Here is a quote by George Muller. I focused on the part that said ‘water through a pipe’.
As the outward man is not fit for work for any length of time unless he eats, so is with the inner man. What is the food for the inner man? Not prayer, but the Word of God-not the simple reading of the Word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe. No, we must consider what we read, ponder over it, and apply it to our hearts.
― George Muller, The Autobiography of George Muller
Do you read the Bible as water runs through a pipe? The words just gushing through your mind on their way to somewhere else? Sometimes I do. I finish a paragraph and realize it hasn’t ‘sunk in’. We must not allow the word to run through our brain in one ear and out the other, as water runs through a pipe. We should absorb the word like a sponge. Hold onto it, keep it, treasure it.
The article discusses how the Bible engages our five senses to connect us with God’s nature and teachings. It emphasizes the importance of hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, and eating in spiritual life, illustrating that just as physical sustenance is vital, spiritual nourishment from scripture is essential for believers’ growth and fulfillment.
I was asked about the Lifeway Bible Study “When You Pray.” The study involves a collection of authors, who wrote a chapter each. They are- Kelly Minter, Jackie Hill Perry, Jen Wilkin, Jennifer Rothschild, Jada Edwards, and Kristi McLelland. It is a 7-session lesson designed for small groups, self alone, or a retreat accompanied by the separately purchased ‘Group Experience Kit’. Each session was written by the different author listed above. It includes a video component for each session. The study uses 6 different Bible translations, including the NLT.
It is not best practice to use multiple translations in one study.
Using many translations in one study: AI says, “A Bible teacher should generally not use six different translations in one study as it can be overwhelming and confusing for students, potentially detracting from the focus on understanding the text rather than comparing translation nuances; it’s usually better to stick with one primary translation and only reference a few others when necessary to clarify meaning or highlight translation variations in specific passages.”
I thanked the questioner for the query and for the encouragement and for reading my material here on the blog. Discernment is always good.
I am sorry to say that uniformly, almost anything from Lifeway is going to be bad. They unashamedly platform false teachers. A while back Lifeway published a spate of “heaven tourism” books where people who said they’d died were given a tour of heaven, some of them claiming to have met Jesus. Lifeway continued to publish these books for years until a big outcry finally pushed them off Lifeway’s shelves. Their years-long persistence in publishing these books, some of which contradicted each other and all contradicting the Bible, despite appeals, petitions, and rebukes, displayed a wanton lack of concern for the spiritual state of their customers, a lack of discernment, and a prioritizing of greed over truth.
Jen Wilkin left, Jackie Perry right
As for this specific study titled “When You Pray”, I’ve written several times about the authors Jackie Hill Perry, and Jen Wilkin. Both are egregious Bible twisters. Perry came out with an announcement that she receives direct revelation from Jesus and was instructed to tell people the different pieces of news ‘He’ tells her. Like this: “Ok ok. I’ll say this. God primarily deals with me in dreams. I’ve been enlightened, warned, and led to intercede for others through them.” She has since removed this Twitter announcement. You can read a transcript of it at the link above.
Jen Wilkin is obsessed with two things, preaching and women. This equals women preaching, she twists almost every sermon, Q&A, panel, or interview into a women need to be leaders WITH men (in roles the Bible denies us, of course). In one famous sermon she likened period blood (excerpt) from women to the blood on the cross, saying women have a better understanding of the gospel because of this. I am not kidding.
As for Minter & Rothschild, Michelle Lesley has written about them, discerning that these women preach to men and they support and promote false teachers. She does not recommend either of these women.
Alternatives to Lifeway’s When you Pray ‘study’ might be:
At Ligonier, there is a 6-week lesson series with video etc, called Prayer, where RC Sproul “uses the acronym ACTS and the Lord’s Prayer to teach us how to pray” 24 min each. It costs $9.00/month. https://connect.ligonier.org/library/prayer-27945/about/
Praying the Bible by Donald S. Whitney is a small book and 5-min youtube videos by the author go thru how to pray daily without falling into the rut of saying the same old thing. https://youtu.be/A-HziKu5Ot0?si=yU70QoTBvrklUrbw
Grace Community Church led by MacArthur has a huge small group ministry section for men and women, many of the lessons are taped or video’d and have accompanying pdf or notes.
I’d say any of those alternatives are better than Lifeway. 🙂
Lifeway is not a trustworthy source for any Christian material, sadly.
With the New Year upon us, many people are either finishing a previous Bible reading plan and perhaps looking for a different one for next year, or starting one for the first time. There are a lot of plans out there!
