Books Jesus Read

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Books Jesus Read

God has worked in your life is essential to sharing your testimony—your story for God’s glory.

Learning About Jesus and HisWorld from the Apocrypha: The Discipline of Study

The Apocrypha help us study the Scriptures. But first, why should we even talk about study? Studying the Bible should be reserved for Bible scholars, right? By no means! All Christians are called to be transformed by the renewing of their mind (Rom 12:2). All Christians are called to be set free, and Jesus tells us it is the truth that sets us free (John 8:22). All Christians are called to delight in the Scriptures and to meditate on them day and night (Ps 1:1–2). Is the Bible true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, and praiseworthy? If so, we should be thinking about it (Phil 4:8). And if you remain unconvinced, take fifteen minutes to read or listen to Psalm 119. “But the Scriptures are difficult to understand,” some of us may protest, “so what is the use of trying to study them ourselves?” Those of us who are of this mind would be correct. In fact, the Apostle Peter is in the same boat. He wrote, “There are some things in [Paul’s letters] that are hard to understand” (2 Pet 3:16). Nevertheless, Christians ought to imitate Ezra by setting our hearts to study the law of the Lord so that we might obey it and teach it to others (Ezra 7:10). Richard Foster, in his classic book Celebration of Discipline , lists study as one of the four inward disciplines especially