Episode #2—Knowing Scripture: An Essential for Christian Growth

The Christian life is inseparable from Scripture. Jesus prayed in John 17:17, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.” This connection between God’s word and our spiritual growth raises important questions: What does it mean to truly know Scripture? How do we grow in this knowledge? What role does the local church play in this process?

To grasp why knowing Scripture matters, we must first understand sanctification. To sanctify means to set apart for a holy purpose. When Jesus asked the Father to sanctify his disciples, he was asking that they be made holy and set apart. Sanctification is the work of God in setting apart believers more and more to practical holiness. While we have been definitively set apart in Christ—a completed reality—there is also a practical, progressive element to sanctification as we grow in godliness.

However, sanctification presupposes justification. Many people pursue holy living without ever having been converted. Justification is a legal act by which God declares the believing sinner in Christ as righteous. Preceded by regeneration, where God gives a new heart, justification secures the believer’s position in Christ forever. From this secure foundation, the practical working out of sanctification proceeds, and this is where the word of God becomes essential. The word of God is the primary means by which we grow in holiness.

Knowing Scripture involves an intellectual element. As Romans 10:17 reminds us, “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” We must intellectually grasp the truth of God’s word to exercise faith. However, knowing Scripture is not merely having one’s head filled with Bible verses. People have won Scripture memory contests as children only to become apostate as adults. True knowledge of Scripture goes beyond the intellectual to include application of those truths.

Knowing Scripture is both an intellectual issue and a relational issue. If you biblically know Scripture, you are developing your relationship with God. This has profound practical implications for fighting sin. How do we know something is sinful? While conscience plays a role, conscience alone is insufficient—it can be wrong. The word of God reveals to us what is right and what is wrong. We need to know Scripture to recognise sinful behaviour and attitudes, and then Scripture empowers us to overcome sin, fundamentally by pointing us to Christ and the gospel for both forgiveness and empowerment to move forwards.

There is no easy way to grow in knowledge of God’s word—it requires effort and saturation. Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible, is filled with exhortations and reminders of the need to saturate ourselves in God’s word and to love it. It truly is a love affair with God’s word, which means we need to spend time with it.

One pastor shared how he spent several years reading through the Bible once a month. For a couple of months he read the entire Bible every thirty days, then every two months for about a year and a half. This practice gave him a comprehensive understanding of Scripture—not just the details, but how it all fits together. More importantly, it gave him a greater hunger for God’s word.

However, growth in Scripture knowledge takes more than individual effort—it requires the body of Christ. It is not an individualistic pursuit. We need to speak truth to one another, hear truth preached, and expose ourselves to faithful biblical teaching. Finally, we must apply what we learn. If we will not do what God has shown us, he is not going to show us more light. As we obey Scripture, we practically come to appreciate it and truly know it.

As Jesus said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). Just as we need physical food daily, we need the spiritual bread of life. This requires saturation—not a sprinkling, but a complete immersion in God’s word. The challenge is that it is not always exciting. Some mornings, Bible reading may not yield much apparent fruit, yet we are still taking in spiritual nourishment. Like meals that may not all be equally memorable, every encounter with God’s word nourishes us. Even when it is not a memorable devotional time, we are taking in God’s word and God is using that to nourish us.

Pastors have a particular responsibility regarding Scripture, but they must approach it rightly. It is vital that pastors see themselves first as Christians, secondly as members of the church, and only thirdly as pastors. This prevents approaching the Bible merely as a professional, where it becomes simply a book of sermons.

Pastors must see themselves as believers, children of God, who need a relationship with the Father. They should start every day looking into Scripture for themselves personally—praying as the psalmist did, “Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law” (Psalm 119:18), asking God to speak to them personally before thinking about troubled church members or upcoming sermons.

A pastor serves out of overflow. One seasoned pastor, when asked how he prioritised among all his ministerial responsibilities—overseeing a church of a thousand people, a worldwide ministry, Bible printing, over twenty missionaries, and being a sought-after preacher—responded with surprise, “The most important thing is my devotional life.” Every morning he spent several hours in prayer and in the word. If a pastor is not feeding himself, if he is not knowing Scripture as a means of knowing God, he will run dry and become spiritually malnourished very quickly.

Committing Scripture to memory is important, though there are different ways to accomplish it. While it becomes more difficult as we age, starting young is particularly beneficial. One effective method is the natural memorisation that occurs when preaching or studying a passage intensively—spending so much time in a text that one can visualise where the words fall on the page. Focused Scripture memory programmes are also valuable.

A common concern is forgetting memorised verses, but this should not discourage us. Even when we cannot immediately recall a verse, it remains stored within us. Scripture memorised long ago often comes to mind precisely when needed—during counselling, conversation, or preaching. We may not remember the exact reference, knowing only that it is somewhere in Romans, yet we can quote the verse. Or conversely, we may remember it is in Romans 10, allowing us to quickly locate it even if we cannot quote it verbatim.

As Jesus promised, “the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:26). However, the Spirit cannot bring to our remembrance what we have never placed there to begin with.

The ultimate goal of knowing Scripture is knowing God. If this is not our focus, we risk falling into spiritual pride. The endgame is always to know God and live a life pleasing to him. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism teaches, our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. We cannot enjoy whom we do not know, and we cannot be in right relationship with someone we do not know. Just as we need to know our family members to have right relationships with them, we need to know God to be in right relationship with him.

The local church plays an indispensable role in knowing Scripture. Consider that until Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1400s, most people did not have personal Bibles. Even into the early 1600s, Bibles were so rare and expensive that preachers could not expect their congregation members to own them. In his sermons, Thomas Goodwin made it clear he was addressing a congregation where most did not have Bibles, saying, “Listen to me as I read this.”

How did people know Scripture before widespread Bible ownership? They learned it corporately, dependent on one another. When Paul wrote to the Colossians, he instructed them, “And when this letter has been read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans; and see that you also read the letter from Laodicea” (Colossians 4:16). They were reading Scripture together, passing letters between churches.

The church remains hugely important today. We should read Scripture together and discuss it. Otherwise, the pursuit of biblical knowledge becomes dangerously individualistic, cutting us off from the heritage of truth. As Luther warned, if everyone studies the Bible entirely on their own, people will go to hell in a thousand different ways. His point was that we need the church to learn truth together. The church provides safety, preventing individuals from developing their own idiosyncratic interpretations. The church is designed to keep us safe in the truth.

God has wonderfully designed his body, the church, for many reasons, but specifically so that we might know him and grow in that knowledge. Knowing Scripture is not optional for the Christian—it is essential for sanctification, for fighting sin, for growing in godliness, and ultimately for knowing and enjoying God himself. This knowledge comes through personal discipline and corporate engagement, through intellectual understanding and relational application, always with the goal of deepening our relationship with the God who has spoken to us in his word.