I’ve done several myself with I enjoyed. I liked the M’Cheyne plan, the Professor Horner plan, a plan my seminary friend devised where the Bible is read from the aspect of when each book was written (Job was 1st).
How to Eat your Bible: A Simple Approach to Learning and Loving the Word of God, book by Nate Pickowicz. Nate is a pastor in Gilmanton Iron Works, NH, plowing hard New England ground. He is the author of several books, including The American Puritans with Dustin Benge. Here is a synopsis of the book:
If you’re feeling distant from God, could it be because you’re ignoring His Word? But maybe you don’t know where to start. Maybe the long books and strange names feel overwhelming. Maybe you just don’t like reading. Whatever the case, How to Eat Your Bible will help you cultivate an appetite for life-long study of God’s Word. Find practical guidance for overcoming the hurdles that have kept you from making Bible study a regular part of your life...
Post-Its and Bible study go together like Mac & cheese
John MacArthur has an article on How to Enjoy Bible Study: “There’s nothing I enjoy more than studying the Bible. Yet it has not always been that way. My real passion for studying Scripture began when as a college student, I made a commitment to explore the Bible in earnest. I found that the more I studied, the more my hunger for Scripture grew. Here are three simple guidelines that have helped me to make the most of my study time.”
Ligonier lists 20 Reading Plans for 2025, saying, “To grow in the knowledge of God and to live in light of His truth, it’s important that we set aside focused time to study His Word.”
Michelle Lesley has listed a huge variety of plans with a short synopsis of each and links to each. Worth checking out. Bible Reading Plans for the New Year.
Pastor Jacob Abshire has an essay on Why I Ditched Bible Reading Plans with reasonable cautions and personal experience. Some people don’t connect with a ‘plan’ and that’s OK. This time of year one begins to see lots of talk about plans and you might be feeling guilty if you’re not on one. Don’t be. You can absolutely create something for yourself. As long as you’re reading progressively and steadily in some kind of structure, you will grow.
Abshire, while ditching a standard plan, absolutely advocates for reading the Bible. He devised a way to read it that was comfortable to him, and shares the specifics. His approach is kind of like the G3 “Six Ribbons” plan in Michelle’s list above.
If you start the year with a Bible Reading Plan and find it’s just not for you, that is OK too! Don’t wait until 2026 to begin a new one. Meeting with God every day is a blessing, so just read, or pick a new plan, or devise one yourself.
All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3:16-17)
For the word of God is living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, even penetrating as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12).
Hermeneutics. It’s not a word you hear often inside of churches. In our watered down state, preachers and pastors rarely use the “big words” any more. If they do, they’re abashed and even apologize for saying theological words like ‘justification’ or ‘inerrancy.’ However hermeneutics is a battleground in our continued spiritual warfare against the schemes of the devil. You must know what it is.
Some things in the Bible are illuminated by the Spirit through concept. In these cases, there isn’t a specific Bible verse that says, THIS IS THE ANSWER YOU’RE LOOKING FOR! The answer is gained by being part of the great sweep and scope of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Some doctrines are learned from a concept rather than an explicit verse spelling it out. In these cases, the Bible student needs to make a logical conclusion. Paul spoke often of reasoning together, (Acts 17:2, Acts 17:17) and using terms like “so then”, or “therefore”. This was his way of announcing a conclusion was imminent.
This is called “necessary inference” and you come to understand it by inference.
One of our elders referred to this quote by George Muller at Sunday School yesterday. I focused on the part that said ‘water through a pipe’.
As the outward man is not fit for work for any length of time unless he eats, so is with the inner man. What is the food for the inner man? Not prayer, but the Word of God-not the simple reading of the Word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe. No, we must consider what we read, ponder over it, and apply it to our hearts.
― George Muller, The Autobiography of George Muller
Do you read the Bible as water runs through a pipe? Sometimes I do. I finish a paragraph and realize it hasn’t ‘sunk in’. Our elder said we must not allow the word to run through our brain in one ear and out the other, as water runs through a pipe. We should absorb the word like a sponge. Hold onto it, keep it, treasure it.
I had a terrible week last week. I encountered some adverse conditions and I became petulant, grumpy, irritable, and self-pitying. I forewent Bible reading, rationalizing that I was too upset and couldn’t think just now. Of course, in adverse conditions, Bible reading is the first place one should go, not the last. But there you have it.
By the grace of God and the ministry of the Holy Spirit I recovered my equilibrium. I attended to some things I’d neglected the last week all day on Saturday, and on Sunday I devoted myself to church service, prayer, and small group fellowship. I’d promised the Lord that on Monday (today) I’d get back to it with a vengeance, since I was home from work on Thanksgiving break and had all the time in the world.
