Want to grow and mature in Christ? Read this list. Here are some bible-reading tips that will help you, no matter how mature you are in Christ or how new-born:

 - Read your bible every day, obviously, because, as Jesus said in Matthew 4:4, "It is written: 'Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God." It's helpful for me to read my Bible specifically early in the morning: Charles Spurgeon and John Wesley practiced this method, as well as Ray Comfort. Daily reading of the Bible will inform your prayer life, order your thought life, equip you for ministry (1 Tim 3:17), build up your judgment for making wise decisions, help you to always know what God's will is (Proverbs 3:5-6), help your morality to know what's right to do given the present age, and train you in what the Holy Spirit is teaching you using life experiences for maturity (Hebrews&nb sp;5:14).

 - By reading the bible, though it may not seem that way, you are actually growing in maturity, spiritually. As the Holy Spirit said through Peter said in 1 Peter 2:2, "As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby: If so be ye have tasted that the Lord [is] gracious." This isn't just true for new believers, but this verse also applies to believers that have some mileage under the belts in Christ. Whether you've been saved for 5 minutes, 5 years, or 5 decades, scripture always has something for you.

 - If you don't understand the 'thus' and 'thou' in the King James Version, start with the NIV, NASB, or NLT and read one of these translations/versions until you're ready for the King James - their translation is in an English that is a closer approximation to the English we speak day-to-day today and it will help you to understand and become familiar with the verses until you're able to read any version, having built up your understanding on a translation easier for you to read.

 - If you don't understand a certain word (such as 'justification,' 'epistle,' or 'apostle,') find a good bible dictionary such as Easton's Dictionary and look it up. This will help you to understand the verse and you will build a good understanding from that passage for when you encounter that word in another area of scripture. Another plus is that when you look something up you tend to remember it very well. It personalizes that verse (and remember, older translations such as King James may have an older definition of an English word, so find a good 1611 dictionary or King James dictionary).

 - You can even look up the original Greek or Hebrew. In that case, find a concordance, like Strong's Concordance.

 - If you're reading a verse and you encounter a particularly interesting topic or subject that you'd like to look into, use something like Torrey's Topical Dictionary.

 - One thing Pastor John Piper says is to not jump around the text, reading random passages, but to systematically go through the bible chapter by chapter, verse by verse. This helps because you always know where you are in your reading of scripture, and if you deviate on another study, you can pick up where you left off. It's helpful for some people to do a Bible-reading Plan. There are plans available where you can read your bible in a year, 6 months, 90 days, etcetera.

 - Here's an important quote:
“When I study the Bible,
I prepare myself to talk to others.
When I read the Bible,
God talks to me.”
—D. L. Moody
This is a very helpful, safe, and effective practice. Make sure that you're hearing from God: commit time for reading scripture so that you're being nourished yourself, then separate time for studying to minister to others than the time when you read for your own nourishment.

One of the people that helped disciple me once taught me not to confuse my specific times alone with God reading scripture with the reading I do to minister to others. It encouraged me to practice letting the Holy Spirit feed me out of the Word first, then to do separate reading for being built up to talk to other people. This is helpful because then I've been encouraged and built up to talk to them as well as equipped. Don't confuse the two: allow the Holy spirit to build you up first before giving you what to say to other people. Make sure that you're fed by the Word first before building sermons, doing studies, and so on.

 - Commentary is good, but not to be a substitute for reading the passage and getting clarity based on the context of the passage as to its meaning.

 - Very importantly, DO NOT interpret scripture by what your pastor or any other teacher even close to you says. This can lead to confusion, wrong thinking, and serious error (that even the person you're listening to may not have intended). Instead, test what preachers, pastors, and teachers are saying by seeing whether the context of the scripture that they quote agrees with their interpretation of it. This way you're deriving the meaning of scripture, rather than assigning it based on outside sources. Once you have understood not only the quoted passage but the context by which the whole chapter or book uses that passage, then you can test to see if what you've heard them say is really what the bible is laboring to tell you also. If they're properly handling and 'dividing' the scriptures, the bible will agree with what they're saying. Otherwise, their preaching may be mistaken (or an error in their own interpretation). When asked why you do this, tell them the bible teaches it in 1 John 4:1-2 - test the spirits to see whether they're of God. When someone quotes a verse, go back and read the whole context to see if it is sound interpretation. This practice also familiarizes you with scripture and builds up your memory of scripture. Knowing the passages and being familiar prevents people in your hearing from being able to abuse them.

 - If you don't remember a particular verse, look it up, because constantly recalling, reciting, and looking up scripture builds up our memory of it. It is stored in our minds and hearts. If it's stored in our hearts, we can meditate on it and the Spirit can further use it to minister to us when we're away from the text (at work or school). No one can take it away from us, and it's ready for use in alarming situations or persecutions. Also, you might just plain forget scripture. But, if you're constantly looking it up, it becomes easier.

