Read the passage in more than one translation. Read the footnotes. Pray through it, form your own view, and only then open the commentaries. Dr. Cynthia James, one of several associate pastors at the Potter’s House, described that order in a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation with Lisa Fields. This guide turns it into a habit. By the end you will have tried the order on a real passage, and you will have written a reading plan you can keep after the first month.
You can work through it alone in about an hour. A group can use one longer session and then check in two weeks later. A group needs two or three different translations in the room, in print or on phones, and every person needs a Bible with footnotes or study notes. No one has to share anything personal. Where a prompt asks about your own habits, writing your answer on paper is enough.
First, look at where your Scripture comes from
Before you change your method, take an honest look at your current one. Write down the last five or six times you remember meeting a Bible passage in any form. Beside each one, note how it reached you: a sermon, a daily verse on your phone, a song lyric, a post someone shared, or a passage you opened and read yourself. Don’t grade the list. Just look at it.
Lisa Fields names the problem this exercise exposes. Many believers now get Scripture as one verse a day through an app, and she compares that to reading one sentence of a book and trying to judge what the whole book is about. Dr. James presses the point with questions anyone can ask of a single verse: “do I really know that passage? What was it intended to say? Who was it talking to? Is it applicable in my circumstance?” No single verse can answer those questions, so a list made mostly of single verses is a list of passages you have met but may not know. Keep it. You will come back to it at the end.
Try the order on a real passage
Dr. James describes her own desk this way: “I don’t keep commentaries on my desk. I keep different translations.” She says she keeps nine or ten. She starts with King James because she grew up on it, and she reads others beside it, some she enjoys and some she argues with. A second rendering shows you where a sentence could be heard in more than one way, and that is often exactly where you need to slow down.
The practice passage is Ruth 3:1-9, where Naomi sends Ruth to Boaz at the threshing floor. Work through these steps in order, and resist the urge to look anything up early.
- Read Ruth 3:1-5 aloud in the King James Version. This is Naomi’s plan. Underline what Naomi tells Ruth to do. Then circle what Naomi says Boaz will do next.
- Read Ruth 3:6-9 in a different translation. Mark what Ruth actually does and says.
- Put the two markings side by side. Compare what Naomi said Boaz would do with what Ruth does when he wakes.
- Compare verse 9 across every translation in the room. Write down each word or phrase that changes from one version to another, and read whatever footnotes your Bibles give.
- Pray briefly, in your own words, for the attention to see what is actually there. Then write one sentence describing what you think is happening in verse 9.
Facilitator note: Give the group time with step 3 before saying anything. If no one spots it, point them to verse 4, where Naomi says that Boaz “will tell thee what thou shalt do” (Ruth 3:4). When Boaz wakes and asks who is there, Ruth answers, “I am Ruth thine handmaid” (Ruth 3:9), and then she tells him what she is asking of him. Let people disagree about what that means. Some will hear boldness. Others will point out that Ruth calls herself a handmaid and stress her humility. Both readings work from words on the page.
Only after the group has written its own sentences, bring in Dr. James’s reading. She noticed that Ruth departs from the script Naomi gave her and names herself, and she hears in that moment a woman who is “declaring her identity.” She also connects Ruth’s words with the “I am” sayings of Jesus. That link is her own interpretive connection, and the book of Ruth does not claim it. Her other point matters most for this guide. Reading other writers helped her see it, but “it helps to open up what was already in the scripture.” The observation was available to anyone who read slowly.
Questions to discuss
1. Which words in Ruth 3 support each reading you heard, including yours and Dr. James’s? Which words complicate any of them?
2. Did any translation or footnote change what you thought verse 9 meant? If none did, what did comparing them still show you?
Why the commentary waits
Dr. James is not against commentaries. She uses a lot of them: “I’ll go through a good eight, nine, or 10 commentaries after I’ve developed my thought.” Everything depends on the word after. Her reason is about what a commentary does to your attention: “I look at commentaries later because that’s someone who’s locked into a view.” If you read the conclusion first, you tend to see the passage only through that conclusion. Starting there, she says, means “we’re cheating ourselves and our audience.” Read after your own work, the same commentary becomes something else: “It’s kind of like sprinkles on the icing.” In her experience the rewards are usually small, one detail that suddenly makes a passage open up.
Her standard for a study Bible follows the same logic. “I don’t always like the Bibles that take me to a conclusion,” she says. “I just want them to give me other references and like scriptures and kind of pray through.” Footnotes are another matter, and she treats them as essential: “Do not have a Bible without footnotes, please.” Translators and editors put information there on purpose. Skipping it means throwing away help already printed on the page.
