#STRask - Can Secular Books Assist Our Christian Walk?

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

Questions about how secular books assist our Christian walk and how Greg studies the Bible.   How do secular books like Atomic Habits assist our Christian walk? How do you personally study the Bible?

This is Amy Hall and Greg Kochel and you're listening to Stanter reasons hashtag str ask podcast. All right, Greg, we have some questions about how you do things. So this first one comes from Tom. All right. Greg referenced reading atomic habits to start the year. What are his reflections from the book, particularly from a biblical perspective? How do these secular books assist our Christian walk? All right, just a point of information here. I didn't say I read it. I said I bought it or actually got it as a gift at Christmas. I'd asked for it. And I've surveyed the book.

I've done a pre-read on it and there's a lot of good stuff in there. But I need to go back and do a more careful look. I've just been too busy with other reading demands that I haven't gone back to that one. But I can speak more to the second issue, and that is I have no reason to be suspicious of books written by non-Christians that can give me advice about how to live life. I mean, people have all kinds of wisdom that they learned from experience that I could benefit from. You know, it's interesting that there is an ancient text called the Wisdom of the Amenemope, okay, or maybe it's called the Wisdom Literature of the Amenemope. And these were proverbs and stuff from the ancient Near East. Turns out a lot of those same proverbs, word for word, end up in the book of Proverbs.

Now, some people can speculate about the literary relationship, who wrote it down first, but that's not actually relevant. What's relevant is whether it's sound as a wise saying. And if it turned out that, who? David's son, Solomon, Solomon, you know, picked this up. A stitch in time saves nine. That's, what's his name? Benjamin Franklin.

You know, it's still smart. A penny saved is a penny earned or whatever. That's good stuff. And we can learn from other people who have the ability to reflect on the nature of the world and draw conclusions about life that are sound. In fact, even in the Proverbs, it says, look at the ant, oh, sluggard. And then he develops the idea. So he's talking to a lazy guy.

He said, just look at nature. Can't you learn something about effective living by looking at ants and locusts that go out in ranks or lizards that live in palaces of kings. So there is a very robust capability that non-Christians have of coming up with smart stuff that we can benefit from in a whole bunch of different areas. benefit from in a whole bunch of different areas. All right? So I have no, what's the word I'm looking for, reservations about reading secular stuff when it comes to this kind of thing. Now, sometimes they say silly stuff. So I might be reading a book about diet and they say, well, ancient man did thus and so.

Well, there's some merit in that before all these foods were processed, and they evolved to do it this way. I said, well, that's stupid. So I just ignore that. But that there's a pattern here that might be useful for me in diet. I can weigh the merits and see whether it's good or not. So I, you know, I learn a lot from secular sources and and I'm not concerned about it unless there is a Whatever said is in vase

Against a Christian worldview in some sense it it it advances a false idea about reality it advances a false idea about reality. But I'll know that because I have a fairly robust understanding of a Christian worldview and I can recognize that when it comes down the pike. So you mentioned sometimes they can have good advice about practical ways to do things, even if their explanation of why it works is incorrect. Exactly, exactly. I think there are two things that you can look out for. If you're looking for good advice, there are two things the person has to get right. So the closer, if they're not Christians,

the closer they are to getting those two things right, the better the advice is going to be. And the first thing is human nature. They have to understand that we are fallen. They have to understand that we tend towards disorder and badness. Rebellion, right. Yes. They have to understand that. And secondly, they have to understand what's good. So their goals have to be the same as our goals would be as Christian. So if they understand who we are and what is good for us to be working towards, then

their advice is going to be working towards, then their advice is going to be better than if they start to move away from those things. Because both of those things affect how we do things. Yeah, sometimes though the good is not a moral good, it's a utility. And so, and therefore the moral quality doesn't really come into play. So three days ago, I changed the bulb, the blinker in the tail of my F-150. Well, I don't know how to do that. I'd done it before but I forgot. So I went online and there it was. I just googled it and the guy's, you know, three-minute video and there's how to do it. So I

don't know if he's a Christian or not, but there was a utility about how to fix this thing that had no moral ramifications. Here's the best way to get it done. And I actually watched two videos because the first one had an ambiguity and I think I could do it that way. The second guy, it was between the two, I fixed it in about five minutes. Okay. So sometimes the value system, the moral system doesn't come into play. It just depends on the topic. If you're fixing something, you're building a fishing rod or, you know, using your jointer or something like that in the workshop, then those kind of assessments aren't so critical.

And part of what I mean by good, I mean kind of a teleology for our purposes, like what should our priorities be? Because someone could realize, hey, we need a lot of help to get us out of our bad tendencies. They could understand human nature. But then if their goal is, we have to beat everybody at every game, and that's the goal, well, now they're just gonna help you, they're gonna help you do well along the wrong path.

Yeah, that's right. No, that's a great observation. So you just need to make sure they understand what human flourishing involves, and a lot of secular people can get that right, but a lot can get that wrong. So those are the two things to look out for. But Greg, was there anything in particular from that book that you have a reflection on? No, I can't remember so much about it right now.

