How to Read the Bible with Fresh Eyes

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Most of us don’t even realize we’re wearing a set of glasses when we read the Bible.

The one that church, Sunday school, and Aunt Marge’s fridge magnets handed you before you could form your own thoughts.

And those lenses? They can paint God with different images. Normally, the one that looks like what you already believe to be true.

The great challenge is: changing lenses you’ve worn for a long time isn’t as easy as (like my dad used to say, “as easy as pie.”

It’s like trying to unhear a bad song stuck in your head. You’ve got to actually retrain the way you read…which takes time.

So, what helps?

First: Admit the thing’s glued to your face

You can’t ditch something you won’t admit you’ve got. I used to think my way of reading the Bible was the Bible. Like I was just “reading it straight.”

Nope. Turns out I was hauling around years of sermons, youth group warnings about “worldly influences,” and this running fear that if I read it wrong, God might smite me or at least frown a lot.

Then: Make Jesus the filter

Look, if you’ve got to use a filter (and we all do), make it Jesus. Not the Jesus from fear-based tracts, but the actual Gospels Jesus.

• The one who touched people no one else would touch.

• Who didn’t back down from calling out hypocrisy,

• But also didn’t seem obsessed with “catching” sinners.

  
  

So now, if I read something that doesn’t sound like Him? I pause. I dig. I ask if maybe this is more about how people thought God was than how God actually is.

If Jesus is “the exact representation of God’s being” (Hebrews 1:3), then He’s the clearest lens I’ve got.

Stop playing verse hopscotch

The old lens loves to cherry-pick verses. You know the game: take Jeremiah 17:9 (“The heart is deceitful…”) to prove we’re all rotten, and just skip right past Ezekiel 36:26 where God promises a new heart. Or, 2 Corinthians 5:17 that says we’re new creations in Christ Jesus.

When I finally slowed down to read whole sections — sometimes whole books at a time — it hit me: this is a story. A messy, winding, human story about people trying to follow God. It’s not a legal code or rule book (that only “we understand correctly” dropped from heaven.

And that changes everything.

See the fingerprints

This was huge for me — realizing the Bible was written by actual people. Not puppets being controlled by a cosmic power to exactly repeat its words.

They were people with culture, opinions, blind spots. They wrote poetry, history, laments, letters. Sometimes they contradict each other. Sometimes their picture of God changes as they go.

That doesn’t make it less holy. If anything, it makes it more real to me. Because it means God’s not afraid of working through human messiness.

Get curious, not scared

I used to read with this low-grade anxiety that I’d land on the wrong side of God. That makes you read defensively, like the text is a trap.

Now I try to read with curiosity:

• What’s here about love?

• What’s here about mercy?

• What’s here that challenges my assumptions?

  
  

And sometimes I just sit with the stuff that doesn’t make sense yet. I don’t force it into a neat box anymore.

Let go of needing to be 100% sure

Saying “I don’t know” is a high form of intelligence and honesty.

“Wisdom is not certitude. It’s the ability to live with doubt and to admit when we don’t know.” — Jostein Gaarder

The old lens promised certainty if I just read “the right way.”

The problem is, that “right way” always seemed to belong to whoever was holding the mic.

I’ve learned that faith isn’t the same as certainty. Nadia Bolz-Weber nailed it when she said, “The opposite of faith isn’t doubt, it’s certainty. Faith has some movement in it. Some trust. Some “I don’t know yet, but I’m hanging on.”

Pray differently before you read

I don’t mean “pray harder so you get it right.” I mean…pray honest. My go-to is something like:

God, show me who You really are, not who I’ve been told You are. Let love be the thing that helps me sort what’s worth holding onto.

It’s amazing how different a passage feels when I start from that place.

Keep love as the bottom line

This one’s easy to say, hard to practice. Jesus boiled it down — love God, love your neighbor. Paul backed it up — “the only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love” (Galatians 5:6).

So if my reading leads me toward more judgment, fear, or pride, I probably slipped the old lens back on.

Give yourself permission to grow

Your understanding of the Bible should change over time. That’s not “backsliding,” that’s…being alive…being honest.

When you were a kid, you probably thought your parents could fix anything. As you grew, you saw their flaws, but hopefully also their love in a deeper way.

God’s like that too — the more clearly you see Him, the more the cardboard cutout version fades. And that’s good news.

Final thoughts

Here’s the important thing: reading without the old lens is not a one-and-done. It’s a lifelong thing.

You’ll catch yourself slipping back into old frames now and then. You’ll still hear echoes of fear-based teaching in your head.

But every time you pause, every time you choose love over fear, every time you let Jesus be the clearest picture of God — that’s another crack in the old glass.

And little by little, the view gets clearer.

© Gary L Ellis