Is all reading just that – reading? Is there good reading and bad reading? Can you be a bad reader? Think about these words:
The most prevalent mistake that people make about both listening and reading is to regard them as passively receiving rather than as actively participating…
The first lesson to be learned about reading – with the mind, not just with the eye – must be every bit as active as writing. Passive reading, which is almost always with the eyes in motion but with the mind not engaged, is not reading at all.
That kind of reading is on a level with watching television for the sake of relaxation or just to fill some empty time, letting the images that pass across the screen flit before one’s eyes. The habit of watching television in this way, endemic among the young who spend hours before the screen in a state of intellectual somnolence, turns them into passive readers who flip the pages of a book with little or no attention to the meaning of the words on the page or the structure and direction of the discourse that the book contains.
-Mortimer Adler, How to Speak, How to Listen, p. 86
Charles Spurgeon preached a sermon from Matthew 12 on how this same principle applies to the reading of the Bible. As a matter of fact, that sermon is the best short instruction on Bible reading that I have ever encountered. Here’s a taste of the introduction:
Yet our Lord proceeds to put the question a second time—”Have ye not read?” as if they had not read after all, though they were the greatest readers of the law then living. He insinuates that they have not read at all; and then he gives them, incidentally, the reason why he had asked them whether they had read. He says, “If ye had known what this meaneth,” as much as to say, “Ye have not read, because ye have not understood.” Your eyes have gone over the words, and you have counted the letters, and you have marked the position of each verse and word, and you have said learned things about all the books, and yet you are not even readers of the sacred volume, for you have not acquired the true art of reading; you do not understand, and therefore you do not truly read it. You are mere skimmers and glancers at the Word: you have not read it, for you do not understand it…
Read the whole thing HERE. And you can read what Martyn Lloyd-Jones taught me about this HERE.
