Don't Apply the Bible to Your Life. Do This Instead.

The Bible calls us to be transformed by the renewal of our minds. This is a better framework for thinking about the Bible than "applying" its principles to our lives.

When I say "apply," I'm referring to how I've seen this phrase used over the years. It typically looks like this: you read the Bible and attempt to find some personal application, sometimes unconnected to the text and individualized to you. In churches, it frequently sounds like, "Here are 10 principles for your life: First principle, save money. Second principle, invest your money," and so on.

While nothing about these questions is strictly wrong, I wonder if applying principles to our lives is the best way to generalize what it means for us to read the Bible to know God.

Is there language to use to identify what it means for the Bible to change and transform your life?

Beyond Application: Transformation Through Contemplation

I believe there's a better word than "apply," and that's "transform." In fact, I can't think of any passage in the Bible that instructs us to apply the Bible to our lives as I have described it above. It's simply not the verb used. Sometimes, we are called to hear, obey, and keep God’s commands. At other times, there are other words like "being transformed from one level of glory to another" or "growing in knowledge," and such words name the general way in which we grow in the word.

What's a better general term than application? I believe we need to consider the words "contemplation" and "transformation." When you contemplate the Bible, you reflect on what it says so that it can transform you from the inside out. This aligns with how the Bible talks about transformation. For example, Romans 12 says, "Don't be conformed to the world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind."

What happens is that when you reflect on Scripture, you contemplate in your mind what is being said about reality, and you come to know what is true about reality—whether that's about yourself or the world around you.

Two Examples of Contemplative Transformation

Example 1: The Cosmic Order

Genesis 1 tells us that God created the sun, moon, and stars as signs for times and seasons. You've probably already intuited that these celestial bodies help us order time through calendars and such, but perhaps in an unreflective way.

When you realize that God, the Creator of heaven and earth, placed the sun, moon, and countless stars in the night sky specifically to order your life according to signs, times, and seasons, something changes. You begin to understand that these objects above you aren't just there by coincidence—they have meaning. They signify that you are under God's care and that your life is ordered according to His creational patterns.

This realization changes what it means to go for a walk at night, to feel the sun during the day, or to see a full moon. It begins subtly, but soon your entire life is shaped by the idea that what you see in nature around you is meant to convey that God has ordered the cosmos in such a way that you exist underneath His care, provision, and providence. Your life becomes reflective about who God is and what that means.

Example 2: Life Amidst Death

In Genesis 3, the woman is called Eve, which means "the mother of all living." In context, Genesis 2 has already stated that eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil would result in death. No longer would the original couple intuit the basic goodness of everything; instead, they would add knowledge of evil to their repertoire—a knowledge that represents loss, not gain.

As they pursued evil, they essentially pursued death. This is symbolized powerfully when Adam and Eve are exiled from the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life, no longer able to access life. As the story progresses through Genesis 5, we see that everyone is indeed dying east of Eden.

Yet between this narrative of life and death, there's a glimmer of hope in the woman's name: Eve, or in Hebrew "Chavah," meaning "the mother of all living." In the shadow of death, she stands as a beacon of hope and life. So much so that at the beginning of Genesis 4, Eve bears a child and says, "I have gotten a child with Yahweh." (Sometimes translated as "with the help of Yahweh," but quite literally it says, "I have gotten a child with Yahweh.")

This demonstrates that the woman and God are, in a sense, partners in the co-creation of new life. While death exists east of Eden, life—through God's help—persists through the womb of woman, which becomes the matrix of all life. Through her, Eve becomes the mother of all living things after her.

There's a certain promise and specialness given to childbirth and pregnancy. In a world where death is everywhere, the one place where life is preserved, created, and made manifest with God's special help and care is in a woman's womb—this matrix of life. Every woman, collectively, as they procreate with God's blessing, can be understood as matrices of life for the whole world.

This is profoundly significant. As Alice von Hildebrand says, a woman can have two souls and one body. A man cannot do that.

Transformation, Not Application

So rather than asking, "How do I apply this Bible passage to my life?" we might ask, "How does contemplating this truth transform how I see reality?" When we do this, the Bible doesn't become a manual for extracting principles; it becomes a lens through which we see the world as it truly is—created, fallen, and being redeemed by God.

Through contemplation, the Bible transforms us from the inside out, renewing our minds and changing how we interact with everything from the stars above to the miracle of new life.

I am not saying “applying” the Bible is bad. I simply think there is a better way to generalize what we are doing when we read the Bible to know God. We read to be transformed from the inside out by what we have contemplated in his word and world.