Every Christian that has studied the Bible knows that it's not always easy.

It can often feel like an uphill journey full of confusing terrain and tricky obstacles that sometimes make us just want to give up.

We may know that Scripture is the Word of God, but sometimes we can feel stuck before we ever get started.

My guest today is Jonathan Pennington, and in our conversation, he details three helpful

approaches to reading the Bible, explaining how they each complement each other.

He also highlights the potholes that we so often run into as we engage with Scripture

and how to avoid them.

Jonathan serves as a professor of New Testament interpretation of the Southern Baptist

Theological Seminary.

He's a pastor at Sojourn East Church in Louisville, Kentucky, and is the author of Come and

See the Journey of Knowing God Through Scripture from Crossway.

Let's get started.

Well, Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me today on the Crossway podcast.

Hey, I'm so glad to be here. Thank you.

So today we're going to talk about coming to know God through the Bible, how we use God's word to get to know him better. And that's the whole point of the Bible in many ways. When it comes to knowing God through

the Bible, you like to talk about that as a journey, use the metaphor of a journey or a road

trip as a helpful tool for kind of understanding what this is all about.

Why do you think that's a helpful way to think about reading the Bible?

Yeah, that's a good question. And it's actually a very common and old metaphor. It's a metaphor

of the Bible itself, right? There's lots of discussion of being on the way, et cetera, and

obviously certainly not unique to me in the Christian tradition.

But, you know, I think it's, it is really important because our lives are experienced as a journey.

...