Today we are covering ten practical tips on how to study your Bible, and there are actually more than ten, because number six includes a list of bonus tips. Hello, church. Today’s video is lesson eight of our 20-part video series on Bible study. Today we are continuing to teach through the book Understanding the Bible for Yourself, and I say it in the video a little bit later, but man, this video has a lot of information. Let me know in the comments which tip was most helpful to you. If you are new here, my name is Ryan Rench, the pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California, and we recorded this video series over a year ago for an extension ministry of a Bible college. I just pray that it helps you grow in knowing Jesus better. With that, let’s get into this week’s video.
Start Where You Are
Welcome back. This is class number eight, and today it is going to be very, very practical. We are going to go through a whole bunch of tips on how to study the Bible for yourself and set it up as a routine and an ongoing thing. We have been talking about doing that, in the sense of encouraging you to do it, trying to inspire you to do it, and challenging you to spend time in the Word of God, but today I want to give some practical suggestions on doing that. Now, you are going to have to start right where you are. I mean, you do not have to wait to order all kinds of fancy tools. I just encourage you to start. If you have a Bible, you can start, and hopefully, if you are taking this Bible study class, you do have a Bible. At whatever level you are at, whatever level of education you are at, you can start. This is God’s Word to you, so I encourage you to be diligent in pushing forward in studying the Scriptures. The Bible says about our diligence, Proverbs 13:4: “The soul of the sluggard desireth, and hath nothing: but the soul of the diligent shall be made fat.” And in this case being fat is good. Okay? So being diligent is what he is talking about there, really pushing forward and starting today with what you have. You have the Scriptures. You have a Bible. Then go ahead and use that Bible. As we talk through some of these things today, I want to encourage you to start a Bible study plan for yourself. I am going to go through all kinds of different options today: some of the things I do, some of the things I have done in the past but am not doing right now, different plans I have been on, and suggestions I have heard where I think, “That would be a really good idea; I want to do that someday,” but I have not done them yet. I will try to bring some of those suggestions in here. So today it might feel like we are drinking water out of a fire hose. There is just going to be so much coming at you. They have done psychological studies of people who are given a choice between two different peanut butters, and they say, “Oh, this is an easy choice. I will take this one.” But when they open it up to all kinds of different options, like we have in America, where there is just shelf after shelf after shelf of all the different brands of peanut butter, they realize that with all these different options and all these different choices, it actually makes the choice harder than when there were only two. So you might feel like saying, “Man, just give me two options, and I will choose from these two,” but unfortunately I cannot do that today. We are going to go through all kinds of different options today, and hopefully you do not get overwhelmed by all the different options available for which direction to take your Bible study. We are going to be talking about daily Bible reading. Later on in the series we will get to more Bible study, and go through examples, and lay it out step by step, how to go a little bit deeper into the study. But today I just want to focus on the entry level here, of marking off a time and making this a habit of life. It is the same way you eat food. You need to eat food not just once in your lifetime, not just once a week, but every single day, and I think the Scriptures are that crucial to life. I mean, you can go a day or two without food, but I would not recommend going much more than that if you want a healthy life. And a healthy spiritual life requires a whole lot of effort, a whole lot of eating, a whole lot of feeding of your spiritual self. So I think it takes just the same kind of effort as feeding your physical body, and any kind of spiritual effort takes that kind of diligence. The Bible says the soul of the diligent shall be made fat, so we want to be diligent in our Bible study. We want to approach it with diligence: “I am in it for the long haul, and I need it as my daily food,” as Matthew 4:4 calls it: “But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” When they were picking up manna, they went out every single day, basically six days a week, and gathered it for each day. So these are going to be some tips to try to help you get into that habit of daily Bible reading.
A Time and a Place
The first tip, the first habit that would be good to get into, is just to establish a time. Set aside a time every single day, hopefully roughly the same time every day, when you are going and spending time in the Bible. You have carved this time out: “This is my time with the Lord. This is my quiet time with the Lord.” We talked last time about limiting some of those distractions and trying to concentrate on the Scriptures, so I would encourage you to make this a habit that is not just hit and miss. Not just, “I do pretty well for a week, and then it tapers off to nothing.” Not just when I feel like it, or when I get around to it, but every single day you have a time where you say, “This is my time.” Depending on when your work hours are, or your kids’ schedule, or your schooling, or whatever your routine of life is, hopefully it is consistent enough that you can pick a certain time every single day that is going to help you spend time in the Bible. For me it is mornings. I love the mornings. I love to wake up in the morning and spend time with God. My wife does the same thing on the couch just across the room from me, and so we love having those mornings together, but not interacting with each other. We are just interacting with the Lord. So have a time. Number two is establish a place. Be sure you have your place. I have a little corner couch, and I sit right there in the corner of my blue couch in the playroom of our house. It is my spot. It is a nice, comfortable couch. I put a pillow behind my back there, and I am just sitting there, and I love that time with the Lord. It is a private place, and if I get cold, I put a little blanket over the top of my head, and I kind of kneel there with my knees up in my own little cocoon there, and I love it. I love the time with the Lord in that spot. That is when it is just me-and-the-Lord time, and it is a wonderful thing. So establish a time, and establish a place.
