The Jeff Cavins Show (Your Catholic Bible Study Podcast) - How to Start Reading Your Bible

Episode Date: May 30, 2017

Have you ever wondered why every time you decide to read the Bible from cover to cover, you end up putting it down after a month? In this episode, Jeff gives 5 tips to help you start (and keep) reading your Bible successfully.

You're listening to the Jeff Kaven Show. Episode 17. How to Start Reading Your Bible. Hey, I'm Jeff Kavins. How do you simplify your life? How do you study the Bible? All the way from motorcycle trips to raising kids, we're going to talk about the faith and life in general. It's the Jeff Kaven show.

Welcome to the show, my friend. good to have you with us today. We're going to have another great show talking about all things Catholic. Today, specifically, we're going to talk about how to read the Bible. And we're going to go into specifics here. I, by the end of this show, I am going to show you how to read the Bible. And once again, I want to thank you for all of your email, your suggestions for shows, your comments on past shows, really helpful for me to hear how it's blessing you and some of the things that you're interested in hearing. A while ago, and you might want to check it out, a while ago we were talking about how to mark your Bible in episode 10. And that got an awful lot of response.

In fact, I got a beautiful letter from Holly, and she wrote about that particular podcast. And as it turns out, she's studying theology. I don't know if it's out of university or a seminary somewhere that they're offering classes. But she's studying theology, and her project was on how to mark Bibles, and she ran into the podcast. And she says, I just recently discovered your podcast, and I'm so excited about it. I enjoy it just as much as the Great Adventure series. She's studying theology, and she was thrilled to discover the Bible covers that we were talking about, beautiful leather Bible covers, and she plans on ordering one.

But then she went on, and she said that she went out and she bought the tools, the zebra pins and the colored pencils, and is just having a wonderful time with it. So thanks, Holly, and it's nice to know that that show made a difference in your life. Well, we're going to talk about this whole issue of how to start reading your Bible. You know, this is one of the most common questions that I get. And that's the purpose of this show, really, is to address many of these common questions that people have. And so often people will say, well, you know, what do I start with to read in the Bible? I want to know the Bible because it's so confusing and it's so big and I don't know where to begin.

So let's go through all of that. Okay. So the first thing I want to talk about before we get into how to read the Bible is, well, what about the Bible? You know, which one should you use? And I have in my library a number of different translations of the Bible, and I do this with my whole life, so I naturally would have a number of Bibles. Most people don't have many Bibles in their library.

You might have a couple. But the first thing that you really have to understand is that not all Bibles are equal. There are Bibles with 66 books that most Protestants use. Catholics use a Bible with 73 books. We call those extra seven, would be called extra according to a Protestant view. We call those the Deuterocanonical books like Syrac, you know. And our Protestant brothers and sisters would call them the Apocrypha. That's not a word that we use because apocrypha means false writings. And so we don't use that phrase.

But there's a couple of Bibles that I would recognize. you use if you really want to get into reading the Bible in chronological order to get the entire story. Now, first of all, when it comes to Bibles, there's three different categories. There is, on one side, paraphrase. A paraphrase Bible is like the living Bible, and it uses language like, your word is like a flashlight on my trail, you know? And it's just kind of using loose words. And the idea behind a paraphrase, like the Living Bible, is a a thought-for-thought translation, even though it's not a translation. It's a thought for thought. It's not word-for-word, and it's not concerned about the syntax and the original languages so much.

It's a thought-for-thought, you know? And it's fun to read those once in a while. I wouldn't recommend that that would be your study Bible, but it's kind of interesting to read them here and there. And then on the other side of a paraphrase, you have a translation, and that is a word-for-word translation. like the New American Bible that we hear in Mass or the RSV Catholic Edition. That's the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition. Those are serious translations. Protestants have their King James Version, which, by the way, the first edition of that had the Deutero-canonical books in it.

