On the Hard Parts
Our small group is about to finish the final book of the Torah: Deuteronomy. Two years, five biblical books, countless Sunday afternoons gathered around coffee and Bibles spread across the living room. The hum is familiar now—pens click, pages turns, sometimes a late arrival slips in with an apology. Someone opens in prayer, and we settle into another conversation about faith, obedience, and what it means to love God with all our heart.
It’s been good. Stretching. Holy, even. That’s what the hard parts of the Bible do.
In many years of leading groups now, I’ve noticed how rare it is to actually spend long periods of time in places like this—in the thick of laws, genealogies, and strange stories that don’t resolve neatly. Most of us like to drift into the same comfortable corners of Scripture. No one says, “Let’s skip Habakkuk.” But we do.
We skim the tricky stuff; treat the prophets like awkward relatives at a reunion—best acknowledged from a distance.
And when we do, we miss something sacred.
Why We Avoid the Hard Parts
We avoid the hard parts of Scripture for many reasons.
Emotional Avoidance—Hard passages tend to stir up things we’d rather not face. They challenge our tidy categories of “good God, good life.” Sometimes, we’re not avoiding the text—we’re avoiding the emotions it awakens (or fails to awaken). Many of us have come to the Bible expecting it to be a self-help manual and for God to play the role of our therapist. We struggle with the passages that either don’t appear to do those things or do them too well. We like God’s mercy but struggle with his judgment. So when Scripture steps outside the lines of our expectations, it’s hard to know how to respond. “This is in the Bible?” we realize, embarrassed.
Cultural Conditioning—We live in a world that prizes positivity, productivity, and relevance. Within evangelical culture especially, spiritual growth is often measured by how encouraged we feel after an encounter with the Bible—not by how challenged we are. When a passage doesn’t yield a quick “life application,” we move on. We expect Scripture to inspire us, not to unsettle us. We prefer a verse that fits into an Instagram square to a story that forces us to rethink our own worldview. The hard parts require endurance—slow reading and learning to sit in tension without resolution, sometimes for a very long time. Most of us have never been trained for that kind of spiritual stamina. And sometimes, we’re simply too exhausted. After a long week, we crave encouragement, not confrontation.
Fear of Getting It Wrong—Many believers fear they’re not equipped to interpret difficult texts. We’re embarrassed by that. The Bible can feel inaccessible. It’s easy to feel intimidated by how little we think we understand. So we don’t even try. Especially in small groups, we also fear those passages might stir up disagreement or silence. So leaders often default to the verses that make everyone nod. But those fears are actually an advantage. We can bring dumb questions, admit our disbelief, and step forward into conversations with the hearts and minds we have, not the ones we’re suppose to have. Its in those moments where the light bulbs flicker on and shine brightest.
If we’re honest, we avoid the hard parts because they’re disorienting. It’s not that they’re impossible to understand—it’s that they’re unfamiliar. We avoid them for reasons that sound reasonable enough, but when we finally engage them, we find ourselves pulled into a story that isn’t centered on us. To truly understand it, we have to give more of ourselves than we often want to. Books like Leviticus, Ezekiel, or Romans confront us with truths that stretch far beyond our culture and lifetime.
But avoidance comes with a cost.
The Cost of Avoidance
When we skip the hard parts of Scripture, we end up with a God made in our own image.
The Bible was never meant to be read in fragments—ten minutes over coffee, a verse for the day, a quote for encouragement. It wasn’t written in a vacuum or designed to fit neatly into our study guides, devotionals, or theology handbooks. Yet that’s often how we approach it. The hard parts resist those models.
And so, in avoiding them, we lose our grip on the story’s sweep. Ironically, the very truths we claim to cherish are found most clearly in the places we neglect. The key to unlocking the story of Scripture is not in the Gospels or Psalms—it’s in the unopened books, waiting to be found by those willing to linger there.
Our avoidance of these texts has bred spiritual shallowness, biblical illiteracy, and costly forgetfulness. It’s possible to attend a Bible study faithfully for years, to memorize verses and fill in workbook blanks, yet never find the thread that connects the garden to the eternal throne. Worse still, it’s possible to do all this and never realize the part God has written for you within that story.
In skipping the hard parts, I fear we’ve so often forfeited what it means to become true disciples of Jesus.