Tools, a Notebook, and a Pencil
Number three, have basic Bible study tools. Mainly you need the Scriptures. You can use other tools, and we will get to some of those today as well as in future lessons, but have basic Bible study tools. Number four, it might be good to have a notebook and a pen handy, to jot down not only thoughts, but to actually start journaling, or to start categorizing some of your own Bible studies as you go through. The author talks about filling up several notebooks, almost having multiple notebooks, or sections of a notebook, devoted to passages of Scripture on certain topics. So a notebook of verses on salvation, a notebook of verses on sin, a notebook of verses on the comfort of God, or Christ’s deity, or Satan, or hell, or angels, or all the different subjects. It might be good that when you are doing your Bible reading and come across a verse that fits into one of the categories you have started to list out, you jot it down, and you start filling up notebooks full of these different categories. That is a good idea. Number five is to have a pencil for marking your Bible, a pencil or a pen. A pen is more permanent. For me, a pencil sometimes smudges, but then with a pen, on some of these pages, it will start to bleed through. I do not know if you will be able to make that out or not, but you can kind of see through the paper a little bit, so a pen might bleed through a little. I understand all of that, but have a pen or a pencil. I love having these wide margins in the Scriptures. The light might be a little too bright to be able to see that, but I love the wide margins of the Bible, to be able to write notes in here and add information on the sides of the text to help me understand the text a little bit better. So have a pencil to mark in your Bible, a pen to mark in your Bible and take some extra notes. That is always a good habit to get into, I think, because the next time you read back through that passage, you have thought about this. You have defined certain words you did not understand the first time. You have to be careful with this. If you are underlining everything in the Bible, then nothing is important anymore. So do not underline everything, but underline a lot of things. Sometimes it might be repeating phrases, and we will talk about that in the interpretation section once we get to that a little later. It might be super important things in the passage, words that jump out, where you see, “Oh man, God keeps saying this over and over. He is repeating this, so I want to underline every time He says this word or this phrase,” like “the evening and the morning were the first day,” over and over. Then at a glance you can start to read the Bible and see, “Boy, He repeats this so many times.” “His hand is stretched out still,” and over and over you will see certain phrases repeated, so underline those kinds of things. If it says, “God said, God said, God said, God said,” then underline each time it says things like that, or “they shall know that I am the LORD.” That is a good habit to get into, but again, do it with caution. If you are just underlining what somebody says, or writing down a note, and it was not from a careful Bible student, then you might be writing some kind of heresy in your Bible, and you do not want to do that. You want to make sure that whatever you are writing in the Bible is accurate and is going to lead you and guide you into truth. This should be reserved for good kinds of notes, or things that moved you or touched you or helped you in a particular way. So be careful with that. Another good idea would be to write definitions of words. In the King James Bible there are certain words we do not use nowadays, and it might mean that you just jot down the definition of the word in the side of the Bible. Some of the words, like sacrilege, that just means profane, or justified. You might see the word justified in here and say, “Okay, that means declared righteous.” You might see the word redeem, and you jot down the definition, “bought with a price.” So for certain words you see in the Bible, you might just put their definition off to the side. It might also be good to put cross-references. If you have, for instance, the Romans Road to salvation, you might go from one verse to the next, and beside Romans 3:23 you might write Romans 6:23, so you know right where to turn the next time. So you can put cross-references like that. You can put cross-references from the Old Testament and the New Testament. For New Testament verses that explain the Old Testament, you could put the New Testament reference next to the Old Testament passage. You could also put full outlines in the Scripture. Perhaps, if you had only your Bible, you would be able to teach a lesson or preach a sermon from the Scriptures just by the notes off to the side of your Bible. That is a good use of writing and marking in your Bible. Another good use of marking in your Bible would be certain weights and measurements. There are things called talents, and there are different weights. We use pounds and ounces, but those are not what is being referenced in the Scripture. You will see things like a cubit and a span, so you might need some understanding of what those kinds of things mean. So write down the definition in your Bible wherever it uses those words. You can write little commentaries in there. You can write where the text is divided, and you can see repetitious words that are repeating themselves through the Scripture and mark those things. So marking is a good idea.
