Scheduling Your Bible Study Time
Set aside a specific amount of time to do Bible study each week. Decide how much time you want to spend on Bible study. Don’t overdo it, but don’t shortchange yourself, either. If you don’t put study into your weekly schedule, you will never make time for it or it will be sporadic and shallow. You must make time for Bible study.
How often should you study the Bible? The answer will vary from person to person, but an important factor to keep in mind is the distinction between your quiet time and your Bible study time. You should have a quiet time every day. It is usually a shot devotional period (10-13 minutes) in which you read the Bible, meditate for a few minutes on what you have read, and have a time of prayer. The purpose of your quiet time is to have fellowship with Jesus Christ.
You should not try to do in-depth Bible study during your quiet time. In fact, nothing will kill your quiet time faster than engaging in serious Bible study during that devotional period. Just enjoy the presence of God and fellowship with him.
While it is better to have a 10-minute quiet time every day than jus a one-hour period once a week, the exact opposite is true in Bible study. You cannot study the Bible effectively in a piecemeal fashion. It is better to block out larger periods of time (two to four hours) than to try to study a little bit every day. Then as you grow in your Bible study skills, you can spend additional time with it.
Probably the worst enemy of Bible study today in the Western world is television. Surveys show that the TV is on 7 hours, 40 minutes per day in the average American home. The average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day – which packed together would be 61 days of TV viewing per year. By age18 the average American child will have seen 200,000 acts of violence, including 16,000 murders. By age 65 the average American will have spent about 9 ½ years in front of the tube. (For more statistics see http://tvturnoff.org/images/facts&fiigs/factsheets/FactsFigs.pdf.).
If, on the other hand, a person went to Sunday school regularly from birth until age 65, he would only have had a total of four months of solid Bible teaching. Is it any wonder that there are so many weak Christians in Western society? We have to discipline ourselves and make specific time for Bible study, and not let anything get in its way.
You should study your Bible when you rare at your best physically, emotionally, and intellectually, and when you can be undistracted and unhurried. Since you are either a “day person” or a “night person,” you should pick the time when you are most alert. You should never try to study when you are tired or right after a large meal. Try to study when you are rested and wide-awake.
Rick Warren is the founding pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., one of America's largest and best-known churches. In addition, Rick is author of the New York Times best seller The Purpose Driven Life and The Purpose Driven Church, which was named one of the 100 Christian books that changed the 20th Century. He is also founder of Pastors.com, a global Internet community for ministers.
Excerpted from Rick Warren’s Bible Study Methods. Used with permission. Copyright 2006 by
Originally published May 30, 2007.