Testing the method against its weak point
The obvious objection is that reading before you consult experts invites private, eccentric interpretations. Dr. James builds the answer into her method. She describes studying the account of the prophet’s widow in 2 Kings 4:1-7. The longer she stayed with it, the more she sensed the widow stood on equal footing with her husband, though she admits she could not prove it. Later she heard a scholar explain language in the passage that pointed the same way. She also says commentaries sometimes do the opposite and tell her she has wandered too far and needs to come back. She reads first, and then she submits that reading to people who know more.
She keeps her limits in view, too. There are parts of the Bible she reads but does not teach, because she doesn’t feel equipped to. She has never studied Hebrew or Greek, yet she points to reliable translations and language aids and refuses to treat that gap as a reason to stop studying. And she does not picture this as a solitary project: “we can help each other find” what a passage holds.
Lisa Fields describes the opposite danger. In seminary, a professor kept telling students to read the Bible itself, and she admits she found herself neglecting it while studying it. Too much secondhand material can crowd out the text just as surely as too little background can.
A footnote exercise: Turn to Joshua 2:1, where Rahab is introduced. Dr. James says the footnote in her translation flags a debate over the word used for Rahab, with innkeeper offered as a possible alternative to harlot. Check every Bible in the room and write down exactly what each footnote says. If none of your Bibles has a note there, compare how each translation renders the word in Joshua 2:1 and in Joshua 6:17, and note whether any of them hint at a choice the translators had to make. Do not try to settle the translation question. Ask a smaller one: does knowing that a footnote like hers exists change how confidently you would describe Rahab to someone else?
Questions to discuss
3. When was a reading you formed on your own later corrected or confirmed by someone who knew more? What made you willing, or unwilling, to accept it?
4. Which do you find more tempting: going straight to someone else’s explanation, or trusting your own reading without checking it? What would a guardrail against that temptation look like for you?
Build a plan you can keep
Dr. James is candid that her habits may not be the textbook ideal. She admires family members who read the whole Bible every year and admits that isn’t her pattern. Her starting point is this: “I think unless you fall in love with something, we’re not gonna stick with it.” She also insists on structure: “I do think the more systematic we are, the better.”
She reads the New Testament straight through, returns to Samuel and Kings for the stories, and reads the poetry and even the law because she likes the sound of the words. She also studies by topic, such as miracles or the parables. For people with little time, she suggests learning the stories of the older books and reading the four Gospels and Paul’s letters systematically. She warns about portion size as well: take in too much too soon and you may simply give up. Discussing study software, she says she prefers books partly because “I can control when I’m ready for more, a little better.” Choose tools and portions that let you control the pace.
Write your plan with these five parts:
- Entry point: one book, section or topic you will start with, chosen because it genuinely draws you.
- Rhythm: which days and how many minutes. Pick a number you could keep in a bad week.
- Portion: how much you will read each time, small enough that you finish.
- One slow passage a week: a few verses you take through the full order of translations, footnotes, prayer, your own sentence, and then one commentary.
- A partner: one person you will tell in two weeks how it went.
In a group, pair people up to swap plans. A partner’s job is to ask whether the plan is realistic, not to make it more impressive.
5. Look at the entry point you chose. Did you pick it because it attracts you, or because you think you should? What might happen to your habit either way?
When the page makes no sense
Some weeks you will hit a passage full of strange names and customs and nothing will click. Dr. James compares the reader’s fear to an escape room, where the clues seem designed to keep you from winning. She takes a different posture: “I try to look at it as if God wants to communicate to me.” She prays that her own mishearing and misreading will give way, instead of deciding the text is simply too hard.
She also remembers reading by flashlight as a girl: “I read the proverbs ’cause they were short.” She adds, “I didn’t understand a lot of them, but I read them.” Her understanding grew over many years. So keep a second page in your notebook titled not yet. When a passage defeats you, write the reference there with one sentence about what confused you, and keep reading. Every few weeks, take one item from that page through the full study order.
6. Is there a part of the Bible you have quietly decided is not for you? What would it take to put it on your not yet page instead?
Two weeks from now
Return to the list you made at the start and make a new one covering the last two weeks. How did your Scripture reach you this time, and how much of it came from your own reading? Tell your partner what you notice, or simply note it for yourself.
Dr. James says of Scripture that “we don’t have to understand all of it, it comes in pieces, but it beckons us.” Success here means that more of those pieces now reach you firsthand, through your own reading. The question to carry is plain: which passage on your not yet page will you take through the full order next?