How do you read the Bible? When you apply Lectio Divina to your practice, you can experience the Bible in a whole new way.
What is Lectio Divina?
Lectio Divina is a form of disciplined thinking about the Bible guided by the Holy Spirit. Lectio Divina is a Latin phrase that translates directly as “divine reading.” In Lectio Divina, you read the “divine book,” the Bible, out loud and listen deeply with all your heart and mind to discern what God is saying to you through what he said to the original audience.
This can sound very formal, but actually reading something out loud and thinking about it is what you do quite often.
If you add in listening to something over and over again, maybe humming along with a song or saying the words out loud, you've actually described what you do whenever you're listening to your favorite music. What you're doing qualifies as what is called meditation.
Meditation, as Christians practice it, basically means speaking God’s word, the Bible, out loud, repeatedly and slowly, and thinking about it deeply. That means that meditation is not just something that people in new-age religions do, but it's something that everyone does. When you sing songs in worship, what you’re doing is also a form of meditation. You probably just have never thought of it that way. In many forms of meditation, the goal is to empty the mind, but in biblical meditation, the goal is to fill the mind with and be transformed by the living words of God that are found in the Bible.
Paul emphasizes the importance of reading the Bible out loud when he writes, “So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” Romans 10:17
What are the steps to Lectio Divina?
In practice, Lectio Divina goes like this:
- Take your Bible and get a notebook or journal and a pen or pencil ready.
- Find a quiet place where you can read the Bible out loud without distraction for about 15 minutes minimum. Sitting upright is probably best. Hold the Bible in a comfortable position where you can read it easily; on a desktop or a lap desk works fine, but just laying it in your lap works, too. Close your eyes for a few moments, take a few slow breaths, and when you find that you’re quiet inside, invite the Lord to be present.
- Ask the Holy Spirit to “highlight” a word or phrase as you read slowly out loud. It’s also good to ask the Holy Spirit to give you an image to see that you should spend more time on and into which you should go deeper as you read.
- Read a short section of the Bible that you have selected beforehand (a few verses at a time) slowly out loud. A longer passage can be broken up into shorter sections. A long story could be read in shorter sections that have at least one clear event or thought.
- Repeat the reading at least 3 times and then write out or describe what attracts your attention. Sometimes, you’ll get a kind of instant “pop-up” answer, but often what attracts your attention is a question about something in the text. It’s ok to start there too. Write out the question. If the question is about the meaning of a word or phrase, you can look up the meaning then or later, depending on how much time you have. Try not to go down a “rabbit hole” of information gathering. It’s fine to look stuff up later. Go with what you can understand of the passage with the knowledge you have right then. You’ll stay with a passage for a few days at least and your understanding of what the Lord is telling you will grow.
- Write out in your notebook a message to the Lord about what you’re seeing or hearing and what you think the Lord is saying to you in the passage. Going the step of writing is vital to this discipline. As you write, you think, you express what you see, feel or sense. So often, it’s the writing that will open something up for you.
The following is a list of questions that will lead you deeper into what the Lord wants to say to you through a passage. Use one set for the first day or two and then move on to the next questions.
Questions to ask during your Biblical Meditation:
- What word, phrase is highlighted or what image comes to you as you read?
- What questions come to mind as you read? Write them down as well.
- How is the passage relating other than or speaking to this week in your life?
- What is the passage challenging you to change in your life?
Divine upward spiral: If you stick with a passage for a while, a couple of days, a week, or longer you’ll discover that your understanding will get deeper. You are in a Holy Spirit-guided spiral.
What Bible passages should you choose to read for Lectio Divina?
Are you ready to practice Lectio Divina? Here are some ways to find Bible passages to practice:
- Use the Bible study blog that Griffin Ministries produces each week. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive a weekly lesson in your inbox.
- If your church is preaching through a book or letter in the Bible, choose the passage that was preached about that week or read ahead for what we preached about in the next weeks coming up.
- Gather a couple of friends and decide on working your way through a book or a letter together. You can do Lectio Divina as a group and share with one another what the Lord is telling you.
- Bible Gateway and other online Bible resources often offer weekly Bible passages. This also has the advantage that they will often have commentary resources that can help you answer some of your questions about the meaning of words or concepts in the passage.
- Get the Olive Tree Bible app (for Mac OS, Windows, and iOS) and work through their daily and weekly Bible study plans. Similar plans are offered through the Logos Bible Study App and the Accordance App.
- Subscribe to the Revised Common Lectionary. This is a three-year series of Bible readings where each week, you get a selection from an Old Testament book, a Psalm, a selection from one of the gospels, and then something from one of the letters in the New Testament, and commentary information that will help you sort out what a passage means.
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