Color Marking
You might get into marking your Bible with different colors. I think that is a good idea too. You might have one of those pens that has all the different colors built into it. My son just got one of those for his school, and his English and writing teacher is encouraging him to use many, many different colors for all the things they are going to be marking: subjects and verbs, action verbs, passive words versus active words, and all of that. So they are going to be marking all kinds of things in different colors, and all the colors are going to mean different things. The author of our book recommends the same thing for Bible study, so I am going to put all of the recommended color markings he uses up on the screen. I personally do not use this, but I want to put it up on the screen so that maybe you could use your camera to take a picture of the screen, or, if you are on a computer or on a device where you can take a screenshot, save some of these color legends for yourself. Or you could use it and adapt it for yourself. I would encourage you to adapt it to your own Bible study, however you do Bible study. So I am going to put those on the screen, and I am going to read through some of the recommendations of different ways you can mark your Bible. He says, “In the Psalms I have used red to mark verses that mention everlasting, things that are everlasting and eternal; dark blue for things of the second coming; orange for trusting God; green for blessings; purple for trouble; yellow for praise; pink for things related to prayer; brown for the Word of God. I circled the verse numbers of messianic prophecies with blue and bracketed unfulfilled prophecies, or future events, in red.” That is one of the suggestions, and those are the colors he uses for the Psalms. So you might have a legend there, like I have put off to the side, on some kind of little bookmark that you would tuck into the Psalms. He uses a different color legend for the prophetic writings. These would be things like Daniel and different portions of prophecy, for instance in the Major Prophets and the Minor Prophets. For some of these prophetic passages he uses a different legend: “In the prophetic portions of the Old Testament I have used brown for verses pertaining to the day of the Lord; light blue for messianic passages; green for passages referring to the remnant; orange for the new covenant; dark blue for the regathering of Israel; yellow for passages describing the millennial kingdom; and red for the second coming. I also bracketed unfulfilled prophecy, or future events, in red.” In the Proverbs there is again a different legend, a different set of colors he uses: “Red marks the verses dealing with counsel and learning; yellow for references to the tongue and speaking; green for correction; purple for anger and strife; orange for immorality; brown for friendship; blue for child training. I have used a blue circle around the verse numbers for verses about the home or the family; a penciled circle for those about the sluggard; a green circle for those about the government; a brown circle for those dealing with the poor and poverty; a purple circle for pride.” So the book of Proverbs has wildly different topics all the way through it, and you can categorize every single verse into some kind of category, so the whole book of Proverbs would be full of all kinds of different colors. It would be a beautiful book if you were using the color-marking system. In the Gospel of John he uses red for the word believe, green for eternal life, and yellow for the “I am” statements used by Christ. In Acts he uses red for salvation by faith, blue for verses about baptism, green for repentance, yellow for places visited by Paul, and orange for Christ’s resurrection. He brackets the places Paul visited and keeps track of the journeys, so that at a glance he can see what is going on in the book and see some of these repeating phrases. In the book of Revelation he marks the names of the seven churches in blue, the seals in purple, the trumpets in orange, the mentions of God’s wrath in red, and the vials in brown. So there are all kinds of different ways those can be used. There are all kinds of different color schemes you can use. If you are using a color system like that, then adapt your own system for whatever Bible study you are doing. That is a fun way to go about it, and it adds a little interest to your Bible study as well.
