It's a common struggle that all of us face.

Maybe you're facing it right now.

You sit down with your Bible, trying to read it, which is really just skimming words on a page.

Feels routine.

Feels dry.

We know we're looking there for deep reality, but how do we get past the mental effort and actually taste the goodness of God through those words on paper?

That's today on Ask Pastor John, how to read the Bible like a Christian hedonist.

The question that gets us there comes from Tyler in Kansas City, Missouri.

Pastor John, hello to you and Tony.

My question comes out of APJ 1713, John Piper's ministry in one Bible text.

That's a great episode.

If you haven't listened to episode 1713, put that on your listen list.

In that episode, you mentioned habits of observation and analysis and text

querying that were extremely fruitful and irreplaceable for you when you studied in Germany.

You said they formed a habit of mind that made you impatient with the gamesmanship that

stayed at the grammatical, logical, historical level of the text, but never pushed

beyond the words to the realities behind them.

My question centers on those habits.

What are they specifically?

Do they differ from the standard seminary classroom hermeneutics that were taught?

And what do you mean by pushing beyond the grammatical, logical, historical, law? from the standard seminary classroom hermeneutics that were taught.

And what do you mean by pushing beyond the grammatical, logical, historical level?

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