In today’s video lesson, we talk about my son Abe, Abraham, when he was a baby and taking his first steps. It felt like a lot of work at first, but soon he got the hang of it, and walking is much easier now. Well, the same is true in Bible study. As you and I walk through the first steps of simple Bible study, it can be difficult, but it gets much easier. Those first steps are things like how to choose a text, how to read a text, and how to flag words, and that is what today’s lesson is all about. I really hope you enjoy this. If you are new here, my name is Ryan Rench, pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California, and I recorded this video over a year ago for an extension ministry of a Bible college, and it was sent overseas. Now I just hope the lesson today can help you grow in knowing Jesus better, and I encourage you to get into God’s Word. With that, enjoy this week’s video.
Baby Steps
Hello, and welcome back to our study on Bible study. Today is lesson number 14, and we are going to be talking about baby steps. I was a brand-new dad, and I loved my baby. My son, Abe Wyatt Rench, was born, and he was my man-child, and I was so proud to be a dad, proud to be a father, and I loved snuggling this nice little baby. But he would not play with me, you know what I mean? He was not wrestling with me. I wanted to put him into a headlock, into a UFC armbar, and get wrestling with this boy. He is my man-child. He has got to be tough. He has got to be taught to be strong and bold and all of that, and this little baby is just crying. So I am thinking, come on, hurry up and grow up, little baby. What is your problem? And eventually he did grow up, and that is when he got fun, man, when he could finally wrestle with Dad. That is a process. They go from being a baby to growing up into young men, and then eventually men on their own. But the baby phase to toddler phase is when they are first starting to pull themselves up, and Abe for a while was real scared to pull himself up. He did not want to stand up. He was real nervous about falling. So he would pull up and then he would sit down, and if we were going, “Come on, walk to Dad,” then he would be too nervous, and he would get down on his hands and knees and crawl over to us. But eventually it got to the point where he was holding on to the desk, and he turns around toward us and takes that first little baby step, and he is so proud of himself, and we are all cheering, and we are so proud of him for taking those steps. It was not but one or two steps, and he flops down onto the ground again, but after that time it was like, “Boy, I have found a new track of mobility, and I am going to walk everywhere. It is way faster than crawling.” But for a while there you are a little bit nervous, and those first steps that babies take are very slow. They are very small, and that is why we call them baby steps. They might be super shaky, they might be super simple, but we are taking baby steps even in Bible study, and those baby steps are, in a sense, something to be proud of. We are at least moving. We are at least going somewhere. We are going places. They might be baby steps at first, but at least we are making some progress in this Bible study. So that is where we are going to start today. Once we have done the observation work, we have got the big picture, we have got the genre of the book, we have decided where we are going, and we have figured out the author and the date of the writing and all of that, at least now we are getting into some more specific Bible study. And the point is just to start, just to read something, just to get into the Scripture, just to do something in the Bible. That is what we want to get going on.