And this is why I just do a pre-read, I get a sense of it, then I have to go over more carefully and then the details sink in. And I haven't done that yet. So Tom, you'll have to call the show. You'll have to read the book. A couple months. You'll have to read the book yourself. Okay, let's go on to a question from Jake.

How do you personally study the Bible? I've heard Greg mention, quote, I just finished, insert book name, several times during the podcast, but each time was in a separate book. Are you reading that fast? What's your process of study? Well, when I say I just finished, you don't know when I started. So it might have taken me a year to read that. But my process of reading, I've talked about this before, I have a checklist for reading the Bible in a year, but I don't worry about reading it in a year. I just use the check boxes to check off books that I've read, and the empty boxes are the

books I have to go to keep reading if I want to read the entire Bible, the full counsel of God. And I have a commitment to keep working towards that end until I've checked every box and then I get a new form and I start all over again. So I think it was 2020 that I started and that process and I finished last fall, 24. And now I started that again and I'm moving ahead. And I will read according to the things they have there, but sometimes I say, I'm just going to read 1 Timothy. And it's not in the sequence, but it's somewhere in the chart.

I'm going to read 1 Timothy and then check 1 Timothy off. So I can read wherever I want. But the boxes help me to keep track of what I haven't read yet if I want to do the whole corpus of scriptural books. So that's not exactly study. That's reading. But I read attentively. I read slowly. I use a pencil and I make notations. I circle words and draw lines between them. I think they're repetition. I can attest to that. I'm looking at it right now.

She's looking at it right now. You know, and I've got one, two, three here, you know, I got numbers and it just, so anyway, it just helps me to see themes. And that's what I do. Now, I only do a deep study for this myself, because being in this work, there are things you have to attend to as part of your craft and as part of your work. And so my deep dives go, are dictated by my work schedule. So I did a deep dive in the canon. I wrote it principally when I was in Wisconsin, but I had to bring five or six different books with me as my resources to make sure I had a really good idea about it. But then I wrote, I think a pretty good piece on the canon that came out last fall, New Testament canon, which books and why.

So now I did a deep dive in that. Okay. And it might be, and I think earlier last year, 24, I wrote a piece called Why the Blood. Now, this was on the blood atonement, substitution atonement, a controversial issue with some people. But I had to do a deeper dive in that topic with books and with scripture. Okay? So I'm doing my deep dive based on my professional requirements.

Once in a while there'll be something I'm just curious about. I'll say, gee, you know, what about this? I did a piece a couple years ago, the myth of the social justice Jesus, and then I read, went through every gospel with a fine-tooth comb in order to determine Jesus' perspective on the poor and the outcast, etc., etc., and see why did Jesus come, what did he say, and what did others say about him. So there are times when I'll do a deep dive like that. Most of the time, if I'm not working on a project like that, then I'm just moving through the text. And nighttime I read through Psalms and Proverbs, Psalms and Proverbs. I just keep going back and forth between them.

And that's just, that's my habit. Okay, I've done different things at different times. And when I started out, when I was in grad school, one of my professors, and I can't remember now who it was, it might have been Walt Russell, but he recommended reading through the Old Testament once a year and the New Testament twice a year. And so at that time, I said, okay, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to start reading through the Bible. And my goal at first was not to focus in too much on the details, but just to get a big

picture of everything, because I think it's really important that we get that big picture so then the details start to fit in in the right places. And sometimes if we're reading too slowly, and by slowly I don't mean like you're reading each word slowly, I mean you're reading a tiny bit at a time, maybe a couple verses a day. Oh, I see, yeah. If you're reading like that, you don't get the big picture because you can't remember what you read at the beginning of the book.

That's just a problem. So my goal was to read large amounts at a time, not necessarily fast as I'm reading, but just larger amounts so that I finish the book more quickly, but that's because I'm reading more at once. So you could read the first Peter in one sitting, for example, and you get the whole thing in one sitting, front to back, so to speak. So that was my goal at first, was to get the big picture. But what I found, and I figured I would eventually start doing something different, but what I found is that doing that, reading books

as a whole, as much as you possibly can, like the Old Testament books, you can't, you really can't do that. I mean, you can, but it takes hours to read certain books. As I did that, I realized it was starting to shape me in a way just because of the sheer amount that I was immersing myself into the Bible. It was starting to shape the way I think in a way that it might not have. And I've pointed out before, we have all sorts of books that we love that we've read over and over, or a TV show that we've watched over and over.

We did a mentoring letter on that recently. And we know everything about it, not because we studied it, but because we read it over and over. Immersion. So I don't even think we have to sit down and do any sort of very detailed study in order to have the Bible shape us.

