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The first time Dallas’ Tara-Leigh Cobble read through the entire Bible, she had some concerns for her pastor.
“I finished and I said to him: ‘I’ve read the whole thing now, I believe it’s true cover to cover, and I don’t like him,’” Cobble had said of God. “I’m like, ‘This has kind of ruined my life.’”
Her perspective on Bible reading changed after her pastor gave her a different way to approach it, advice that she now shares with listeners to her podcast, The Bible Recap, which this week reached No. 1 on Apple Podcasts charts.
Cobble’s podcast consists of roughly eight-minute daily episodes that serve as a companion for those planning to read the entire Bible in a year. Knowing that many Bible readers, including herself, had New Year’s resolutions to do just that, Cobble launched her podcast on Jan. 1, 2019.
“My big pipe dream was that 300 people would listen,” Cobble said. “I woke up that morning to 300 messages from listeners, and so I immediately knew this is a bigger deal.”
In addition to the podcast, which has garnered over 300 million downloads, Cobble has a line of books of the same name. She also leads tours of Israel focused on sites with Biblical significance and hosts a weekday radio show called The God Shot that broadcasts on Dallas’ KCBI-FM (90.9).
Cobble, who doesn’t have a seminary degree, attributes the success of her podcast partly to its accessibility. Her goal is to give listeners basic context to help them understand and love what they’re reading.
“I say things like, today, we read about the measurements of the temple, and they list it in cubits. What even is a cubit? Well, here’s what you need to know … I did the math, and it’s about half the size of a Chick-fil-A, give or take the playground.”
Cobble encourages listeners to focus on getting to know God better through their Bible reading instead of trying to perfect themselves. That perspective is what helped her love Bible reading, she said.
“I think so many of us measure ourselves by that standard of ‘How do I be a better Christian? How do I need to live a good life and be a good person?’ And when you don’t nail it, you despair — and you don’t want to go back to Scripture again the next day, because you already feel like it’s too heavy a burden.”
“When you go and you look for the character and the person of God, and you see who he is, and you fall in love with him, then you live out of a different kind of heart. You live out of a heart that loves God, and not out of a heart that’s trying to clean yourself up and get your act together,” she went on. “The first time that I read Scripture that way, I just fell in love with him.”
Cobble ends every episode with what she calls “the God shot,” where she describes how that day’s passage teaches readers something about God. Her hope is readers “come away going: ‘Oh, my goodness, the God of the universe has been so patient with me; the God of the universe has been so kind and generous to me.’ And they receive that love from him and are able to extend to others what they have received from him.”