Step One-Half: Choose Your Text
So even before step one, I guess I am calling it step one-half. It is like that half a baby step that we take, and it is such an easy step in Bible study that I do not even know if we would call it a step. That is why I called it step one-half. Step one-half would just be choosing your text. It is such a simple thing to do, but wherever you are in the Scripture can be something that is helpful to you. The Scriptures tell us, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” So the Bible says all Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is what? It is profitable. The Scripture is profitable, all of it. Now, it might not be equally profitable, I will grant you that. You might read something and go, “How is this profitable?” Right? I understand that sometimes you open up the Scriptures and you are not altogether sure how profitable it is, but we know that it is profitable. It just may not be equally profitable. That is the thing. So not all of it is going to relate directly to you, but all of it means something to someone at some time. Your needs may not be the same as your teacher’s needs, or your mom’s needs, or your grandfather’s needs, or your child’s needs. Everybody’s need is different, but all Scripture is profitable, and so we can open up the Scriptures, and wherever we are in the Scriptures, we should be able to dig something out of there that is going to be profitable. I am not saying that is how you should read the Bible. We should be systematic about reading our Bible, and we have talked about that in previous lessons, because I like staying in the author’s train of thought. But when we are doing Bible study, then we want to first choose a text. The Bible study might be for a devotion that you are giving in front of people. It might be for a sermon that you are preaching. It might be for a Sunday school lesson that you are teaching, and it might just be for your own personal devotions. Whatever it is, you are choosing a text. You are picking a passage in its context, and you are going to do some work on that. That might be that you are looking at an entire book and getting the overall theme of the book. It might be a short book; it might be a long book; but that might be what you are doing. Another way you might choose a text is by these little paragraph markings in the Bible. Let me see, here is one right here. It kind of looks like a little backwards P there. Your Bible might have those kinds of paragraph markings in it, and that might section off a particular portion of Scripture for you. Let me see if I can find another one. Here is Acts. Okay, so you are reading down here, and then a paragraph mark at verse number 15, so it is like this paragraph is verses 1 through 14. Your Bible might have paragraph markings divided off kind of like that. You might have a Bible like my Cambridge Cameo paragraph Bible edition. When you are in the poetry sections of the Scripture, it will be laid out like poems. I brought this Bible into our tools lesson that we went through, and so the poetry might be listed out like this. A lot of the Proverbs are like this; a lot of the Psalms are like this. But if you are back in the portions of Scripture that are more historical or more narrative, then you are going to have these big long stories going on, and this Bible separates them by paragraph. It just runs all the verses together like that. You see the little number two there for verse number two, but the paragraph might be the portion of Scripture that you study, the book of Ruth again, for example, paragraph by paragraph, kind of like we would read a novel. Many of the New Testament Scriptures are laid out like that as well. Even though we think of the New Testament specifically as verse after verse, they are laid out in paragraphs like this, and so the first eight verses of Romans chapter 12, for another example, would be a division here. So you can look for paragraphs as the text that you are going to read, and that is a good way of doing it. You might have a Bible similar to a study Bible that I have here that has these kinds of headings over top of the sections, and it might tell you a little bit about what this section is about, part one, part two, part three, or it might give you a little subject theme of what this section of the passage is about. So you might have a Bible that is laid out like that, with those section headings, and the portion of Scripture that you are reading might be just a few verses when you are actually getting into the Bible study portion of things, divided off by these headings. Sometimes it does not have them, like you see here, but then there is a little heading with just these final verses here. So that might be a way you figure out which section to read. Another way you might do that is through a devotional. We have talked about this in a previous setting as well, but when you are talking about reading the Scriptures and dividing it out, there might be a devotional that helps you do just that and actually sections it out for you. Let me show you here in the digital version of this book that you might have various divisions of the book already laid out. Let me skip ahead to one of the actual days that is broken down here. The process we talked through in the last lesson was this right here. Oops, not that. Let’s see here, let me make that full screen again, and here we go. Here is a devotional that might give you an idea of what you would be reading in a day’s time. On day number one, you see your step number one is to pray, and then look at the background, look at the overview of the passage, and then read Philemon. That will give you the broad overview of the text. Then day two might be something super simple again: you read the whole book of Philemon. And then the next day, what passage are we reading? What section division are we reading? Well, in this devotional it might just tell you, read chapter 1, verses 1 through 7, and that is your division. That is the paragraph division you are following, and we will cover some of these other things later on, maybe in the next couple of lessons. The next day you will reread that same passage once again. Day four is a lot of rereading again, and then day five in this devotional is reading the next portion of Scripture: read chapter 1, verses 8 through 22. So in choosing your text, in step one-half, there might be a whole variety of ways that you choose your text. It might be these paragraph divisions, it might be through a devotional, it could be any number of ways, but at least start. Start by getting into Bible study, by choosing a passage or going through a devotional and reading what they have chosen for you. That is good. Getting into the Scriptures is good.