Don't tell anyone, but that's the way it began. So you've got a translation, and then in the middle you've got what's called a dynamic equivalent. And a dynamic equivalent is like, for example, the new international version, there's a bunch of them out there. And that is a word for word, thought for thought. It's trying to make, you know, very accurate and at the same time, very, very readable. What I recommend is getting a translation. And the two translations that I recommend are, number one, the RSV Catholic Edition. Ignatius has a great one. We can put a

link in the show notes for you. That is a wonderful Bible. You can get those from Ascension Press and they'll order it and send it right out. And that's a good one. And the reason I like it is because it's so readable, so accurate, and the catechism of the Catholic Church uses it when it quotes from the Bible. It's approved by the bishops. That's a big thing for us. The second is the new American Bible affectionately called the NAB. And the NAB, the New American Bible, is the translation that is used during Mass. So if you've ever read as a lector in the United States, you've read from the NAB. I suggest getting them both, but get one that you get really comfortable with, one that you can underline, one that you can read. It's not too big, you know, so you want to

carry it with you, bring it to work for breaks or whatever. It's not too small where the reading is is difficult and you find yourself not reading because of it. But those are the two. Those are the two. So get your Bible, New American Bible, RSV Catholic Edition. Now the problem with reading the Bible is this, right? Is that when people pick up their new Bible and they start to thumb through those beautiful golden pages that are stuck together, you know, they make one big assumption that is wrong.

And that big assumption is that this is written in chronological order. In other words, you can start at Genesis, and by the time you get to the book of Revelation, you'll close it, you will have a big smile on your face and say, man, was that a story? And that just simply doesn't happen. It doesn't happen. And it's impossible for it to happen. The big assumption is that it's written like Gone with the Wind, you know, that you can start at the beginning and go to the end. It doesn't work that way.

You know, don't be embarrassed if you read the Bible and had to quit many times. In fact, a lot of people say to themselves, I'm going to read the Bible, and they're going to start in January. So here they are. It might be August, you know. And now they've got to wait until January to start. They go out and get a brand new Bible because the old one doesn't work. And they get that brand new Bible, and they get their pens and everything ready. And January rolls around.

They start reading Genesis. And they go through Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Moses. And right about March, they quit. Why? Because they're in Levitic. and it's not making sense anymore. They've lost the story. They've lost the narrative thread to the story.

And what do you do when you lose the narrative thread? You quit. It's what happens to teenagers today who lose the narrative thread of their life. It might even take their own life. People walk out of movies that they can't follow. They put books down that aren't making sense anymore. They turn the television on and the show is boring and they turn it off. This is what happens with the Bible.

but we've got a remedy to that, though. I'm going to show you how to get over that so that you can read the Bible in chronological order. All right? So the number one problem that we face is that, and this is number one, these five points that I want to share with you today, number one is picking a translation.

Number two is the problem with reading the Bible. That's what I'm on right now. And that problem is that we think it's a book like Gone with the Wind. When it's not, it's a library. It's a library of 73 books, and they're not in chronological order. In fact, they are ordered by type of literature. We've got historical books together. We've got prophets together.

We've got poetry. We've got wisdom literature. We've got gospels and epistles. So that's the way that it is ordered. It's not in chronological order. In other words, you've got to have somebody teach you. you have to have somebody teach you how to read the Bible. I don't care who you are.

You've got to be taught. And by the way, this is something that we need to do with our children, is we need to teach our children. My gosh, we've got to give them at least the basic skills of how to read the Bible. And that's what we're talking about here. So that's number one is pick up good translation, NAB, RSV, Catholic Edition. Number two, the problem with reading the,

Bible is that it's not written like other books. It is a library that has to be navigated. You have to be taught how to use that library, and that's what we're doing here. Now, let's pause here for point number three for a second. Where does the Bible fit into all things Catholic? Now, what I mean by that is the Catholic Church, we're called on to read the Bible daily, you know, and to meditate on it. But the church, the church, the church, the church, Church is so big. I remember as a kid growing up, maybe you do too, that when you would walk into the church, I mean, it was like a feast for the eyes. They had candles. They had an altar. They had vestments. They had nuns. They had priests. We have mortal sin, venial sin. We have heaven, hell, purgatory.

We've got sacraments. We've got all kinds of things in the Catholic Church. How do you make sense out of all of this? Where does it come from? And how do you share it with other people? My friend, knowing the Bible is the key. It's the key to this. And let me explain. You've got that great big pile of Catholicism as Frank Sheed, the English apologist, one who defends and teaches the faith. Out at Hyde Park in London, he taught all the time and he said to the people, he said, you know, the problem with us as Catholics is that after 12 years of parochial education, we wind up with a pile of Catholicism. We don't know how to. to order it. We don't know how to organize it. We don't know how to access it, but it's there. It's paid for. But how do we make sense out of it? Well, that's where this point three comes in. It's called the catechism. You see, the catechism gives you the keys to making sense out of all that's Catholic. And it shows us where the Bible fits in and why you need to read it in chronological order and understand this amazing story. You see, the creed has four pillars. The first

