Spending time in Scripture’s original languages is unquestionably important. But it’s rarely urgent unless you’re teaching or taking a class based on these languages.
This means it’s all to easy to put it off to another day, to let things slip. And before long, even a passage that you might have found comparatively straightforward looks like a jumbled mess.
So, amid the clamor of urgent activities vying for your attention, how do you make time to spend in the biblical text’s original languages? How can you ensure this critically important activity doesn’t get lost amid the noise?
To ensure you make time to spend in the biblical languages, 7 steps can help—namely, to
- Focus on what really matters.
- Start small.
- Notice where your time is going.
- Eliminate activities that aren’t urgent or important.
- Separate yourself from activities that are urgent but not important.
- Abbreviate activities that are both urgent and important.
- Concentrate even more on Scripture in its original languages.
1. Focus on what really matters.
You can improve your ability with Scripture’s languages in any number of ways. Each one has its virtues and its challenges.
But you’re probably not so interested in these languages for their own sake. You’re probably interested in them because they’re Scripture’s languages.
That fact means some ways of working on these languages have more direct benefits, others less.
You could drill vocabulary cards, read grammars, or work over morphology patterns. All of these activities are great. All of them can be beneficial. They all get you into using some incredibly helpful tools.
The downside is that they’re not the text of Scripture. So, if you focus on ancillary resources—helpful as they are—you’re not focusing on the core reason you’re interested in these languages in the first place.
Instead, if you focus on reading biblical texts in their original languages, some passages will definitely be heavy going. You might get stuck and not know what you’re looking at.
But if you do, you’ll end up working on vocabulary, consulting grammars, and sorting out morphology patterns. And you’ll get something much more besides—first-hand involvement with Scripture’s text.
2. Start small.
Although they’re important, it can be a challenge to make time for the biblical languages. If you focus on the biblical text and start small, however, you can pretty quickly develop a regular habit that’s sustainable over time.
It might be tempting to set a lofty goal for how much text you want to work through. You might be inclined to set the bar high enough so that you’ll feel you’ve really achieved something if you meet that bar.
The trouble is that there’s a lot that’s competing for your attention. That’s why you need to be intentional about making time for the biblical languages in the first place.
So, instead, start small. Begin with just one verse, or small handful, a day. Even at that pace, you can get through more text sooner than you think.
My students and I normally do 2–4 verses a day in the Hebrew Bible and another 2–4 in the Greek New Testament. Even accounting for days when we don’t hit that comparatively doable pace, we’ve worked all the way through Genesis and the gospels, we’re the better part of the way through Exodus, and we’re moving along in Acts.
Even a small number of verses, if you work at reading regularly, will bring you through a good amount of text. Plus, starting small will make it easier for you to actually get started while you free up space elsewhere in your schedule.
3. Notice where your time is going.
In order to free up space in your schedule, you need to know where your time is regularly going every week.
You might already know. If so, that’s great. But if not, try noting the big things that you find yourself spending time on for a few weeks.
Do any patterns emerge? Is there anything you’re consistently spending more time on than you think you really should?
You don’t need a complete picture. You just need a basic understanding to get you started. As you peel back the layers and notice what you’re doing on autopilot every week, you can make some intentional decisions about whether to keep that activity and, if so, on what terms.
As you do, it’ll be helpful to have in mind the classic two-by-two “Eisenhower Matrix” that classifies activities as either urgent or not and important or not.((On this matrix, see especially Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).)) Depending on an activity’s characteristics, it also has an appropriate response.
UrgentNot UrgentImportantQuadrant 1
Characteristics: Urgent, Important
Response: AbbreviateQuadrant 2
Characteristics: Not Urgent, Important
Response: ConcentrateNot ImportantQuadrant 3
Characteristics: Urgent, Not Important
Response: SeparateQuadrant 4
Characteristics: Not Urgent, Not Important
Response: Eliminate
4. Eliminate activities that aren’t urgent or important.
It might be counterintuitive, but you want to start by addressing activities that are neither urgent nor important. You want to start here because you shouldn’t be doing these activities anyhow.
So, doing them at all in any form means that you’re allowing them to take time away from other things, like work in Scripture’s original languages.
This could involve getting distracted into “doom swiping” on social media. But it also has more “productive” forms.
Maybe there are meetings you regularly attend but really shouldn’t. Or maybe there are emails that you get, but you really shouldn’t.—Yes, it’s okay and even good to unsubscribe from a newsletter or filter a sender so that they don’t keep dragging your attention away from where it needs to be.
5. Separate yourself from activities that are urgent but not important.
Next on the chopping block are activities that have some urgency to them but that aren’t important and so are in the way. You have two options for how to separate yourself from these activities: delegate them or automate them.
Unless you’re in an administrative role, you might not have anyone to delegate to directly. But you can still entrust others to do certain things without your direct involvement. Letting go of your peripheral involvement might even help them move more quickly.
Automation might take the form of using software to put some things on autopilot. But other kinds of automation can be helpful too (and not require you to take up computer programming as a hobby when you’re trying to invest more time in Scripture’s original text 🙂).
Some of these other kinds of automation include
- habits or routines that you consciously optimize,
- templates that you develop for repeated tasks, or
- checklists that help you or others move through a process more quickly and easily.((For suggesting these other kinds of automation, I’m grateful to Michael S. Hyatt, Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2019), 117–38.))
6. Abbreviate activities that are both urgent and important.
At first glance, urgent and important activities might seem to deserve whatever time they need. But the problem is that, because they’re urgent, they’ll still squeeze out other important activities that aren’t urgent—like spending time in Scripture’s original languages.
So, yes, you have to address what’s in front of you that’s both urgent and important. But as you do, ask yourself what you can do to prevent something similar from becoming urgent in the future.
Is it a quick conversation you need to have? A heads-up email you need to send? A larger allowance you need to make for unexpected events to come up and alter your scheduling plans?
The more you can take simple, small, preventative measures to help keep important things from becoming urgent, the less likely they’ll be to require that you derail work on other important, but less urgent, activities.
7. Concentrate even more on Scripture in its original languages.
Clearing the decks as in steps 3–6 above isn’t a one-time process. It’s a continual cycle. But each time you go around the cycle, you should get more margin back in your days.
That greater margin will make it easier for you to keep up with your current plan for staying in Scripture’s original languages. And over time, it will also make it more feasible for you to expand that time until you find the right balance for it.
Conclusion
It can be hard to prioritize what matters but isn’t noisily urgent. And in some ways, it might never be easy—even when something as important as time in Scripture’s original languages is at stake.
So, especially as you’re getting started—or restarted—with prioritizing time in Scripture’s text, focus on that core activity of reading the text. Even a little at a time will mean that, in not too long, you’ll be looking back at some measurable progress.
And having time for reading Scripture in its original languages can get easier as you
- eliminate or separate yourself from what’s unimportant and
- take preventative measures to help keep what’s important from clamoring for you to drop everything else.
As you go through the cycle, you’ll find yourself able to invest more in important (but rarely urgent) activities like carefully working through a biblical text in its original languages.
For additional help making time for the biblical languages, download my free resource pack. It’ll help get you started and give you some tools to start making even more time for Scripture’s original languages as you go along.