What is your motivation for reading the Bible?
The first and correct answer of course is to know God. However, perhaps more than any spiritual discipline, Bible study can become a blind pursuit of self-righteousness. Our quest for the knowledge of God can subtly become a way in which we compare ourselves to other Christians. We can come to believe that our great knowledge of Scripture means that we are spiritually mature. J.I. Packer, in his classic work Knowing God, writes,
“We need to ask ourselves: What is my ultimate aim and object in occupying my mind with these things? What do I intend to do with my knowledge about God, once I have it? For the fact that we have to face is this: If we pursue theological knowledge for its own sake, it is bound to go bad on us. It will make us proud and conceited.”
Those of us who love to read and study Scripture are in danger of being intoxicated with knowledge about God and coming to think of ourselves as a cut above other Christians. If we do, we will fail miserably at coming to know God himself and actually being transformed by the power of his Word.