On Iyabo’s phone there is a folder of notes she used to call Ammunition. She showed it to me herself, scrolling with her thumb and laughing a little at her own expense. Inside were dozens of headings: Tithe. Honour your parents. Wives and husbands. Alcohol. Women in trousers. Backsliders. Under each heading she had copied verses, sometimes ten or fifteen of them, ready to paste.
Iyabo is a lawyer in Ikeja, and she is very good at what she does. In her extended family she had become known as the one who “knows the Bible.” In the family WhatsApp group, when an argument started, someone would eventually tag her, and within minutes she would reply with a column of references. She rarely lost. Her uncles respected her. Her cousins were slightly afraid of her.
Then a friend of her younger brother died in an accident on the Lagos–Ibadan expressway. The young man was twenty-six. Her brother, who had been drifting from church for some time, posted a raw message in the family group late one night: If God is good, why did this happen? I am tired of being told to just pray. Iyabo replied within five minutes. She sent Romans 6:23, Proverbs 14:12 and a long paragraph about the danger of questioning God. Her brother left the group the next morning. He has not rejoined.
A few weeks later, her twelve-year-old niece came to her with a Sunday school assignment. “Aunty, you know the Bible. What is the book of Ruth about?” Iyabo opened her mouth and found she could not answer. She knew “whither thou goest, I will go.” She knew it was read at weddings. She did not know who Boaz really was, why the story mattered, or how it ended.
“I sat in my car that night outside my flat,” she told me, “and I realised I had three hundred verses in my phone and I had never once read a whole book of the Bible with my mind switched on. I knew where to find bullets. I did not know the story.”
Verses used as weapons
Iyabo’s experience is more common than we like to admit. Many believers have a large collection of verses and very little understanding of the Bible. We know which texts to quote on which occasions. We can win a debate or close down a conversation. But if someone asked us to explain the argument of Galatians, the flow of Mark’s Gospel or why Leviticus is in the Bible at all, we would struggle.
The danger is not only ignorance. A Bible handled as a collection of quotations can easily become a weapon. Scripture itself shows us the most striking example. When the devil tempted Jesus in the wilderness, he quoted the Bible:
Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple, And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.
“For it is written.” The devil quoted Psalm 91 accurately. The words were true. But he tore them away from their meaning and used them to push Jesus toward presumption, as though trusting God meant forcing God’s hand. And Jesus answered, “It is written again.” He set the verse back inside the whole testimony of Scripture. One verse, pulled out of place, was being used to contradict what the rest of the Bible says about God.
That is a sobering thought. The first person in the Gospels to quote a Bible verse as a weapon was Satan. Correct words, quoted in the wrong spirit and for the wrong purpose, can still serve deception.
The religious leaders of Jesus’ day did something similar. They often came to Him with Scripture-based questions designed to trap Him. Matthew tells us the Pharisees “took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk” (Matthew 22:15). Their questions about divorce, about taxes and about the resurrection were not honest enquiries. They were moves in a game. They studied Scripture to find arguments, and in the process they missed the One standing in front of them.
A familiar example from our own setting is the way some people use “Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm” (Psalm 105:15). The verse is often quoted to silence any question about a church leader’s conduct. But read the psalm. It is a song recounting God’s protection of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as they wandered among foreign kings, and “mine anointed” refers to those patriarchs. The verse has nothing to do with shielding a minister from accountability. Taken from its setting, it has been used to protect abuse. In its setting, it celebrates God’s faithfulness to a vulnerable family of wanderers.
PunchlineStudy changes that. It slows us down long enough to see what a passage actually says, to whom and why.
Ever learning, never arriving
Paul’s second letter to Timothy was written from prison near the end of his life. In chapter 3 he warns that “in the last days perilous times shall come” (2 Timothy 3:1), and he describes people with “a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof” (2 Timothy 3:5). Then comes a phrase that should give every Bible student pause. He speaks of people who are “Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7).