So by 11:00 this morning, I’d done-
10 chapters of Bible reading,
1 chapter read in Hidden Life of Prayer,
1 chapter read in Gerstner’s Theology in Dialogue,
1 chapter lesson completed in Jess Pickowicz’s Biblical Doctrine study,
Lecture 1 of Hebrews by Dr Abner Chou listened to, plus NT overview
4 pages of notes on legal pad
I am a Theology BEAST. Sadly, by a few days from now I know that I’ll be a theology wimp. I tend to slide. I start out good but slacken, then speed up and then slow down. Goodness, I totally understand Paul when he said,
I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do. But what I hate, I do. (Romans 7:15).
O Lord, have mercy on this weak woman, and help me stay consistent in Bible reading and study!!
Here are some thoughts and insights gained by the Spirit during today’s studying bonanza.
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EPrata photo
And behold, a man came up to him, saying, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” 17And he said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments.” 18He said to him, “Which ones?” (Matthew 19:16-18a).
This made me laugh out loud. Which ones? Like we can pick and choose? Whether as Gill’s Expositions says, the Rich Young Ruler
Whether those commandments of a moral, or of a ceremonial kind; whether the commands of the written, or of the oral law; of God, or of the elders, or both; or whether he did not mean some new commandments of his own, which he delivered as a teacher sent from God:
or whether the Rich Young Ruler had the original ten laws in mind, asking “which ones” just shows how blind he was. No one can keep any of the laws perfectly their whole life. But the man confidently replied to Jesus’ answer as to ‘which laws’ that “all these I have kept”. Some believe that the Rich Young Ruler was indeed Saul of Tarsus. If he was, then the Lord’s mercy is great. If he wasn’t, I pray that mercy came to that young ruler sometime before his death, when eternity becomes fixed.
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I do my daily Bible reading in the NKJV. The verse at Psalm 18:4 says,
The cords of death encompassed me, And the torrents of ungodliness terrified me.
Me too, David, me too.
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The LORD lives, and blessed be my rock, and exalted be the God of my salvation— (Psalm 18:46).
A GREAT verse!
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Job 18: man, this is rough, very rough, It’s not only rough because Bildad is heaping scorn on Job, and telling him to snap out of it, but Bildad is excruciating in his detailed list of what and how the wicked endure the coming punishment. Read Job 18 if you begin to lose your compassion for the lost.
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For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it. (Matthew 19:12)
Yes.
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Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. (1 Corinthians 2:12)
God is generous. We may only understand Him through His word, and we can only understand the word via His Spirit, but He has given to us His Spirit. Freely.
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“You don’t want to just know the word of God. You want to know the God of the word.” Dr Abner Chou, The Master’s Seminary, Hebrews lecture #1.
Read the word to gain an understanding of who Jesus is, to commune with Him, to understand His revealed attributes, commands, precepts, and plans. Every time I let Bible reading go and then return to it, I am refreshed and wonder why I let it go in the first place. I am a silly person, stumbling and bumbling along. No doubt I’ll mourn my wastrel ways when I get to heaven and see the glories Jesus has set before us. All I can do now is try again. And again…
I’d had a hard week, a long one. It had been a few days since I’d read my Bible. I was 6 days overdue for reading the pages in the book Biblical Doctrine I’m studying with an online group, and the new weekly study was going to come out the next day. If I didn’t do some reading I’d be a week behind in the study, and I was already a few days behind in Bible reading. When I read the ten pages suggested for the Doctrine study, I always also read a chapter in The Hidden Life of Prayer by David MacIntyre. I hadn’t read that either, even though it would only represent a few pages of reading and wasn’t especially hard or time-consuming.
It infuriates me when I do this. I exclaim aloud as Paul did in Romans 7:15-20, 24 why do I do the things I don’t want to do and do the things I don’t want to do? Who will deliver me from this body of death?
I didn’t desire to be behind any more. Nor did I want to neglect my God any further. I buckled down and read all my pages, the Bible, the weekly Bible Study, and my chosen book on Prayer. I took a leisurely two and a half hours to do it, though given the number of pages, the actual reading time could have been shorter. But the amazing thing is, the longer I read the Word, and the deeper I went into the Doctrine study, the more relaxed I became. I wanted to stay with it. I enjoyed it tremendously. I luxuriated in reading a bit, then lifting my eyes and praying in exultation, pondering a while, then reading some more. I was amazed when I finished, it felt like just one minute had passed.
