Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

If you and I'm going to spend a year and hopefully the rest of our lives reading through the Bible, let's aim to do it well.

Today I'm going to talk about the three primary mistakes I made during my first trip through scripture and tell you how to

avoid them. Hopefully you'll be able to get the hang of this much quicker than I did and with fewer

pitfalls. My first major mistake and the one I think we're all naturally inclined to make is that I was looking for myself in

scripture.

Maybe it was the result of my church upbringing, but I'd come to view the Bible as a big to-do list,

even though I knew that wasn't the primary message.

It's hard to rewire the way you think about

scripture if you've held a certain view for a long time. But one thing that

really helped me was asking myself a few questions each time I read. Number

one, what did God say in this passage? Number two, what did God do in this

passage? Number three, why did God do or say what God said or did in this passage?

Number four, what did I learn about what God loves? Number five,

what did I learn about what God hates? Number six, what did I learn about who God is?

If you can't find God in the passage, look harder.

Ask yourself, what's happening in these pages that could be attributed to God?

There's only one book of the Bible that doesn't mention the name of God, Esther, but even in the absence of his name, the pages are

saturated with his actions.

So when you're in a section like that, try asking yourself, what is he doing behind the scenes?

What's he doing in the hearts of the people we're reading about?

Why did he put this section in his book?

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