The Pattern I Didn’t Notice in the Bible for Twenty Years
And how it changed the way I read Scripture
Welcome to Sunday’s article for all subscribers.
Throughout the week, I write daily reflections for paid subscribers. Sundays are my opportunity to open the doors a little wider and share something with the whole Sacred & Secular community.
If you’ve recently joined us, you may also be interested in my new book, Sacred & Secular: Find God in the Ordinary, which brings together some of the most popular and thought-provoking essays from this journey so far.
After more than twenty years of preaching, teaching, and now writing about Scripture almost every day, I discovered something I had never noticed before.
It wasn’t a hidden verse or a forgotten historical detail. It wasn’t even a difficult theological idea. It was a pattern.
Looking back, I am surprised I missed it for so long. Once I began to notice it, it seemed to be everywhere. Not in one particular book of the Bible, but running through the whole of Scripture like a thread woven through a large, beautiful tapestry.
The Bible keeps telling what feels like the same story.
At first, that can seem like repetition. But the more I read, the more I became convinced that something else was happening.
The Bible is not simply repeating itself.
It is teaching us how to see.
— • —
Our Instinct for Easy Answers
Human beings naturally look for patterns.
We want to understand why things happen, especially when life becomes difficult or confusing. When something goes wrong, we instinctively search for a wider narrative that makes sense of it all.
That instinct naturally carries over into how we read Scripture.
If a story is repeated, we often assume it must be reinforcing a straightforward lesson. We mentally build neat systems in which actions lead to predictable outcomes.
Be faithful, and life goes well.
Get it wrong, and everything falls apart.
There is some truth in those ideas, but the Bible stubbornly refuses to become that simple.
Again and again, it resists reducing life to a formula. It challenges the assumption that suffering always has an obvious moral cause or that blessing is simply the reward for good behaviour.
Instead of offering simple explanations, Scripture does something much more interesting.
It tells the same kinds of stories.
— • —
The Pattern You Begin to Notice
Once you begin reading across the whole Bible rather than one passage at a time, certain themes keep resurfacing.
Outsiders see what insiders miss.
Interruptions become the main event.
Apparent failures turn out not to be failures at all.
The overlooked become central.
These are not isolated moments. Together, they begin to form a much larger pattern.
A Samaritan, someone culturally and religiously dismissed, becomes the moral centre of a story that exposes the blindness of respected religious figures.
A woman who has spent twelve years excluded and unseen interrupts Jesus on his way to another miracle, and her story becomes every bit as important as the one everyone thought they had come to witness.
A disciple steps onto the water and, for a few extraordinary moments, does the impossible. Yet he is remembered primarily for sinking, as though the failure matters more than the courage.
Each story stands perfectly well on its own.
But when they are read together, something remarkable begins to emerge. These connections are not limited to a handful of familiar stories.
Across the Gospels, those closest to Jesus often struggle to understand him, while people on the margins repeatedly respond with surprising faith and insight.
The pattern appears often enough that it no longer feels accidental. It begins to feel intentional, almost as though the biblical writers expect us to notice. And once you do notice it, the question changes.
Instead of asking what one story means, you begin asking why this same kind of story keeps appearing.
— • —
More Than Moral Lessons
For much of my life, I approached these stories as moral lessons.
The obvious things like being more compassionate, having more faith, and trying not to doubt. That is how I was taught from Sunday school onwards, and there is certainly truth in those conclusions.
But over time, I have come to think they sometimes make the stories smaller than they really are by tidying them up too quickly.
The Bible is doing more than telling us how to behave. It is showing us what God is like. And rather than giving us abstract definitions, it does so through repeated patterns that unfold over centuries.
Each story adds another piece to the picture.
Eventually, those pieces begin forming something far larger than any one passage could reveal on its own.
— • —
Repetition as Revelation
Years ago, someone at Bible college told me to repeat the main point of a sermon three times if I wanted people to remember it. It sounds simplistic, but there is wisdom in it.
Biblical storytelling works in a surprisingly similar way.
The same types of events appear again and again, but always with subtle variations. Those differences matter because they invite us to compare, reflect, and gradually recognise what the writers are showing us.
This is one of Scripture’s great teaching methods. Not everything is stated outright. Instead, understanding grows slowly.
When outsiders consistently respond with faith while insiders remain confused, we begin to glimpse how God’s kingdom actually works.
When interruptions repeatedly become moments of revelation, we are challenged to stop seeing disruption as something to avoid.
When reversals constantly appear, where the last become first and the forgotten become central, it becomes increasingly difficult to hold on to our ordinary assumptions about success, status, and significance.
Repetition, in this sense, is not about saying the same thing twice.
It is about revealing the same truth from multiple angles until it slowly reshapes the way we see.
— • —
What These Patterns Reveal About God
This is where the repetition begins to matter.
If these patterns appear consistently across Scripture, they are not merely literary techniques; they are theological clues. They suggest that God’s attention is not drawn to the powerful, the visible, or the impressive in the way we often imagine.
Instead, God repeatedly meets people at the margins. Those who are overlooked, excluded, or dismissed.
They also reveal that God’s work is rarely interrupted. More often, it is revealed through the interruption.
And they remind us that faith is not secured by status or proximity.
Again and again, it appears in vulnerability, persistence, humility, and openness.
Perhaps most striking of all, these stories reveal a God who is wonderfully consistent and endlessly surprising.
Consistent in pattern.
Surprising in detail.
The more I think about this, the more astonishing it becomes.
The Bible is not the work of a single author sitting down to write one carefully planned book. It is a library written over many centuries by different people in different places, for different audiences, and facing very different circumstances.
Yet the same patterns continue to emerge. This kind of coherence suggests something deeper is holding these diverse writings together.
Not by making every story identical, but by weaving them into a single vision of the God who continually overturns human expectations.
— • —
Scripture Forms How We See
Perhaps this is why the Bible continues to speak so powerfully across generations.
Its purpose is not simply to give us information. It is to form us.
Stories shape the imagination. They train us to notice certain things and overlook others. Over time, they influence not only what we believe but how we perceive the world itself.
As these patterns repeat, they slowly begin carving new grooves into our instincts. We become more attentive to people on the margins.
More open to interruptions.
Less certain that we already know what is happening.
Without even realising it, our way of seeing begins to change.
— • —
The Questions I Carry Now
These days, I find myself reading Scripture rather differently than I once did.
The stories no longer feel like isolated episodes. In fact, they echo one another and, increasingly, they echo into ordinary life.
So the questions I ask have changed.
It is no longer simply, What does this passage mean?
Instead, I find myself asking,
Where is this happening again?
Where is the outsider seeing what everyone else has missed?
Where is the interruption I am tempted to dismiss?
Where is the apparent failure that might not really be a failure at all?
Those have become some of the questions I carry into each new day.
They have changed how I read Scripture, but perhaps even more importantly, they have changed how I try to read my own life.
I find myself wondering whether the interruption I am resisting might actually become the place where God is at work. Whether the overlooked person may have something I need to hear. Whether certainty is sometimes less important than attentiveness.
Perhaps that is why the Bible keeps telling what feels like the same story. Because let’s face it. We are the sort of people who need reminding.
Not once.
But again and again.
If you’ve found yourself noticing similar patterns, I’d love to hear which stories have most shaped the way you read Scripture. These are the kinds of conversations I hope this community continues to have together.
Thank you for being a Sacred & Secular subscriber. I really appreciate it.
Paul.
Yes, the “Where is this happening again?” question can be very insightful.
Thank you, Paul. I appreciate the reframe in your questions. So good!