How to Study the Bible for Beginners: A Simple Four-Step Method

What’s the difference between reading and studying the Bible?

Reading covers ground. Studying stays put. When you read, you might take in three chapters and follow the story. When you study, you take a few verses and stay long enough to see what you’d miss at a normal pace.

You need both, and neither needs a degree. Bible study is mostly the habit of slowing down and asking good questions. If you already read most days, try adding one study session a week. If you’re still working out what to read day to day, start with how to read the Bible.

What do you need to start?

• A Bible you can understand. Any modern translation will do. Our guide to Bible translations for beginners compares them.
• A notebook. Writing slows you down, which is the point.
• One short passage. Four to twelve verses. One paragraph teaches you more than a rushed chapter.
• About 20 minutes. Long enough to notice things, short enough to repeat.

A study Bible is a good extra, but keep its notes closed until step three.

A simple Bible study method in four steps

Bible teachers often call the last three steps observation, interpretation and application. Here they are in plain words, with a slow read first:

1. Read. Read the passage twice, slowly, and once out loud if you can. Don’t analyze it yet.
2. Observe. Write down what’s on the page. Who is speaking? Which words repeat? What is compared or contrasted? Stick to what the text says, not what it means.
3. Ask what it meant then. Who wrote this, who first received it, and what were they facing? What would these words have meant to them?
4. Ask what it means now. What does this show about God and about people? Where does it touch your life this week? Write down one specific thing to do or pray.

Give each step about five minutes. Some days one step will take longer, and that’s fine.

An example: James 1:22–25

Here is the method on four verses from the letter of James:

“But be doers of the word, and not only hearers, deluding your own selves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man looking at his natural face in a mirror; for he sees himself, and goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of freedom and continues, not being a hearer who forgets but a doer of the work, this man will be blessed in what he does.” (James 1:22–25).

• Read. Read it twice, then once out loud. That takes about two minutes.
• Observe. Two people stand side by side: one hears and forgets, the other looks and keeps going. The words “hearer” and “doer” keep coming back. There’s one picture, a man at a mirror. And James says “not only hearers”, so hearing isn’t the problem. Stopping there is.
• What it meant then. James writes to “the twelve tribes which are in the Dispersion” (James 1:1), Jewish believers scattered far from home. Few people owned a copy of the Scriptures, so most heard them read aloud when they gathered. That’s why he talks about hearers. He has in mind people who listened, nodded and went home unchanged.
• What it means now. Most of us read alone, on a phone or at a kitchen table, but the risk is the same. You can finish a chapter, feel good about it and forget it by lunch. The next two verses give James’s own examples of doing: watching your tongue and caring for “the fatherless and widows in their affliction” (James 1:27). So ask what you’ve read lately and done nothing about, and write down one small action for this week.

That’s the whole method: twenty minutes, a page of notes and one thing to do. It’s possible to fill a notebook and change nothing, so let the last line of your notes be something you’ll actually do.

How do you find out what a passage meant then?

This is the step beginners worry about, but the Bible itself gets you most of the way. Read the whole chapter, then look at how the book opens. Many letters name their writer and readers in the first verse, as James does. A study Bible’s introduction to the book covers the rest: who wrote it, when and why.

Our guide to reading a Bible verse in context has four questions to ask of any passage, with worked examples. Try to answer in one sentence before you move on. If you can’t, write your question down and leave it open. Unanswered questions are a normal part of studying.

Common mistakes when you’re starting out

• Jumping to step four. If you ask what a passage means for you before asking what it says, you’ll mostly find what you already think.
• Taking too much at once. A whole chapter is a lot to observe. Cut it to a paragraph.
• Reading the notes first. Once you’ve seen someone else’s answer, it’s hard to see the text for yourself. Give the passage ten minutes of your own attention first.
• Starting with the hardest books. Leviticus and Revelation can wait.
• Expecting a big insight every time. Some days you’ll notice one small thing, and that still counts.

What should you study first?

Choose a short book and work through it a paragraph at a time. Staying in one book means you carry what you learned last time into the next session, so step three gets easier as you go.

Common questions