 - Though a particular verse has many applications, it only has 1 meaning. All of scripture was authored by the Holy Spirit through holy men throughout the ages (2 Peter 1:21, 2 Tim 3:16). So, though there many writers, there was but one author, God. But, because God used men (like a King dictates to a scribe), it's helpful to read a verse to see the intended meaning of the writer - what did the person with the hand to the pen intend for me to understand as he wrote by the Holy Spirit? What were they thinking? What was their understandnig of what they wrote? Asking these help to see scripture past our own system of thought.

 - It's helpful to see whether your interpretation of a verse is orthodox and has been interpreted the same way throughout the history of the Church by reading what men from Church history wrote about it. For example, if you're reading Matthew 13 and come up with a meaning to Jesus's parables that Martin Luther, Augustine of Hippo, Charles Spurgeon, Whitefield, Newton, Wesley, Pink, Towzer, or any of the early 1-4 century Church Fathers didn't come up with, most likely you need to check if your interpretation is biblical. Check the context of the passage and other scriptures. The Bible says, 'Out of the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established’ (2 Corinthians 13:1b, Deut 19:15). Church history is helpful as a guide to interpretation of key passages because many times our 21st century thinking paints our entire concept and thinking of what we're reading, and we can misunderstand the 1st century mind and thinking of the original authors of the New Testament. This keeps us from serious errors in interpretation, but also helps to assure us that the Holy Spirit is teaching us - all these men, even from different centuries and completely different surroundings within their age, all came to the same conclusions that you did when reading the same passages and the same text! The same Bible that produced the Great Awakening or caused Augustine to write The Confessions is the same Bible God is teaching you from! Each sucessive generation of the Church is made stronger by the work of the previous generation of the Church being available to them. Abandoning your own presuppositions when reading scripture is hard, but seeing how other men did it in ages past is a big help.

 - It's also important to look and see how people in the bible interpret scripture. The New Testament requotes the Old Testament directly over 300-600 times and refers to it in speech over 4,000-5,000 times (very modest statistics). So, you can read and see how Jesus, Peter, or Paul all handled or interpreted the scriptures, then go look up those same verses in the Old Testament and read their contexts. This can be helpful.

 - Pray - Allow the Author of scripture Himself properly guide your interpretation of the passages - the Holy Spirit. Ask God to reveal to you the meaning of scriptures you might not understand (and even the ones that do), and then ask the Lord to teach it to you in practice. A great way to mature is to do what the Bible is telling you, not just to read it. This help in reading it. Sometimes whole areas of scripture that were once not as clear to me begun to open up once I started practicing them (not to say that any area of scripture is in any wit unclear to the understanding of its readers, but that God was teaching me something specific in my walk with Him).

 - Nothing binds and blinds people from understanding the scriptures more than sin. Confessing sin and asking God to reveal scriptural truth to you as well as relying on the fact that the Holy Spirit is revealing it to you are good approaches to scripture, because ''...the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned." And one of the ministries of the Holy Spirit is to teach, declare, and reveal Jesus's teaching to us (John 16:14 - Jesus's words).

 - If you see something really amazing revealed to you in scripture, don't be surprised that it was put there on purpose! :-D God is amazing! He speaks to us through His Word! Want to hear the voice of God? Read your bible out loud!

http://www.biblegateway.com/" title="http://www.biblegateway.com/" target="_blank"http://www.biblegateway.com/ - This online bible is great for looking up passages of scripture for when you can only remember one part of a verse (such as looking up 'only begotten Son so that whosoever' might bring up John 3:16, or 'keepeth slumber sleep' may bring up Psalm 121:4), or reading the bible in several different translations/versions.

http://www.blueletterbible.org/" title="http://www.blueletterbible.org/" target="_blank"http://www.blueletterbible.or... - Blue Letter Bible - This is a good bible specifically for looking up the original Greek and Hebrew. It also has a tool for finding related verses to one verse, audio and video commentary by trusted Christian leaders and ministers, a lexicon, text commentaries, pertanent imagery, and even old hymns that pertain to whole passages of scripture from Church history.  The Koinonia House ministry has provided this bible online for quite some time. Their websites were some of the first websites on the internet. I use this one alot.

http://www.biblos.com/" title="http://www.biblos.com/" target="_blank"http://www.biblos.com/ - Here you can read the bible in several different translations/versions and even languages. This is very useful for comparing versions. They even have a parallel bible for comparing versions here - http://bible.cc/" title="http://bible.cc/" target="_blank"http://bible.cc/.

http://www.studylight.org/dic/" title="http://www.studylight.org/dic/" target="_blank"http://www.studylight.org/dic... - I use this website just for their dictionaries. They have a great King James Version dictionary for looking up older English words (second to last in the list) as well as an Easton's Dictionary for hard-to-understand words (third in the list).

http://www.swordsearcher.com/" title="http://www.swordsearcher.com/" target="_blank"http://www.swordsearcher.com/... - Here's a helpful piece of software that I use even to today. It costs money, but I emailed the author and he gave me a key to use the trial version unlimited. This is good just for searching for scripture when all I have is a part of a verse, a word, or a few words. Software like these also come packaged with dictionaries, maps, commentaries, and other tools. Other good bible software can be put on phones, PDAs, laptops, or mp3 players for Bible-on-the-go.