Last week, I went down to the Dominican Republic on a missions trip.  I went with an organization called Meeting God in Missions (www.meetinggodinmissions.com).  I’ve gone down twice before (each trip is in January), and each time has been a real blessing.  The “leader” of MGM is Jim McDonald – a retired basketball coach and an amazing preacher.  Each day of the trip he teaches on something new and practical, and he helps all of the people on the trip to really understand what he talks about.  He really gets into the lessons, and he is known for certain “quotes” that he says all the time.

One of his famous sayings is, “Don’t read your Bible…study it.”  He pauses for a while in the middle of it, and everyone laughs.  But it has such a true lesson – you and I shouldn’t be simply reading our Bibles, we should be studying them.

But what does it mean to study the Bible?  How do you study the Bible?  In this post, I hope to outline one of many popular ways that people study the Bible, and how you can do it too.

How to Study the Bible – Part One – Individual Book Study

The individual book study is by far the most popular method of studying the Bible, though it is usually not done thoroughly enough to get as much out of a book as you would want.  The steps below are just an outline for you to go by – don’t feel like this is the “only way”, whatever works for you is the most important.  These are just here to give you a guide to start out with, and you can grow from it however you want.

Step 1: Pick the book you want to study

Obviously, if you are going to do a study on a book of the Bible, you have to know what book you are going to study.  If this is one of your first times actually studying a book, you will probably want to pick a shorter one.  My favorite one is 1 Thessalonians, because it is short and sweet.  Other good ones are 1 John and 1 Peter.

Step 2: Get used to the contents of the book

Before you start digging deep into the material, you want to get used to the overall flow of the book.  I would suggest going away somewhere quiet for a few hours and reading through the book a couple times.  Repeat this process for a few days, and you should have mastered the general contents of the book.

Step 3: Summarize the book’s contents

I always enjoy this step, because I love to write down things while studying the Bible.  For this step, simply write down the main facts about the book.  Here is a list of some of the important ones:

Who wrote the book?
Who was the book written to?
Where was the author when he wrote the book?
What date was the book written?
Why did the author write the book?
What can you tell about the author by reading the book?
What are the most important ideas in the book?
After reading the book, what one thing do you feel you have learned from it?

Some of those questions might require you to look in other books to find the answers, so a cross reference would be a useful tool here.

Step 4: Divide the book into logical sections

This step requires you to write down some more things, so get your paper and pencil ready.  Go through the book you chose, mark all the divisions in thought in it, and give a brief description of each of them.  For example, if I was doing 1 Thessalonians, I would mark the first chapter like this:

Chapter 1:1.  Introduction and greeting to the church of the Thessalonians.
Chapter 1:2,3.  Thanks to God for the Thessalonians.
Chapter 1:4-8.  God has chosen you, and you have become imitators of us.
Chapter 1:9,10.  They report your reception of us, and tell how you turned from idols.

As you can see, I just wrote down the very basics of what Paul was saying to the Thessalonian church.  You can do the same – write down the basics of the sections.

Step 5: Study each verse separately

The first thing you have to do when studying each verse is to actually understand exactly what it means.  To do this, you have to understand what each word means – not what you think it means, but what it actually means.  A concordance is good help here.  Next you have to understand the context of each verse – what goes before it and what comes after it.  The final step to understanding what the verse means is finding parallel passages that go along with it.  There is a great book called The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge by R.A. Torrey that is an amazingly extensive cross reference of every verse in the Bible.  If you don’t want to pay for the actual book, there is an online version of it at http://www.studylight.org/com/tsk/ that is free for general use.  Even if you aren’t doing an individual book study, you can get a lot out of just studying one passage with it.

The second thing to do when studying each verse is to analyze each verse and determine what it teaches.  So go through each verse in the book, and write down, “This verse teaches 1. ________, 2. ________, 3. _______,” etc.  It’s amazing how many things one verse can teach.  Even if you only see one or two things at first, keep looking, and you will be surprised how much a seemingly “insignificant” verse can teach you.  It makes you think of a divine author, doesn’t it?

Here is an example of analyzing verse 1 and 2 in Thessalonians chapter 1:

  1. This is a letter.
  2. This letter was written by Paul, Silas, and Timothy.
  3. This letter was written to the church of the Thessalonians.
  4. The Thessalonians are in God the Father.
  5. The Thessalonians are in the Lord Jesus Christ.
  6. Jesus Christ is the Lord.
  7. God is the Father of Christians.
  8. Grace comes before peace.

As you can see, there are many things you can get out of just two short verses of introduction.  I’m sure there are more things to be learned from these verses, but I’ll leave those up to you to find.

While digging through the verses, try to follow these three rules:

  1. Don’t “read into” the verses by writing down things that aren’t actually in the verses.
  2. Do your best to find everything that is in a verse, leaving nothing out.  Obviously, this will be a hard task, and sometimes you just can’t find everything, but don’t give up until you have dug and dug.
  3. Be precise in your analysis – don’t “fluff up” the descriptions.

Step 6: Classify your notes

If you repeat the previous step for all of the verses in a book, you will end up with a lot of results.  For these results to be the most meaningful to you, you need to classify each of them into categories and sub categories.  Take, for example, the book of 1 Peter.  There are many, many categories possible, but here are a few for example purposes:

  1. God
  2. The Holy Spirit
  3. The believer
  4. The Word of God

I came up with those by reading through all of my notes and writing down every single category they could fall under.

Now that you have the general categories, you need to write down sub categories.  For the first one in our example, “God”, here are a few sub categories:

  1. His names
  2. His will
  3. His work – what he does

As I said before, there are many, many more possibilities, but I chose these for example.

Your framework is now ready.  Read through all of your notes, and put them in the correct categories.  Depending on how extensively you did the previous parts of this step, this could be easy or hard.  I would suggest laying a good framework before you attempt to categorize your notes, so that it will be as easy as possible.

Step 7: Meditate on and think about the results

What’s the point of all the work you did if you don’t meditate on the results?  You might think that you have learned everything possible from a book of the Bible after doing the previous six steps, but how can you truly learn everything without looking at the big picture?  Take a step back and think about the book as a whole.  Look at how things flow together, and how the book connects with other books of the Bible to weave together into the greatest book ever written.

And that’s it!  If you have done every step in this article thoroughly, then you should have a full and deep understand of the contents of your chosen book, and you should be well on the road to having a closer relationship with the Writer of the Book.

My aim with this article was to give you something more practical than some of our previous posts, while still maintaining the spiritual aspect of the blog.

I hope to write more articles on this subject in the future, and to give you even more ways to study the Bible than the individual book study I talked about in this article.

Bibliography

I used the following sources for this article:

Thanks to the authors/creators of them!

~Ben