And I think there's a place for that, but I think my main goal is to get as much of it into me as I can every day. John MacArthur said, you should read the Bible enough so that your blood is biblical. I saw this when I read Saint Patrick's book, The Confessions of St. Patrick, you know, that was written in what, 400 A.D. or something? But as I was—this is years ago, when I first read it, I saw that there were all these footnotes everywhere, and the footnotes were referencing a Bible verse. And what it turns out is that he had so much of the Bible in him that as

he talked, it was just coming out. And I thought, oh, that's what I want. That's what I want to be. His blood is biblically. Yeah. So, and then along the way, I also, Greg, have an app. I have an app. You use a paper. I have an app. I think it's called the Bible Box. And it just has every chapter and you just check it off. And you can choose entire Bible, you can choose New Testament, you can choose Old Testament. I think you might even be able to do chronologically, but you just click it off.

And if you say when you want to finish it, it'll tell you how much to read that day. And it adjusts depending on how long each chapter is. So I use that app. But along the way as I was doing this, I realized, or I heard about this method that Fred Sanders wrote about one time, and it was James Gray's way of mastering the Bible. And his way was you take a book, you read through the whole thing, and you read it over and over and over and over. Now, if you can do that in the smaller book, you can do that, you know, in a couple hours, you can read it over and over. But what I did was— You mean read it multiple times in the same sitting? Multiple times in

the same sitting. Okay, as opposed to read through 1 Peter once a day for a month. Right. John MacArthur suggests that, too. Right. So that's what I ended up doing. I ended up doing one book for a month, and I only did this with the New Testament, so that's what I ended up doing. I ended up doing one book for a month, and I only did this with the New Testament, and that took me about five years to get through. And as I was doing that, I was also doing memorization. So memorization actually ends up being a really good way to study it,

because as you memorize an entire book, you start to see how everything fits together. And you have to really meditate on it. You have to really think about what it means if you're going to memorize in that way. And you start to understand it in a way that I don't, the books that I've worked on like that, I understand way better than the ones I haven't. It just makes a huge difference. So I did that memorization while I was doing the read the book every day. And I didn't get to the end of every book, but the parts that I did, I really did, you know, learn way better than

the other parts. And as I'm going, if I see something I want to make a note on, all I do is I just put a date in my Bible and then I have, well, I'm using a remarkable now, so I write in there, but I also have files where I'll just make my notes in a book and I'll date it so that I can see what my comment was for that date. So that's kind of how I do notes as I'm going along. But honestly, I would just say, especially if you're just starting out, don't worry about having a system that you have to follow because sometimes that can stop you because you think,

oh, I'm going to have to get this my pencil out. I'm going to have to do all this stuff if I want to read. Don't put that pressure on yourself. Anything that's stopping you from reading, take it away. If something moves you as you're reading and you want to write a note, write a note. But don't have this pressure that I have to write notes every time I am reading the Bible, because you'll stop yourself from reading. Yeah, I have a little aphorism about prayer, because prayer is difficult for me and it's

hard to figure out. But the aphorism is, the first rule of prayer is to pray. Okay? And there's a parallel here. The first rule of reading the Bible is to read. You don't have to have a pen or pencil or read so much or whatever. Just keep reading and the point of course is being consistent. Because another principle here for me is you cannot read today's Bible reading tomorrow. You can only read tomorrow's Bible reading tomorrow. If you don't read today, then you lose this day of reading or prayer. You can't pray today's prayers tomorrow. You can't do today's workouts tomorrow. There's some things you can only do today for today. And that's why we want to make prayer and Bible reading a consistent daily thing. You don't need a

special thing, just start doing it and do it consistently. By the way, that is a principle in Atomic Habits. Now I recall we had an earlier show that asked about that. Well, creating a habit is absolutely key. The more that you create in your life, if you do things a certain way each day, it's so much easier. You don't have to think about it. There's less resistance to doing it. You automatically go from one thing to another. Maybe you work out, then you eat, then you get ready, then you read your Bible. Whatever it is, having a consistent routine will keep you going. And the other thing I would say is, as you're focusing on keeping this habit, I have two suggestions. One of them is, let's say you're reading several chapters a day,

and you're in a certain day where you don't have time for that. Don't not read anything just because you can't do as much as you wanted to. Read one chapter. And sometimes I actually will say, and that's just to keep your habit going. So if I get to the end of the day and I don't even have the strength to read a long chapter, I just read Psalm 23. And that's just my go-to. I'm like, I'm just gonna read the Bible. I do it every day. I'm gonna read it now before I go to sleep.

I think the principle is don't break the chain. Yes. That's really key. And then my second piece of advice would be, if you do break it, that doesn't ruin everything. Have grace for yourself. That doesn't mean, cause sometimes you miss one day and then it's just all over and you feel like you've lost your streak.

I wouldn't keep track of a streak. Don't keep track of that because that's too upsetting when you miss it. Just have this goal. You read a chapter every day no matter what. And if you happen to miss a day, it's just one day. Just get back in the saddle. Just get right back in the saddle. Don't let it go.

And so that's my advice. Excellent. All right, Greg, we're out of time, but thank you so much, Tom and Jake. That was a fun one, and we'd love to hear from you. Send us your question on X with the hashtag STRask or go to our website at str.org and find our hashtag STRask podcast page. Thank you so much for listening. This is Amy Hall and Greg Koockel for Stand to Reason.