Since the Bible is the word of God, its nature is divine and spiritual. We must read it with every part of our being. There is milk for our soul in the Word. It is for nourishing our inner man through the understanding of our rational mind, and it is assimilated by our mental faculties (1 Pet. 2:2 footnote 5). The milk of the word eventually nourishes our spirit, making us spiritual (1 Pet. 2:5 footnote 3). [Therefore, in reading the Bible, after we have understood the meaning of the text by our understanding and have apprehended the truth of the text with our wisdom, we should use our spirit by prayer to receive the truths in the Scripture into the deepest part of our being, that is, our spirit. In other words, after we understand the text and receive the truth therein, we still must exercise our spirit to turn what we have understood and realized into prayer that it may be assimilated in our spirit, becoming our life supply and the basis of our spiritual experience.]
We need to read the Bible sequentially from cover to cover. By reading the Bible in this way, we can better understand it (Col. 3:16; 2 Tim. 3:15; Psa. 119:11, 130). The foregoing lessons have given you a guided tour of the Bible. This overview of the Bible and of its sixty-six books has given you a bird’s-eye view. The more you read the Bible and compare your reading to these lessons, the more you will understand. Some of you may like to read the Old Testament at one rate and the New Testament at another. For example, if you read a chapter a day, you can finish reading the New Testament in nine months. Brother Watchman Nee read the New Testament through fifty times in one year. That became his foundation in the Bible. Most of us may not be able to read the New Testament as frequently as he did, but we can at least read through it once a year. We all need to decide on how much to read every day, schedule the time to read, and develop a habit to read.