It is possible to be always studying and never arriving. To attend conference after conference, buy book after book, follow teacher after teacher and still not be changed. The problem is not the learning. It is learning that never leads to submission, learning that collects ideas without ever bowing to the truth.
Against that background, Paul gives Timothy a different path:
But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them ; And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.
“But continue thou.” Timothy is not told to find something new. He is told to keep going in what he has already learned. Healthy Bible study is often less about novelty than about continuing, going deeper into the same truths over many years.
“Knowing of whom thou hast learned them.” Timothy did not learn alone. He learned from his mother and grandmother, and from Paul himself, people whose lives matched what they taught. Bible study happens best within a community of faithful people. We read with others, past and present, and we test what we find against the wider witness of the church.
“From a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.” The first purpose of Scripture is to bring us to Christ. Then Paul says that “All scripture is given by inspiration of God.” The whole of it, not only our favourite verses. Iyabo’s folder had nothing from Ruth, Lamentations, Haggai or Philemon. Yet all of it is God-breathed, and all of it is profitable.
And notice the final goal: “That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.” The word furnished means fully equipped, fitted out for a task. The purpose of study is a furnished life. Study does its work when a believer is equipped to do good to others, and that is a different thing from winning arguments with them. If our study makes us better at defeating people and worse at serving them, something has gone badly wrong.
NuggetThe aim of Bible study is not a fuller arsenal but a furnished life: a believer equipped by God’s word for every good work.
Ezra’s order
There is a single verse in the Old Testament that gives us a model for the place of study in a believer’s life. It describes Ezra the scribe, who led a company of exiles back from Babylon to Jerusalem:
For Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of the LORD , and to do it , and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments.
Notice the order. Ezra “prepared his heart.” Study began with the heart. He came to the law of God willing to be changed by it. Then he set himself “to seek the law of the LORD.” That is the study itself: careful, sustained searching. Then “to do it.” Ezra applied the word to his own life before anything else. And only then, “to teach in Israel statutes and judgments.”
Seek, do, teach. Many of us reverse the order. We seek in order to teach. We read a passage and immediately think of someone else who needs to hear it. Our first question is, Who can I send this to? That is the instinct that fills a folder called Ammunition.
Ezra’s order protects us. Before the word goes out of our mouths toward anyone else, it should pass through our own lives. A teacher who has not done what he teaches will teach it badly, because he does not yet know what it costs.
It is also worth noticing what follows in the story. When Ezra later read the law to the people, the Levites “read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading” (Nehemiah 8:8). Study was never meant to stay locked inside a specialist’s head. It was meant to help ordinary people understand.
The greatest Bible study ever taught
On the afternoon of the first Easter Sunday, two disciples were walking home from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus. Their hopes had been crushed. A stranger joined them on the road and asked what they were discussing. They told Him everything: about Jesus of Nazareth, His mighty works, His crucifixion, the empty tomb and the report of angels (Luke 24:19-24).
Notice that they had the facts right. Almost everything they said was accurate. What they lacked was understanding. They could not see how the facts fitted together, because they did not understand what the Scriptures had said. Then the stranger spoke:
Then he said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken: Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.
“O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.” Jesus does not blame them for not knowing the Scriptures. He blames them for being “slow of heart” to believe all of what the prophets had said. They had believed the parts about a conquering Messiah and overlooked the parts about suffering. Their problem was selective reading.
Then Jesus gave them a Bible study. “And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.” He began at the beginning. He went through the whole Old Testament. And He showed them how all of it pointed to Him. The word expounded means He interpreted, explained thoroughly. This was not a scattering of proof texts. It was the whole story, laid out from start to finish, with Christ at the centre.
What would we give to have been on that road? But in a sense, the apostles’ preaching in Acts and the letters of the New Testament give us the fruit of that study. They show us how to read Moses, the Psalms and the prophets in the light of Christ.
Afterwards, the two disciples said to one another, “Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?” (Luke 24:32). That is what real Bible study does when Christ is the teacher. It does not leave us with a sharper argument. It leaves us with a burning heart, and it sends us back on the road to tell others. Those two disciples got up “the same hour” and walked seven miles back to Jerusalem in the dark (Luke 24:33).