pillar is the catechism has four pillars the first pillar is the creed the second pillar is sacraments and liturgy the third is life in christ and the fourth is prayer okay so you've got creed number one what is that well saint augustine said that it is the story of salvation history the bible in a very tightly wound form in other words it takes the bible the creed takes the bible from Genesis all the way to Revelation, and it, here's a big word for you, big, big, fancy word. It squishes it. It squishes the story. Now, it was Pope Benedict who brought out this point that the organization of the catechism is in itself a educational tool.

It's telling you something. If the creed, the Bible, the story comes first, that should say something to you. It means you've got to make this a priority in your life, my friend. You've got to get into God's Word, the scriptures, and begin to read. Why? Because the second pillar, sacraments and liturgy, third pillar, life in Christ, fourth pillar, prayer, all spring, spring, spring from the story. So if you want to know everything Catholic and where all of this comes from,

you've got to know the story because it all comes from the story. By the way, in a later show, we're going to talk about this more, but that's why we have developed this brand new product called the Storybook, the Great Adventure Storybook for children, and I'll put it in the show notes. My wife worked on it. It is a masterpiece that takes children through the story and shows them where everything Catholic springs from. You might want to buy it yourself. Just don't show them for a couple months. Act like it's new, but you go through it yourself. And you're going to be surprised at what you gain.

So you've got the creed number one. That's the story. Sacraments in liturgy. Pillar number two. That's how you get into the story. Pillar number three, life in Christ, that's your script. That's what you live in this story. And prayer touches all of it.

So the Bible comes first. We've got to learn to read the Bible. Now we're going to take a break. And when we come back from that break, I am going to reveal to you, I'm going to reveal to you the 14 books that you need to read if you want to know the narrative of salvation history. I wonder if you could guess what those 14 are. So when we come back, I'll give you those 14 books and show you what to read, how to make the

complex simple, and then I have a little plan for you on how to go through it and make this a reality. You're listening to The Jeff Kaven Show. We'll be right back. The Bible is such an important part of our Catholic faith, but it's not always easy to understand. There are 73 separate books and so many names, places, and events that sometimes we just stop trying to figure out how it all fits together.

The good news is, the great adventure Bible studies make it easy for you to understand the Bible. By focusing on the story that ties all of Scripture, together, the Great Adventure Bible studies give you the big picture of the Bible, and once you see the big picture of salvation history, the Mass will make more sense, the Catholic faith will make more sense, and you will see how God has a loving plan for your life. The Great Adventure Bible studies have helped hundreds of thousands of people to understand the Bible and grow closer to Christ. There's no other Catholic Bible study series like it, and you can get started on the great adventure today by creating your free account at ascensionpress.com.

Welcome back. Welcome back. I'm Jeff Kavens. Talking about how to start reading the Bible, and I hope it's going to be helpful for you. We're going to give you now the 14 books out of the 73 to read in what order. And if you do that, you're pretty much going to get the narrative of the story. and then I'm going to challenge you to start doing it, and I'm going to challenge you to share with a couple people in this next week what you just learned. You know, one of the best ways to retain what you learn is to teach. That's why I'll be honest with you.

I'm actually a slow learner, but I get to say it over and over and over to the point where I actually learned it. I think when I really got serious about the Lord, I think the angels said to Jesus, what are you going to do with him? He's never going to remember this stuff. And Jesus said, you just watch. I'll make him teach it. And then he'll get it. And I think that's what the Lord did for me. All right, we got your Bible in front of you. There it is. It's beautiful, isn't it? It's beautiful gold gilded pages. Old Testament all stuck together. You haven't looked in that yet. You got your marker. You got your colored pencils. You got your Mulski notebook. Man, you are ready to rock and roll in reading the Bible. Where do you begin? Number one question I get. book should I start with? You know what my answer is? I never start with a book. I never do. My answer is the whole thing. That's my answer. People want to know, well, which book should I

start with? Well, no, let's start with the whole thing, shall we? Let's go through the whole thing. That's why in our Bible system, we have unlocking the mystery of the Bible, which is eight sessions that take you through the whole Bible very quickly. And we also have the Bible timeline, which is 24 one-hour sessions that take you through the whole Bible. Our idea is this. Let's get the whole story first. Let me give you an example. If you are going to study cars and you came to my car clinic and I'm going to teach you about cars,

you wouldn't come in wondering if we're going to start with carburetors on the first day, or on the first day say, are we dealing with gas tanks? Is that what we're starting with today? Or should we start with engine blocks or power brake systems? Or what about, let's start with glove compartments. No, you wouldn't expect that at all. You would expect a basic introduction of, here's a car. This is what it looks like.