Because the hard parts are not there to confuse us. They’re there to reveal God. Every law, lament, and obscure oracle is a window into the heart of a God who refuses to abandon his plan. He invites us into his story—one that is far bigger and more demanding than the version we often settle for.
Why We Need to Wrestle Together
But when a small group dares to tackle the hard parts of Scripture together, something beautiful happens. We learn to depend on one another—and on the Spirit—in new ways. No one person has the easy answers. We grow side by side. Everyone is discipled, and everyone is discipling.
This is how the early believers learned. They didn’t gather around curated lists of “most encouraging passages for modern life.” They opened the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings—the same Scriptures Jesus used to explain himself. Every community had its Torah-guide, its elders—those “able to teach,” who helped the rest discern the wisdom of the oldest books and apply it to their sphere.
Studying Scripture in community guards us from arrogance and isolation. It reminds us that no one “owns” the truth; we discover it together as a diverse people learning to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, into the image of the Messiah.
Our mission as small groups is to disciple one another in how to enter Scripture on its own terms. Our goal is fluency and growth—to ask how the Bible uses its own language, patterns, and designs to reveal truth, and how those truths challenge our assumptions. Learning to situate the Bible within its own worldview is difficult work, but it can be done.
And the simplest, least-used tool for it?
Repetition.
Reading and rereading entire books—again and again.
The Bible is meditation literature. It’s meant to be reread, pondered, and wrestled with together. Later passages illuminate the earlier ones; earlier stories give shape to what follows. The goal isn’t to revise original meaning but to listen more carefully to it—to enter into the divine conversation already unfolding, and stay there long enough to be changed by it.
A Way Back into the Hard Parts
The best way to venture into deeper waters is to start small—but start. And start near the beginning. In the first Bible study I ever led, we began with Genesis 1.
Choose a short, “hard” passage and sit with it.
Don’t rush to explain it. Read it aloud. Ask what others notice. Wait through the awkward silence; let it do its work. Push one another to find something—anything—that stands out. Ask what this passage says in its own story, to its original audience, before asking what it means for you.
Embrace confusion as an act of worship.
You don’t have to have it all figured out. The best Bible studies are the ones where someone says, “I don’t know what I’m missing here, but I want to find out.” That first Genesis study I led didn’t use a guide or workbook. We simply showed up having read a few chapters and talked about what we saw. I didn’t have all the answers (I still don’t!)—and that made everyone else feel free to learn alongside me.
Use good tools, but don’t outsource.
Commentaries and study guides are helpful. Still, read the actual Bible. Learn to use a concordance—and then teach others how to do the same. Let Scripture interpret itself. Train your eyes to look for patterns, repetitions, echoes. Ask, “Where have I heard this before?” and “What does this remind me of elsewhere in the Bible?”
Keep the bigger picture in view.
Every hard passage belongs to a larger story. It’s easy to zoom in so closely on a verse that we lose sight of the arc it lives within. Try reversing that. Ask how the larger story—the structure of the book, the covenantal thread, the themes, the author—shapes the meaning of the smaller part. What bigger picture is at stake?
Pray Psalm 1—and then live it.
Blessed is the one who meditates on the Torah day and night. Make that your aim: not just to gain knowledge, but to marinate in the earliest books of the Bible until they reshape how you see the world. Anyone who’s studied with me knows that I’m never not studying Genesis. The stories of the Torah are the most underestimated and least utilized tools for understanding the rest of Scripture. Every syllable of the Bible echoes back to those early books. Even when you’re knee-deep in Romans, remember Genesis. Remember Exodus. Remember Leviticus. These are the words that gave every later word its meaning.
When Small Groups Become Holy Ground
When small groups read the hard parts, the atmosphere changes. The words come alive in new ways. The discussion begins to shift. It takes time; returning to the same grass and mowing over it in different ways. But in those moments, the living room turns into holy ground.
We begin to see Scripture not as a collection of stories to inspire or fix us, but as one breathtaking reality that includes us. We discover that God’s hardest words are his most loving, meant to purify our hearts and prepare us for an eternity in his presence. But if we want to know him, we must be willing to open the whole book.
When we study the hard parts, we learn to live the hard parts. We find courage for obedience, clarity in confusion, and hope that outlasts circumstance.
So gather your people. Open the Scriptures.
Turn the pages that intimidate you.
Ask the hard questions.
And when you do, expect the Spirit to show up. Because the same God who spoke from the mountain still speaks from the pages—and he has not changed.