Every time we study, we can ask the risen Lord to do what He did on that road. “Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures” (Luke 24:45). We bring our minds and our effort. He brings the light.
Reading the passage where it stands
So how do we move from collecting verses to understanding the Bible? It begins with a simple shift. Instead of starting with a topic and hunting for verses, start with a book and read what is there.
Choose one book. If you are new to this, Mark’s Gospel or Philippians is a good place to start. Read the whole book through at one sitting if you can. Mark takes less than an hour and a half. Philippians takes about fifteen minutes. You will see the shape of the whole before you examine the parts, and many verses you knew in isolation will suddenly make sense.
Then read it again, slowly, a section at a time. Ask some simple questions. Who wrote this, and to whom? What was happening in their lives? What is the main point of this section? How does it connect to what came before and what comes after? What words or ideas keep repeating? Write your observations down in a notebook. You will be surprised how much you notice when you are forced to put it into words.
PunchlineOnly then ask, What does this mean for me? The application grows out of the meaning. When we skip straight to application, we tend to find in the text whatever we already wanted.
Use good tools where you can. A concordance, a Bible dictionary or a sound commentary can help you understand a custom, a place or a word. But let the tools serve your reading, not replace it. Read the passage for yourself first.
You will also meet passages you do not understand. That is normal, and it is no sign that you are failing. Write the question in the margin of your notebook and keep reading. Sometimes the answer comes two chapters later. Sometimes it comes when you raise it in your study group, or when you read the same book again a year from now. Some questions stay open for a long time, and a humble student can live with that. What matters is that you do not settle the difficulty by forcing the text to say something easier. A question held honestly before God is far healthier than a confident answer that ignores what the passage actually says.
Here is an example. Many believers have “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Philippians 4:13) printed on a mug or a car sticker. Often it is quoted as a promise that God will help us achieve our ambitions. Read the verses around it. Paul has just said, “for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content” (Philippians 4:11), and he describes knowing how to be hungry and how to be full. The “all things” he can do through Christ include going without. The verse is about contentment in every circumstance, including lack. That meaning is more demanding than the mug suggests, and far more precious. It will hold you in a season of loss, when the sticker version would only mock you.
Peter warns about the opposite habit. Speaking of Paul’s letters, he says:
And account that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation; even as our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto him hath written unto you; As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.
“Which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest.” The word wrest means to twist, to torture, as on a rack. Some people put Scripture on a rack until it says what they want. Peter says they do it “unto their own destruction.” Careful study is a kind of reverence. It refuses to force the text, and it accepts that some things are “hard to be understood” and need patient attention.
The mirror is for my own face
James adds the decisive word about where study must lead:
Wherefore lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness, and receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls. But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein , he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.
Start with verse 21, which comes just before the familiar mirror passage. “Receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls.” The posture of the student is meekness. You do not approach the word to master it. You approach it to be mastered by it. The word is engrafted, implanted, like a seed or a graft placed into a tree, so that it becomes part of you and bears fruit from within.
Then comes the warning: “be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.” The person who hears and does not do is deceived. He is disobedient, and worse, self-deceived. He has mistaken knowledge for growth. He feels spiritual because he knows a lot. Study that never becomes obedience produces a dangerous illusion of maturity.
And then the mirror. A man looks at “his natural face in a glass,” walks away and forgets. Notice whose face he sees. His own. The mirror of God’s word is held up first to the person reading it. That is exactly where the Ammunition folder went wrong. Iyabo had been holding the mirror up to everyone else’s face. She was reading to find out what was wrong with her uncles, her cousins and her brother. She had rarely let the word show her own.
James promises a blessing to the person who looks into “the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein.” Continueth. There is that word again, the same instinct as Paul’s “continue thou.” Study that changes us is rarely a sudden event. It is a long looking, a repeated returning, a steady doing. “This man shall be blessed in his deed.” The blessing comes not in the knowing alone but in the doing.