This is its purpose. These are the big parts of the car. Then we can go into the minutia. It's kind of like a tree. I'm going to teach you about a tree. I'm not going to start with bark. I'm not going to start with roots. I'm not going to start with roots.

I'm not going to start with leaves. I'm going to back up and show you the whole tree. And then we're going to go into detail. You see, that's the genius of education systems, no matter what it is, is to make the complex simple, so that people can begin from simple places and then become more complex as they go deeper. Okay?

So which book should I start with? All of them. But specifically, 14. And then if you want to go into John, or you want to go into Galatians or James, that's great, that's great. But you've got a background, you've got a foundation to work from. Okay, so drum roll, please. Okay, we'll have our little drum roll.

We're going to give you the 14 books out of the 73 books if you read them in this order. And yes, they'll be in the show notes, so don't pull over on the side of the road yet. You still got to get to work. If you write these down later, or you go to the show notes, it's going to be gold, just like the four pillars of the catechism. That's gold. That's pure gold to understand how all of this fits together. Okay, let's go. We've got number one, Genesis. Genesis, the creation of the world, right? Adam and Eve, the beginning goes all the way through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Donnie Osmond, the whole thing.

Joseph, actually. And then you move into Exodus, and they go into Egypt, and you have the 10 plagues and Moses leading this great Exodus from bondage. and they go out into the wilderness. And it brings us to our third book, Numbers, the Book of Numbers. And then after they're out there for 40 years, they go and they take the promised land in the book of Joshua. They conquer the land. That's their fourth book. So we got Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Joshua.

Notice we've skipped some. We skipped, what did we skip? Leviticus, we skipped Deuteronomy. So we're up to Joshua, and they divide up the land. Joshua dies, and we have the period of the judges. So we're in the book of judges now. That's our fifth book. And then we go into the sixth and seventh book, which is first and second Samuel. And this is where we begin to have this leadership building up. We have Samuel. And the prophets begin right around this period. We have first Samuel,

second Samuel. I'm going to repeat these in a moment. But first Samuel, second Samuel, then you go into first kings, then second kings. And this all deals with, you know, the divided kingdom of the north and the south, Israel, and Judah. Even if that doesn't make sense to you right now, my friend, it will. It will. If you read and you go along with, for example, unlocking the mystery of the Bible, you'll get it, you will. I've never met anybody who couldn't get this. So after First and Kings and Second Kings, we go into Ezra, Nehemiah, First Maccabees, Luke, and Axe. Now you're saying, oh, I recognize those last two, Luke and Acts. And there you've got 14 books.

Let me go through them real quick. You've got Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, First and Second, Samuel, First and Second, Kings, Ezra, Nehemiah, First Maccabees, Luke and Axe. There it is, my friend. If you read those, if you read those, you're going to get the basic story. you're going to get the basic storyline and then that leaves you with how many books left over 59 where do you put those that's what we teach in unlocking the mystery of the bible that's what the individual bible timeline chart shows you this is actually a lot simpler than the most people know we just have to teach this to people to let them know how to read the bible right so like for example

in the period of the judges, during the book of judges, judges is the fifth of the 14 narrative books, what would belong there? Well, Ruth, the book of Ruth, belongs in the context of judges, right? So we're going to show you in that chart where everything fits. But suffice it for today, for the purpose of this podcast, I'm giving you the 14 books that you need to start reading. Now, when you start reading those books, you want to pay attention to the overarching story and repeated themes like Exodus in return, the replacement of the firstborn who fails. All of the various components in the Old Testament, the 12 tribes, Mount Sinai, the sacrifices, the Passover lamb. All of these things will find their fulfillment in the New Testament. So as you're reading through the Bible as a story, you begin to pay attention to themes, places, people.

