And other things people say online without knowing a single thing about you
There’s a particular kind of confidence the internet, or social media in particular, has manufactured in people: the confidence to diagnose a stranger’s character, theology, or way of life from a single post. A comment. A soundbite, stripped of context, with zero due diligence behind it.
I’m not writing this to complain about that. It’s just the way a lot of online interaction takes place now, and pointing it out doesn’t change much.
What I want to write about is something underneath it — a habit I had to unlearn, and a sentence I still hear thrown at people (including me) that reveals more about the person saying it than the person it’s aimed at.
The sentence is: “You need to read the Bible.”
It shows up whenever someone disagrees with someone else on a point of theology, ethics, or interpretation. It’s said with a kind of finality, as if it settles something. As if disagreement itself is evidence of ignorance.
Here’s the thing. I might have read the Bible more times than the person saying it to me. I don’t say that to win anything — I say it because the sentence assumes something the speaker has no way of knowing: how much Scripture the other person has actually read, studied, memorized, wrestled with. Most of the time, “you need to read the Bible” really means you need to see it the way I do. Which is a fundamentally different claim, dressed up as a more spiritual or educated one.
I know this sentence so well because I used to carry its weight around with me — literally.
The years of marking it up
For a long stretch of my life — starting in the late 90s, before I went to Bible school in the early 2000s— my relationship with Scripture had a very specific physical shape. A desk with a relatively new slim-line translation, a set of colored highlighters with a system in my head for what each color meant. I’d read straight through, Genesis to Revelation, hunting for every place a particular doctrine or theme surfaced. One year I did this exact process three different times using a different English translation each time.
It was a discipline, and I don’t regret it, but it was also in my single years when I had a lot more time on my hands and less immediate responsibility, and I knew so at the time.
But it was also, slowly, becoming something else.
Bible school deepened it. I had an exegesis class — taught with a thick textbook called Grasping God’s Word, written from a tradition that disagreed with mine on several doctrines, which made it more useful, not less. That class remains one of my favorites, along with a debate class the next year the same professor offered, because it didn’t hand me conclusions. It handed me a method.
Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, give a man a fishing rod and you feed him for a lifetime.
I started circling pronouns and tracing the connective tissue of a passage. And somewhere in there, I developed a real dislike for subheadings — those little bolded titles publishers drop into the text to help readers navigate. I started noticing a subheading would announce a “new section” in the middle of a single unbroken thought, especially in the Gospels, where a string of parables that clearly build on each other gets chopped into three separate “topics” because an editor decided that’s where a heading should go. The text wasn’t changing subjects. The page layout just told me it was. (To be clear — I still use subheadings in my own books and blog posts. They help readers. I just stopped trusting them as a guide to where an author’s thought actually begins and ends.)
Two gloves, one match
Coming out of my years at Bible school — learning to pray in tongues, learning to flow in the gifts of the Spirit — I became convinced that two disciplines had to operate together for any of it to mean anything: being filled with the Spirit, and digging your roots deep into the written Word.
I watched my friend Robert do this in a way I’ve rarely seen matched. He’d carry small cards — verses written on one side with the topic or theme written on the other, tucked into a little wallet sleeve. He would spend an hour per day in his basement in his thirties and forties, memorizing those Scripture packets. I don’t know many people on the planet who can quote the Word of God the way he can.
He gave me several of these packets and the cards he’d cut to fit them, and I did it myself for many years in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
That became the core of what I tried to pass on to the people I discipled: fill yourself with the Spirit AND pray in tongues, and fill yourself with the Word and know it well enough to draw on it without searching. Two gloves, same fight. You can’t really flow in prophetic gifts, in my experience, without also being someone who has put in the time in the written text. They’re not in competition. They’re load-bearing for each other.
The Bible I carried into arguments
By the time I’d been doing this for years, I had a particular Bible — a slim-line copy, completely marked up of whatever translation I was going through at that time, with color-coded notes across almost every page , even in Leviticus and Chronicles, and I started carrying it with me everywhere. Meetings, conversations, anywhere an argument might happen.
If a disagreement came up, I’d open it. “Show me where in the Bible it says that” to whoever was making a statement I’d challenge. And the page opened would be covered in my own handwriting, my own system, visible proof of how much time I’d already put into this.
I didn’t plan this consciously. I didn’t sit down one day and think, I will use my marked-up Bible as a weapon. But looking back, that’s exactly what it had become. The point wasn’t persuasion.
The point was making the other person feel like defending their own view wasn’t worth the trouble, because I’d clearly already done more homework than they had.
By 2009, though, that particular move was already showing up less. I’d moved to Peru and was deep into learning Spanish, which meant a lot of the conversations and arguments I used to have in English — the ones where I’d reach for that marked-up Bible — simply weren’t happening in the same settings anymore. The habit hadn’t died. It just had fewer rooms to walk into.
What the Lord actually asked me to change
Around 2010, I felt a conviction about this — and it surprised me, because it wasn’t “study less” or “stop being precise.” It was something quieter: stop bringing that Bible into the room.
Get a new one. Don’t mark it up. Just read it. Absorb it. Meditate on it.
It took real effort to hear that correctly, because by then the highlighting wasn’t really feeding me anymore — it had become a way of demonstrating how much I knew and had learned.
A quiet, respectable form of pride, dressed in spiritual language.
And the cost of it was specific: people stop revealing what they actually think to someone who’s clearly walked into the conversation ready to correct them. You can’t persuade someone who has already decided it’s not safe to be honest with you. And opening a heavily annotated Bible in the middle of a disagreement is one of the fastest ways to communicate this isn’t a conversation, it’s a correction.
So I had to relearn something I’d unlearned without noticing: listen first. Let the other person actually say what they think before I show them anything I’ve studied. I could still mention the books I’d written, the years I’d put in — but not as an opening move. Not as a way of ending the conversation before it started.
It took a long time to retrain that habit. Reading instead of studying-to-defend. Absorbing instead of arming. Feeding the inner man instead of building a case.
Which brings me back to the sentence
So when I see someone tell a stranger online, “you need to read the Bible” — usually in response to a take they don’t like — I recognize exactly what’s happening, because I used to do a version of it myself. It’s not really a statement about that person’s Bible literacy. It’s the highlighted Bible on the table, minus the table. The same impulse, just digital now: I have clearly done more work on this than you, so stop talking, fool.
The truth is, you don’t know how much someone has read. You don’t know what conclusions they’ve wrestled their way into, or how, or how long it took them to reach the stance they now hold. All you know is that they landed somewhere different than you did.
And “take it up with Jesus” or “you clearly haven’t read the Bible” isn’t an argument — it’s a way of ending one before it starts, dressed up as if it were spiritual maturity instead of what it usually is: not wanting to actually hear where the other person is coming from.
I’d rather ask questions now. Not the kind where I’ve already made up my mind and I’m just baiting someone into admitting it — that’s not a question, that’s a trap with a question mark on it.
Real ones.
The kind that assume I might not actually know what this person thinks yet, and that I should probably find out before I tell them what they think, or what they need to go read.