Study that grows with you
Bible study is not a single skill acquired once. It grows as we grow. Peter tells new believers, “As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby” (1 Peter 2:2). At first we need simple, nourishing truth. Who is Jesus? What has He done for me? How do I pray? Later we are able to receive more, to wrestle with harder books, to hold questions that do not resolve quickly.
A believer in his first year may read the Gospels again and again, and that is exactly right. A believer in his tenth year should be able to follow Paul’s argument in Romans, understand why Hebrews keeps comparing Jesus with the priests and angels, and read the prophets without getting lost. He need not have become a scholar. He has simply kept reading. Study is how the word goes deep enough to become judgement and wisdom.
It is worth saying clearly that you do not need a theological degree to study the Bible well. Many of the most faithful Bible students I know never went beyond secondary school. What they had was hunger, patience and a willingness to obey. Some believers cannot read easily, or have little time because of long work hours and family duties. An audio Bible on the morning commute, a Bible study group at church or a family reading after the evening meal can be just as real a form of study. God does not rank His children by their reading speed.
Nor should study become a new form of status. Some people move from collecting verses to collecting Greek words and commentaries, and use them in exactly the same way: to win, to impress, to put others in their place. “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth” (1 Corinthians 8:1). The test is the same at every level. Is my study making me more like Christ? Is it making me more able to serve and more gentle with those who know less?
Iyabo began with Ruth. She read it in one evening, the whole thing, and then read it again. She discovered that it was a story about a grieving widow, a foreign woman with no claim on anyone, and a kinsman who chose to redeem what he did not have to redeem. She learned that the story ends with a genealogy, and that the foreign widow became the great-grandmother of King David, and so an ancestor of Jesus. She sat on her couch and cried. “It is a story about grace,” she said to me. “And I had only ever used it at weddings.”
She explained it to her niece the next weekend, and the girl’s teacher gave her full marks.
Since then Iyabo has studied Mark, Philippians and Jonah. She meets with three other women on Thursday evenings, and they read slowly, asking questions, writing in notebooks. She deleted the Ammunition folder.
A few months later, her brother sent her a private message for the first time since he left the family group. Are you still angry with me? She did not reply with verses. She called him. She told him she was sorry for what she had sent that night, and that she did not have a neat answer to his question about his friend’s death. Then she said, “But I have been reading the book of Job. It is full of people who gave the wrong answers. Would you read it with me? One chapter a week?”
He said he would think about it. The following Sunday, he sent her a voice note with a question about chapter one.
That is the place of Bible study in a believer’s life. It is not a store of bullets. It is the slow, patient hearing of a Father’s voice, through the whole of His word, until we are changed enough to carry that voice gently to others.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- If someone looked through your Bible notes or highlighted verses, would they find a collection of ammunition or the record of a growing understanding?
- Which books of the Bible have you never read all the way through? What might you be missing?
- Ezra prepared his heart to seek, to do and then to teach. Which part of that order do you most often skip?
- Can you think of a verse you have quoted for years without knowing its setting? What would it take to study it properly?
- In James’s picture of the mirror, whose face have you been looking at when you read?
This Week
Choose one short book of the Bible this week: Philippians, Ruth, Jonah or 1 John. Read the whole book through at one sitting. Then, each day, read one section slowly with a notebook open. Write down who is speaking, to whom, what the main point is and how it connects with what comes before and after. Only after that, write one sentence of application for your own life. Resist the urge to send anything you read to anyone else until you have lived with it yourself for at least a day.
A Prayer
Lord Jesus, You opened the Scriptures to the disciples on the road to Emmaus and made their hearts burn. Open my understanding in the same way. Forgive me for the times I have used Your word as a weapon against others, or collected verses without seeking to understand them. Give me a prepared heart like Ezra’s, to seek Your word, to do it and only then to teach it. Let me receive with meekness the engrafted word. Show me my own face in the mirror, and give me grace to continue. Furnish me through Your word for every good work, and let my study make me more like You. Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.