And what we find when Jesus comes is that he fulfills in his life all of it. All of it. So, for example, those who have gone through the Bible timeline with me, they learned the whole Bible, and then they move on to 24 weeks of Matthew, which is basically looking at the life of Jesus and seeing how he fulfilled everything that they read about in the story in the Old Testament. But what we're talking about today is at least getting that story down, right? So we want to focus on the overarching story. We want to underline key pivotal points as we're going through.

And now number five, I want to give you a plan on how to do this. a plan on how to read it, because you might be thinking yourself, well, how long does that take to read those 14 books? Well, it depends on how much you want to read every day. If you want to read four chapters a day, you're going to read through the Bible in those 14 books in three months. Four chapters a day, three months. If you read two chapters a day, it's going to be six months. If you read one chapter a day, you can do it in a year. If you read zero chapters a day,

you will be as ignorant as you are a year from now. You know, I'm just joking with you. But if you read four chapters a day, you'll get through it in three months. And then the second time around what we encourage people to do is to start reading the other 59 books in their proper context. Right? So when you do come to judges, read Ruth in the middle of it.

Oh, it'll make sense. It will make sense when you do that. This is exciting stuff. And, you know, I had, let me tell you real quickly, we had a guy who wrote a note, 94 years old. 94 years old got a hold of the Bible timeline, this methodology of reading the Bible. And was so moved, he said, I have been looking for this all my life. And then you know what he said? He's 94. He said, I'm going to spend the rest of my life. reading the Bible and telling people about this. Isn't that beautiful? What are you? 33, 34, 41?

You've got a long time ahead of you. Lord willing, just think of all the people that you can share with, all of the grandchildren that you can teach how to read the Bible. I think every grandchild should have a memory of Catholic grandma and grandpa teaching them how to read the Bible, sitting down with them and actually doing it. You can do it with the Bible. You can do it with the children's story book that Emily and the,

and the ladies put together that's in the show notes it's going to be going to be exciting so that's my fifth point is is take some time and and start to read it and don't read it to conquer it as americans so often we read like oh just got to get through this slow down read to comprehend read to worship read to get to know god because he is going to reveal himself to you in word and deed. In words and deeds, he's going to reveal himself to you in this amazing story. And your response to his revelation is one of faithfulness. You respond not in just word alone. No, faith alone doesn't cut it. It's faith in works. It's we respond in the same way that he revealed himself in word and deed. we respond in word and deed.

Faith, you are not saved by faith alone, James says, but by works with that. Because that's biblical faith. That's the fullness of our response to God. Now, in the end of all of this, my goal, my hope, my prayer for you is that you would come to know two things. One, paragraph 236 of the catechism, paragraph 236 of the catechism talks about that we need to get to know the mystery of the Trinity. We need to know the heart of our father. And number two, the economy of God. We need to get to know his plan. And you by reading the Bible,

remember it's a relationship. He's revealing himself to you. You're going to grow in your ability to trust him on a daily basis. Isn't that beautiful? Wow, the time flies when you're having a lot of fun here on the show. And I want to encourage you to give me an email. My email address is very easy. It's the Jeff Cavan Show at ascensionpress.com. The Jeff Cavan Show at ascensionpress.com. Let me know. I want you, I want you to pray about this. And seriously, start it. Start reading the Bible this way. I want to hear the feedback. I want to hear what it's doing in your life and any questions you might have. I love to share your emails, your insights, your victories in this area. For some, this is a new beginning.

For others, it's a refresher course, and that's good. But I have found one thing common to all believers, and that's this. Sometimes we just got to be reminded to get going deeper into God's Word. And just because you read it once doesn't mean you're done. It's a way of life. And that's why every year we revisit the life of Christ in the liturgical year over a three-year cycle. We don't go through three years, and then everyone says, well, what are we going to do? now? Well, we're going to start over. Why? You need to hear it again and again and again.

And so what the church does in the liturgical year with hearing the word of God and hearing the word of God, we need to do that in our devotional life. We need to do that in our life of prayer and we need to conform our life to Jesus Christ. What better way than reading his love letter to you. And I'll just end with this. The Bible or the church says that that in Bible study our Heavenly Father comes down to his children and reveals himself to them. Bible reading and Bible study, my friend, is a father revealing himself to you. God bless you and hope you have an absolutely wonderful, wonderful week. Remember, share this show with your friends.

Go to iTunes, go ahead and make a comment, rate it. We'd love to have that information. but share it with two friends this week that need to know how to read the Bible. Go ahead, just share it, and the family will grow. Have a good week.