HOW TO READ · 2026-11-10
The day's guides
Method
Read the Passage With the Subject Crossed Out
Swap every pronoun for the noun it stands for, and watch who is actually doing what.
Most of us read pronouns without seeing them. The eye slides over a 'he' and supplies a subject from memory, usually the right one. Occasionally it supplies the wrong one, and a whole reading of a passage tilts quietly on that mistake.
The remedy is dull and effective. Take a paragraph and copy it out by hand, leaving room between the lines. Wherever you meet a pronoun, write above it the noun it stands for. 'He' becomes 'God', or 'the steward', or 'Paul'. 'It' becomes 'the law', or 'the sin', or 'the cup'. You are not interpreting yet. You are only answering the question of who or what.
Try it on Ephesians 2:1-10. In the first verses, 'you' and 'we' and 'he' and 'them' shift quickly, and it matters a great deal that the one who is 'rich in mercy' and the one who 'made us alive' are the same subject, while the dead are the ones being acted upon. Written out in full, the grammar of the passage shows itself: nearly every active verb belongs to God, and the human verbs are mostly 'were' and 'walked'.
Sometimes the exercise exposes a real ambiguity. In a few verses the referent of 'it' is honestly disputed, and your translation's footnote or a second translation will show that others have hesitated too. That is useful to know. You can hold your reading loosely where careful readers disagree, and firmly where the text leaves no doubt.
More often it simply slows you down in the right place. A chain of 'who' clauses in Colossians 1 can run for several verses, and by the end it is easy to forget the subject. Substituting the name each time keeps the Son in view, and the paragraph reads less like fog and more like a description of a person.
Do this to one paragraph a week, not to everything. It is a magnifying glass for hard passages, and it will teach you to catch the same slippage in easier ones without pen in hand. After a month you will notice yourself silently asking 'who is that?' as you read, which is most of the point.
- Pick a paragraph of six to ten verses, preferably from a letter.
- Copy it onto a sheet, leaving a wide gap between lines.
- Replace every he, she, it, they, and who with the name or noun it points to.
- Read the new version aloud once, slowly.
- Underline any place where you had guessed the wrong referent.
12 MIN
Tools
A Rubber Stamp Is Not Required, but a Dated Slip Is
A small slip of paper inside the cover can hold the one thing you need to remember about each book.
Bibles are built for reference, but they are poor at remembering you. When you open to Habakkuk after a year away, nothing on the page tells you why you once cared about it. A small slip of paper, kept at the start of each book you have read, can do that work without defacing a single page.
The slip should be narrow, about the width of the column of text, so it hides inside the book. Write the name of the book at the top. Turn it over and write a single sentence saying what the book is for. Not a summary, a purpose: 'A prophet argues with God and is answered.' 'A letter asking a master to take back a runaway.' If you cannot write the sentence, that is information, and a reason to read the book's first and last chapters again.
Below the sentence, add one line for a passage you would want to find again, with its reference. Keep it to one. The restriction is the discipline. It forces a choice, and a choice means you actually decided what mattered to you in the book rather than assigning importance to all of it.
Date the slip. Months later, the date tells you something the text cannot: where you were when you read this, and how long you have lived with it. Some people find they would revise the sentence the second time through, and cross it out and write a new one beneath. Leave the old one visible. The two sentences together are a small record of understanding changing.
The advantage over a notebook is that the slip travels with the book. Lend your Bible, or move to another copy, and you can carry the slips across. The advantage over underlining is that nothing in the text is altered, so a later reader, or your later self, meets the page fresh.
A shelf of sixty-six slips is not the goal. Start with the three books you know best and see whether the sentences come easily. Then add the others as you finish them, and let the gaps show you what you have not yet read.
- Cut or buy slips of paper about the width of your page.
- Write the book's name at the top, and nothing else on the front.
- On the back, write one sentence: what the book is for.
- Add one line for the passage you will want to find again.
Getting started
Read the Names in the Greeting
The first lines of a letter tell you more about its situation than most of its argument will.
It is tempting to treat the opening of a letter as throat-clearing: a greeting, a bit of grace and peace, and then the real material begins. But ancient letters were formal, and the formality was doing work. Who is writing, to whom, and in what capacity are never idle details.
Take Galatians. Paul opens by insisting he is an apostle 'not from men nor through man', and the sentence goes on to name Jesus Christ and God the Father as the source of his commission. Compare Philippians, where he calls himself and Timothy simply 'servants'. The same man chooses different words because the letters have different jobs. One is a defense, the other is closer to a thank-you note.
The method is simple. Read only the greeting, up to the first thanksgiving or prayer, and make a short list on a scrap of paper. Who is named as writer? Is anyone sending greetings alongside? What titles are claimed, and which are conspicuously not? Who are the readers, and how are they described: 'saints', 'the church of God', 'the faithful'? Where do they live, and what do you already know about that place?
Then notice what the thanksgiving praises. In 1 Corinthians, Paul thanks God that the church is enriched in speech and knowledge, which is generous, and also slightly pointed, because speech and knowledge are exactly what they have been squabbling over. Galatians, tellingly, has no thanksgiving at all. Paul moves straight to astonishment. The absence is a sentence of its own.
Once you have the list, read the rest of the letter with it beside you. You will find the opening keeps returning, in a title that reappears at the argument's hinge, or in a phrase about the readers that the writer comes back to near the end. A good opening is a promise about what is coming, and good readers hold it to account.
This takes ten minutes and makes no demands on background knowledge. It is a fine way into a letter you have found dry, because it starts with the most human thing in it: one person writing to others he knows by name.
- Choose a New Testament letter you haven't read recently.
- Read only the opening greeting, to the first thanksgiving or prayer.
- List every person and place named, and every title claimed.
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