Today we're pleased to share with you an audio essay written and read by Jen Wilkin, entitled Nine Tips for Making the Most of Your Bible Study.

Jen Wilkin is the author of Women of the Word, How to Study the Bible with both our hearts and our minds from Crossway.

Nine tips for making the most of your Bible study by Jen Wilkin. Women today find themselves pulled in many directions.

Work, family, ministry, fitness, and other activities all tug at our schedules.

The more we are tugged, the more we have to work to

guard the time we give to personal study of our Bibles. When we are at last able to sit down to read,

we want every precious minute to count. Whether we have 15 minutes or two hours, we want our

efforts to yield the most benefit possible. But how can we make the most of the time we have to read and study?

It can be tempting to want our personal study time to fill our emotional tank for the day.

We may rush to find an application point we can act on in whatever time we have.

This may mean we limit our time in the word to devotional reading,

meditating on a passage and looking for a way

to put it to immediate use. Devotional reading is beneficial, but it is not foundational, and

its benefit actually increases exponentially as we grow in our foundational understanding of the Bible.

So we must be sure to study the Bible with our minds as well as with our hearts.

As you read the Bible devotionally, seek to complement this with time in which you also build a

basic knowledge of Scripture. Here are nine suggestions to help you make the most of that time.

Number one, take a long-term view. Think a Bible study as a savings account rather than a debit card. Rather

than viewing it as a declining balance you draw on to fill an immediate need, allow it to have a

cumulative effect over weeks, months, and years. You may not reach understanding of a passage or be

able to apply it well after one day's exposure to it. And that's okay. Keep making

deposits into your account, trusting that in God's perfect timing, he will illuminate the meaning

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