When I finished I felt refreshed and relaxed. I felt good, through and through. Why is that?
I confessed my laziness to several of the men in my Bible Study group the next night. I mentioned the amazing feeling afterward, the energy and freshness I’d felt when I concluded my personal session. Why is that? And why do I put it off when I know that the Lord is worth the discipline, and that I’ll be receiving the gift of His presence through the scriptures, not to mention the bonus of the fresh and energized feeling?
They both said,
The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; (Psalm 19:7).
The answer is simple- the scriptures refresh like no other activity, item, discipline, food or drink on earth. They refresh totally because they are not from earth.
Have you ever gone to a Bible study and either they use a curriculum or the Bible itself, and the teacher reads a passage and then opens it up for comments by saying “What does this verse mean to you”? What is happening here is the teacher is confusing interpretation and application. There’s a book called Multiplyfrom Multiply Movement, which is David Platt and Francis Chan, written in 2012. Here is an excerpt fromlink to chapter 9of their free book-
Know the Difference between Interpretation and Application
Maybe the most common mistake made in Bible interpretation is when people focus too much on “what this verse means to me.” It’s not uncommon for Bible study groups to go around the circle as each person shares an individualized interpretation. Often these interpretations are made with little study and are heavily influenced by opinion and desire. Many times, the various interpretations are incompatible with one another. In this type of setting, the focus is not on what God is saying through the Bible. Instead, each person is focused on what he or she thinks the verse means. Whether it’s clearly articulated or not, this approach reveals the assumption that the Bible has a personalized meaning for each Christian. It might mean one thing to me, but another thing to you.
I’ll use an exaggerated example here, by saying, one man might respond by saying ‘Yes, this passage says to me that I can sin with impunity.” And the other man says, ” What it means to me is that I have to follow the Law.” Can it be both? No. As with any text, the author had one thing in mind when He wrote it. The fact that there are many different interpretations doesn’t mean that we can sow our own agenda into the Bible, come out with different interpretations, and think that that’s OK. It isn’t.
Sometimes when we talk about “what this passage means to me,” we are actually talking about application, rather than interpretation. With interpretation, we are asking what the passage is saying and what it means. With application, we are applying that meaning to our specific situation. Ultimately, each passage has one meaning, but it might have many different applications.
Application depends on our specific life situations, so we may all read the same passage and walk away with different applications. Interpretation, on the other hand, is all about discovering what God has actually said and what He intended to communicate. We should all read the same passage and walk away with the same meaning. Source:Multiply.
The Multiply book is free in pdf format and there are also 24 videos to match each week’s lessons.
In the Ligonier online class Principles of Biblical Interpretation, lecturer RC Sproul always says that there is ONE intended meaning for each passage in the Bible. There might be many applications, but the Author intended one meaning. I can give an example of this. In the passages describing the rapture and in the larger context of God’s plan for humankind in history, some interpret the rapture to occur before the Day of the LORD, or during the Day of the LORD, or after the Day of the LORD. Since it is one event and it happens only once, there can’t be an interpretation of the rapture that includes ‘what it means to me’ with three different timings.’ Only one of those timings is right and the other two are wrong.
John MacArthur at Grace Community Church preached against personal revelation and preached how to interpret the Word properly in this sermon from 2013.
Can we understand the one meaning the Author intended? With study, prayer, and the aid of the Holy Spirit, yes. Some passages are admittedly more difficult to understand. Also, we know we can’t understand all of the Bible in the same way the LORD does. However let me end with this story I’ve told and re-told. It fascinates me. Shortly after the Soviet Union fell, John MacArthur was asked by some pastors in the split-off nation of Kazakhstan to come give them a crash course in theology on various topics. The Communist Soviet Union had banned Christianity and when it fell, the secret pastors, new pastors, and new believers needed to get a good foundation in the open. MacArthur came.
At the end of the week, they asked to be taught on eschatology. MacArthur spent 8 hours teaching them from the Bible about last things. At the end of the teaching, they said, “Good. This is what we believe.” Having no access to commentaries, external sermons, or other teachings, and relying solely on the Bible, these pastors on one part of the world believed the same thing as another pastor in another part of the world, because they had interpreted rightly and understood the one intended meaning.
Won’t it be wonderful when we’re there and we all understand the same, and have a strong union in Christ with no error or sin? Meanwhile, in order to reduce the possibility of error, pray fervently and often, study diligently and well, and do not fall for the ‘what this verse means to me” claptrap. Stay true to discovering the wonders of the single, intended meaning of the passage you are reading.
the-end-time.org 