has released. The interior has been brought into the posture of listening before the reading begins. The verses are about to land in a soul that is in tune, not in a soul that is still jangled by the day.
The first-year reader who learns this thirty-second somatic before her daily reading will, by the end of three months, be a different reader than the reader she was at the start. The verses will land differently. The page will feel less closed. The Lord’s voice, in the small still way Spurgeon describes, will be more reliably audible. The body has done its part. The reading is now the reading the body can hear from inside.
The mid-article callout
The Stilling Waves Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around exactly this Spurgeon-shaped slow frame. The workbook does not ask the first-year reader to commit to a year-long chronological plan or a 365-day reading scheme. It asks her, on each daily page, to sit with one short passage — and the page is laid out to support the tuning before the reading. A short space at the top for the breath and the small prayer. The passage in the middle. Room below for the honest sentence the verse drew out. Space for the slow chewing rather than the urgent finishing. The workbook is built for the late-starting reader who has decided to begin slowly, in the older way, with the lamp and the chair and the small evening rhythm Spurgeon would have recognised.
The third passage: Magnify, then, the Spirit
The final Spurgeon passage is the one to keep for the long arc of the reading life.
“Thou, O Father, art the source of all grace, all love and mercy towards us. Thou, O Son, art the channel of Thy Father’s mercy, and without Thee Thy Father’s love could never flow to us. And Thou, O Spirit, art He who enables us to receive that divine virtue which flows from the fountain-head, the Father, through Christ the channel, and which, by Thy means, enters into our heart, and there abides, and brings forth its glorious fruit. Magnify, then, the Spirit. There never yet was a heavenly thought, a hallowed deed, or a consecrated act, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ, which was not worked in us by the Holy Spirit.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Gleanings among the Sheaves
Read it once at speed, then read it slowly.
Notice the structure of the Trinitarian movement Spurgeon is teaching. The Father — the source. The Son — the channel. The Spirit — the One who enables you to receive. The reading of the Bible, in this frame, is not a solo act of the reader’s understanding. It is a Trinitarian movement in which the Father’s love flows through the Son to the reader by the Spirit’s enabling — and the verses on the page are the instrument through which the whole movement is happening, in the moment of the reading, every time the reader sits down with the book.
The Spirit, by whose means, enters into our heart, and there abides, and brings forth its glorious fruit. The Spirit is the One who carries the verse from the page into the heart. The reader does not have to manufacture the carrying. She has only to sit in the chair, in the tuned posture, with the page open, and let the Spirit do what the Spirit does. The reading is not the reader’s strenuous effort. The reading is the Spirit’s quiet movement through the verses into the affections.
For the first-year reader, this is the line that releases the technique. You do not have to be a good exegete. You do not have to know what the Greek word was. You do not have to identify the literary structure. You have to sit in the chair in the right posture and let the Spirit do the carrying. The carrying will, over time, deepen your understanding too. But the understanding is the by-product of the carrying, not the prerequisite for it. The Spirit enters into the heart of the reader who has tuned herself and opened the book, and the verse does its work whether the reader’s head has yet caught up to the heart or not.
There never yet was a heavenly thought, a hallowed deed, or a consecrated act, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ, which was not worked in us by the Holy Spirit. This is the line that quiets the late-starting reader’s anxiety about her own slowness. Every good thing in the Christian life is worked in us by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the worker. The reader is the receiver. The pace of the working is the Spirit’s pace, not the reader’s. The late-starting reader who is faithful to the small daily reading will, by year three, be a different woman — and the difference will not be of her own producing. It will be the slow Spirit-work that the daily reading made room for.
(The sibling articles in this contemplative-fathers series sit at how to memorize scripture — Owen’s slow method and how to read the bible daily — Spurgeon’s practical counsel.)
How to study the bible for beginners, in Spurgeon’s frame, this week
Not a year-long reading plan. A different posture, walked slowly.
The first evening, pick one short book. The Gospel of Mark. The Psalms (one psalm at a time). The Gospel of John. Philippians. Something short, narrative or poetic, that does not require historical-context homework. Put the book — the actual physical book — on the chair you will read in. Open it to the first page of the chosen short book.
The second evening, sit in the chair. Do the thirty-second tuning. Open to the first verse of the book. Read one verse only. Slowly. Aloud. Then sit with the verse for one minute. The verse is the whole reading for the evening. One verse. Not one chapter. Not three chapters. One verse, chewed for sixty seconds.
The third evening, read the verse you read yesterday — again — and then one more verse. Two verses. Slowly. Aloud. Sit with them for one minute.
By the end of the first week, you will have read perhaps seven verses. Perhaps seven. That is the right speed. The first-year reader who reads seven verses well in a week is reading better than the reader who has rushed through three chapters and felt nothing. Spurgeon would say so. The slow reading is the deep reading. The shallow reading produces, by year two, the woman who has read the bible and has nothing inside her from it. The slow reading produces, by year two, the woman who has lived inside Mark or the Psalms or John long enough that the book is part of the room her interior lives in.
This is how to study the bible for beginners, in the older Spurgeon frame. Slowly. One verse at a time. With the tuning before the reading. With the small evening rhythm. With the Spirit doing the carrying while you sit in the chair and let yourself be carried.
What the long arc looks like
The woman who walks Spurgeon’s counsel for ten years is not the woman who has read the Bible cover to cover seven times. She is the woman who has sat, slowly, in three or four of its books — gone deep into Mark and the Psalms and John and Romans — and who knows them in the felt, by-heart way the Puritans meant by that phrase. The bible is no longer the closed book on the shelf. It is the room she lives in, in the small evening practice that has, by years of slow tuning and slow reading, become her actual life.
That is the slow shape of how to study the bible for beginners. Not the year-long plan. The thirty-second tuning. Not the rushed chapters. The chewed verse. Not the urgent recovery of the lost decades. The patient inhabiting of the next ten, by the small daily evening in the chair, with the lamp and the book and the One who delights to give what you are asking for.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each evening, one short passage, room for the tuning and the honest sentence, and the slow place to read in the older way Spurgeon was teaching his first-year students — one verse at a time, with the Spirit doing the carrying while you sit in the chair.
The Stilling Waves Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Spurgeon’s older vocabulary — speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth, the heart in right tune, the Spirit enters the heart and there abides — into a daily companion built for the late-starting reader whose beginning is, at last, ready to be held in a quieter rhythm than the one she would have invented by herself.