Step One: Read, and Step Two: Reread
Now, we are talking about baby steps, and I said that sometimes the first baby steps are small, and they are super simple, and maybe they are a little bit shaky, and maybe they do not feel like they are getting very far. Step one-half is choose your text. The actual step one would be to read your text. I mean, it is not too hard, right? Baby steps are super simple on purpose. So we have already chosen our text, or it has been chosen for us through a reading plan that we are going through, and then you just read it. You obviously cannot skip that stage. You have to read the Scriptures, and we have been trying to encourage you to get into the Scriptures and read the Bible for yourself and actually try to understand it for yourself, and that takes a special kind of reading. We have said you need to read broadly, you need to read wide, and then also read deep, so you are going deep and wide at the same time. You want to stay in the context and then go deep into the context, and that gets into step number two. The first step is read; the second step is reread. So read it again. When you are doing a little in-depth Bible study, a little further Bible study, you are going to have to read that same passage, whatever paragraph division you have gone into, whatever portion is there. You are going to end up reading that thing many, many times before it really sinks into your soul, before you really get to the heart, to the meat, of what it is actually saying. Rereading it helps you get that overall idea. Rereading it helps you find some of those words that start repeating themselves, and you start to see those themes that are coming. We have been asking all along, what is this text about? What is God saying in this text? What is the nugget? What is the truth that we are trying to dig out of this text? Well, as you read it and reread it and keep on reading it over and over again, those kinds of nuggets will emerge, and the themes will start to fit together. For a while your brain is going to be going, “I do not get this. I do not get this. I do not understand it.” Just turn that off for a while. Just ignore that voice in your head that is saying, “I do not understand,” and just keep reading it and rereading it, and read the same thing over and over again. I may have mentioned this, but I am in a Bible reading plan right now where I read some of the Old Testament, but then I am reading the same passage of Matthew every day for a month. So the same chapters every single day are helping me understand and get deeper and deeper into what Jesus is saying and what Matthew is saying, trying to understand the Bible not just in one reading but in thirty readings, reading the same passage every single day. That is a form of meditation. It is not the same thing as meditating, but it is a kind of meditating. It is a kind of digging and chewing on the same Scriptures, deeper and deeper. So when you are in this rereading phase and you are thinking on these same things again, it is like you are pulling your chair up next to the author and sitting down with him while he is writing this thing, and you are trying to think the same thoughts as the author is thinking, and you are trying to get into his mentality and his mindset. It is almost like you are asking, “Well, why did you write that? Why would you tell them that? Wait, why did you say this? Wait, are you referring to what you said earlier in the story? Oh, wait, you are writing to this church in the New Testament, but you quoted something from the Old Testament. Why did you quote that verse?” It is like you are sitting next to the author and asking him questions, and you are trying to figure out what he is trying to get across and what he is trying to say.
Put Yourself in the Scene
In a previous lesson we read the book of Philemon, and we were going through Philemon from the observation perspective, but it is the same kind of thing when we are doing the actual reading and the rereading. We are thinking, okay, what is Paul thinking when he is writing this letter? And wow, what is Philemon thinking as he is reading this letter? Maybe Onesimus is standing right there after saying, “Okay, here is a letter from Paul. Do not get mad. I know I ran away from you, but here, read this letter from Paul. It will clear everything up.” Now imagine what Onesimus is thinking while Philemon is reading the book of Philemon, and imagine what Philemon is thinking when he is reading this letter from Paul, and what Paul is thinking when he is writing. I mean, use your imagination, and start forming questions, and set yourself in the scene, putting yourself right there in the situation of the authors and the characters in the middle of the story. Man, imagine what was going on in David’s mind when he is picking up those stones out of the water to go fight against Goliath. Imagine that, and imagine the things he learned when he was out being a shepherd, tending to sheep and writing poetry and songs and singing for them and learning music while he is out there. Imagine what he is going through. Imagine what Joseph and Mary are going through when they are traveling, and his espoused wife is nine months pregnant, and they are worried about having this baby Jesus that was promised to them. Imagine it from their situation, from their perspective, and imagine why this text is in this book, using your imagination to say, okay, wow, this thing is really starting to come to life. We do that with novels, right? We do that when we read for entertainment. We put ourselves in the story. When I was in high school, I used to read a whole lot of fiction, and my heart would start pounding when I was in a battle scene, for example. I am reading about these ships fighting each other with cannons and all of these things, and I am getting nervous, and it is a fiction story. It is not even real, but I am putting myself in the scene, in the situation, and it is like I am living it there with them. Now, we can do the same thing for the Bible, and we should do the same thing for the Bible. Live in the scene that they are living in, and put yourself in their situation, and let the Bible come alive to you. Let it be absolutely real, not just black-and-white words on a page, but something that is living and breathing and meaningful to you. Let these things speak to you.
