Not a subscriber yet?

Join the weekly mybibleschool newsletter to get better at studying the Bible. It's completely free.

Do "Feelings" Guide Your Bible Study?

3 Dangers of Letting Feelings Lead Your Bible Study

How do you know when you are studying the Bible well? If you’re like many Christians, the quality of time spent studying the Bible is related to your emotional connection with the text. If you had a spiritual experience, then you think you had a successful time studying God’s word. As with most things in life, using your feelings to study the Bible is a recipe for disaster.

I’ve been in that situation over the years. If you look through my old Bibles, you will find highlighted verses spread throughout the pages. These highlights represent moments when I felt particularly inspired, moved, or challenged by the Bible. Unfortunately, if you look through my old Bibles again, you’ll find far more verses that aren’t highlighted.

If I allow my Bible study to follow my emotional response to God’s word, I will end up missing out on huge amounts of Scripture. I don’t want my Bible study method to “feel” right. I want it to follow principles that will unlock all the verses I tend not to highlight.

There are 3 dangers of studying the Bible based on our feelings.

1) We miss huge portions of the Bible.

As I described in my personal story, we miss out on huge portions of the Bible when we study based on our feelings.

Many verses in the Bible are not particularly inspiring on the surface level. Some verses provide us with historical information. Others offer a detail in the narrative. Let’s be honest, some verses are especially confusing or disturbing. If our feelings guide our study of the Bible, we are likely to ignore most of it.

When our approach to the Bible is based on solid Bible study principles, however, we will force ourselves to wrestle with all of Scripture… the good, the bad, and the confusing.

2) We ignore the context.

When we study the Bible based on our feelings, we tend to ignore the historical and literary context of the Bible.

If our feelings determine how we approach God’s word, we will almost certainly focus too much attention on our personal context and not the biblical context. The Bible has much to teach us about how to live our lives. Still, our ability to understand that teaching depends on our ability to understand the Bible’s historical and literary contexts.

For example, many Christians have found inspiration in the conquest of the Promised Land in Joshua. They have used it as motivation to do all sorts of difficult things. Unfortunately, some Christians have also used it as motivation to invade foreign lands and kill the natives (i.e., North America). Ignoring the historical and literary context of Joshua means that people will use those stories to do all sorts of things: some good and some bad.

3) We distort Scripture from our emotional perspective.

When we study the Bible based on our feelings, we distort Scripture to our emotional perspective.

I like to think of this as the “Instagram” approach to scripture. Christian social media profiles are filled with inspirational quotes from the Bible. If we are not careful though, we will find ourselves looking for verses that fit our particular mood.

Rather than study all of God’s word, we will search Google for the Bible’s top verses on money, relationships, or anxiety. While we can certainly benefit from what Scripture says on these topics, we need a balanced approach to Scripture that will challenge us in every area and not just the ones to which we feel emotionally drawn.

Conclusion

Our list of potential problems with studying the Bible based on feelings could go on for a long time. However, I think these three dangers provide us with enough reasons to pursue a better approach to the Bible. After all, we do not want to…