This guest post was contributed by Keith Ferrin, public speaker, writer, Biblical storyteller and founder of That You May Know Ministries.

I didn’t like the Bible for the first 20 years I was a Christian. Ok…that might be a bit of an overstatement. (But not by much.)

The first several years I really liked it. After all, I was in elementary school. And in elementary school, they only tell you the really cool stories. You know the ones:

• God Speaks…Everything Appears
• Brother Sold Into Slavery Becomes Prince
• Bush Burns Without Burning…and Talks
• Runaway Prophet Has 3-Day Quiet Time Inside Huge Fish
• Messiah Spends First Night On Earth in a Feeding Trough
• Sack Lunch Goes a Looooong Way
• Messiah Heals Blind Man with Spit and Mud

Cool stories. Stories that really fly on a Flannel Graph. (Did I just date myself?)

But then came Junior High. Now I was supposed to read it – on my own. Now I was supposed to study it. Now I was supposed to have my own “quiet time.”

I tried. I really did.

I would pick up my Bible, read my chapter-a-day, and try to see what I could “get out of it.” Some days it was really cool. I would see something that I hadn’t seen before or felt like I understood something that had confused me in the past. But not every day. In fact, not very frequently at all.

Bottom line: I believed the Bible was true. I just didn’t like it very much.

I thought that I would like it more when I got into High School. Then I got to High School. I thought to myself, “Hmmm…maybe when I get to college I’ll like it more. After all, in college you become a deep thinker.” Then came college. No change. Except I thought that I would like it more once I got out of college. But not much changed then either – even though I was a full-time youth pastor!

I believed the Bible. I studied the Bible. I actually really liked teaching the Bible. But I still didn’t enjoy sitting down and reading the Bible.

Then came the spring of 1993. A guy named Bruce Kuhn (www.brucekuhn.com) was coming to a local church where a friend of mine was the youth pastor. Bruce had memorized the entire gospel of Luke. Yep…the whole thing.

He got up on stage alone. No other actors. No sets. No props. And he quoted it. He didn’t just stand there like I did as a frightened 8-year-old quoting John 3:16 in front of “big church.” He lived it. He told the stories. They came alive!

That night, the living Word of God went from being a phrase to a reality.

Little did I know that God was changing my entire perspective on the Bible…and my life in ministry. I got to know Bruce and heard him talk about “hanging out” in a section of Scripture and “soaking” in a passage until he knew it. That summer, I did exactly that with Paul’s letter to the Philippians. And I loved it!

As I look back on those few months and really ponder the shifts that helped me fall in love with God’s Word, I can boil it down to two:

I shifted my mindset from informational Bible study to relational Bible study.

This is huge. And it’s not semantics.

I hear people talk all the time about having a “relationship” with Jesus. But how often are you thinking about that relationship when you read the Bible. I didn’t think about it much at all before 1993. When I opened my Bible, I was there to learn something – or to be challenged, inspired, comforted, or even corrected.

Certainly every one of these still take place when I read the Bible. But the overarching mindset is one of relationship. I am there to learn something by having a conversation with God. I am there to be challenged by God, inspired by God, comforted by God – and yes – corrected by God.