Step Three: Flag Words
Now, as you are studying the Scriptures, it starts, well, by choosing a text, but first reading it and then rereading it, and then step number three is, while you are rereading it, along the way, flag words. Almost put a little flag in that word, and let certain words alert you. Next lesson we are going to talk even more about this, looking for repeating words and all that kind of stuff, but for now just say step three is flag words. Notice from cross-references where this word shows up through Scripture. Look for themes because of repeating words in this passage, and maybe even through the Scriptures. You can flag the words and come back to them later, or you can flag the words and use the Bible study tools we talked about in previous lessons. Use a concordance. Use a Bible dictionary. Use a commentary to look up a cultural reference. Look up an atlas and say, how long of a distance was it from Nazareth to Bethlehem? How far did they have to travel? Which route did they take, and how did they get there? Think in the terms of the author, and use the words that are coming from the story to give insight and life to the passage, and look up definitions of words and variations of the same words. Flag those words. Do not ignore them. Do not just gloss over them, but actually use the time to look them up and understand those things. My father-in-law was a professor at a Bible college across the street from the church he was pastoring, and he was teaching a counseling class. It was a nouthetic counseling class, and they were going through a nouthetic counseling book. So he comes into class and says, “We have a quiz on chapter 3 next week,” or whatever chapter it was. The chapter was on nouthetic counseling. So the students read the chapter on nouthetic counseling, and they are studying about nouthetic counseling from the Bible, getting Bible answers, and nouthetic counseling that is led by the Spirit, so they are studying about the Holy Spirit’s involvement in counseling, and then nouthetic counseling that gives hope, so they are studying about instilling hope in the people they are counseling, and nouthetic counseling that tries to bring change through even homework assignments. So they are trying to figure all that kind of stuff out, and they are studying for the quiz. They come in to his quiz that day and start the quiz. They have the whole chapter basically memorized. They have been studying it all week. They know all about the different aspects of counseling. And the quiz had one question on it. My father-in-law’s question was this: “Define nouthetic.” They had studied this entire chapter. They knew all the ins and outs of counseling. They knew about homework. They knew about the Holy Spirit. They knew all of the answers, all the bolded words in the chapter, but almost all of them failed, because nobody took the time to look up the word nouthetic. So it was a good lesson: do not ignore definitions of words. When you see a word and it flags you, in the sense that it may not make sense or you may not know what it means, then go ahead and take the time to look it up, and do the work of flagging words. We will do that in our Bible study throughout our process as well. I wish those students of my father-in-law had looked up the word nouthetic. They would have realized that in the Greek it is the word for admonish, and so it is instilling in them the biblical mentality through counseling. So make sure you do not get caught with a one-question quiz, not having looked up those words. God bless you as you go into your own Bible study this week. Be sure to read, reread, and flag those words along the process. God bless you; we will see you in the next lesson. Well, thank you for watching this video from our 20-part series on Bible study. I realize this kind of content, or our Baptist perspective, might not be for everyone, and I do not want to waste your time, but if you did find it helpful or enjoyable, would you subscribe to our channel? We are releasing videos every Monday at noon Pacific Standard Time, and I just want to help you bring the Bible home. So we will see you maybe in person this Sunday at our church. That is it for now. God bless you, church. Grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
