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Here’s something I found helpful from N.T. Wright on Reading the Bible:

“Jesus’ charge against his contemporaries is thus that they have been reading looking at the right book but reading it in the wrong way… It is easy to be attracted to the study of the text as an exercise in intellectual brilliance… But it is possible to allow the study of the text, and of different interpretations of the text, to become a substitute for allowing the text to bring us into the presence of the living God… This is not to say that we must leave our minds behind when we read the text… To read the Bible in the light of Jesus the Messiah demands more thought, not less. But this thought must always be ready to pass into personal knowledge, into adoration, into prayer – and then back again… (N.T. Wright, John for Everyone: Part One, p.69)

Wright’s writing here reminds me of the introduction to the Renovare Study Bible, now called The Life With God Bible in which editor Richard Foster explains how many of us have Bibles (average of nine) and yet we keep searching for something else within a new Bible purchase. He pinpoints that this something else is the essence of discipleship transformation – learning how to, as Wright states, read the story in the right way – in the way of learning the life rhythms of Jesus and placing them into action within a life immersed in receiving the forgiveness of sins from Jesus.