A Reading Plan
So number five was to mark your Bible. Number six is to have a reading plan. If you want to get into the habit of daily Bible reading, it really, really helps to have a plan. It can be a super simple plan, where you just read straight through the Bible. I really like that one, where you get the entire Bible as it is laid out, the way we have it in our Bible. And yet there is both reading and studying in the Scripture. Look at these verses here. Deuteronomy 17 talks about the reading side of Scripture. This is talking about when Israel was to have a king. He was supposed to write out his own copy of the Bible: “And it shall be, when he sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests the Levites.” So he was to physically write his own copy, and then verse 19 says, “And it shall be with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them.” I like that. It is telling them to read the Scriptures. Revelation also talks about reading: “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand.” But then we also know, “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” So there is the reading aspect and the study aspect that we see in the Scriptures. Reading is going to give you the broad view of what is going on in the book, and studying is going to make you dive into what the words mean and figure out how they are all interconnected, piecing together the stories and figuring out why the story is in the Bible in the first place, and all of that. So we have got to do studying, and we have got to do reading. If you are reading, I would encourage you with a couple of different tips for reading the Scriptures. I would encourage you to read systematically. Find some system. It does not have to be what everybody else is doing. It does not have to be what you have always done. You can switch it up. But I would encourage you not to just say, “Okay, what am I reading today? This one,” and the next day, “Okay, what am I reading today? Colossians,” and the next day, “I am reading 1 Kings,” bouncing all over the place. That is not a good system, and we do not read anything else like that. You would not read a love letter from your wife like that: one day you read one paragraph, the next day you read the closing of the letter. No. If you are reading something, it is good to read the whole thing from start to finish. So I encourage you to read it all. You will start to see that the Bible is one book, and it is all cohesive. It all works together. So I encourage you to view the Bible as one big book about Jesus, and as you systematically read it, more of that will start to fall into place. I think you need more than just one or two verses per day. The little daily bread kind of things, where you read a verse and then a page of a devotional, and that is it for the day, I think will give you a weak Christianity if that is all you do. You need to have the broad view of Scripture. You need to stay in the Scripture for more than just one or two verses a day. Somebody wrote this poem:
“I supposed I knew my Bible, reading piecemeal, hit or miss, now a bit of John or Matthew, now a snatch of Genesis, certain chapters of Isaiah, certain Psalms (the twenty-third), twelfth of Romans, first of Proverbs; yes, I thought I knew the Word. But I found that thorough reading was a different thing to do, and the way was unfamiliar when I read the Bible through. You who like to play at Bible, dip and dabble here and there, just before you kneel aweary, and yawn through a hurried prayer; you who treat the Crown of Writings as you treat no other book, just a paragraph disjointed, just a crude impatient look: try a worthier procedure, try a broad and steady view; you will kneel in very rapture when you read the Bible through.”
Amos R. Wells wrote that, and I like it. It is just encouraging us to read the Bible through. Have a purpose. Have a goal, to say, “I do not know how long it is going to take, but I promise, I devote myself, I dedicate myself: I am going to read this Bible through. I am going to follow this all the way through. That is going to be my goal sometime in my life.” So I encourage you to do that. Your system might be that you read it straight through, from Genesis to Revelation. It might be that you switch it up a little bit, and that might be a good habit to get into: you read a little bit of the Old Testament and a little bit of the New Testament, and you alternate back and forth. Maybe it is one book at a time, from one to the next. Maybe it is a passage in the morning and a passage in the evening, and one of them is in the Old Testament and one of them is in the New Testament, and you alternate like that. Maybe every single day you read a portion from both. If you read only in the mornings, then maybe you will read a couple of chapters from each portion. That is a good habit to get into. Another good habit would be to read in the morning and the evening. We see that in the Scriptures, in Psalm 119:147-148: “I prevented the dawning of the morning, and cried: I hoped in thy word. Mine eyes prevent the night watches, that I might meditate in thy word.” That could be your division of time. It could be morning and evening, and it could be that you read differently. Maybe in the morning you are reading really systematically, and almost pretty fast, getting the big broad movements of the Scriptures by reading big chunks of Scripture at a time, and then maybe in the evening or the afternoon you are reading devotionally. You are getting something out of it. You are trying to hear from God a little bit more. So there are different kinds of reading you can do. Maybe you will read systematically in the morning and try to get through the Bible, and then read Psalms and Proverbs in the evening, or you will do both of those things together in the morning. Those are just good ideas. It might be that you split your devotions into two portions: one is reading, and one is studying. So you read a few chapters, and then you study a little bit. My devotional, the Big Idea Bible Study devotional, has a format just like that. You will read a chapter or two every day, so you stay really broad, but then that same day you will go back and reread certain verses from that. So you will do the reading and the studying all in one day, and every single day you will do a little bit different aspect of that as well, and we will touch on that a little bit later in our series. So reading every day and studying every day could be a good way to approach it. It might be that you break it up by month. One month you read intensely, and the next month you study intensely, and you do not read as much, but you use all the time you were spending on reading for studying and getting deeper into these things. So that might be the way you break up your Bible reading. I encourage you to spend a good chunk of time, maybe thirty minutes, maybe an hour a day. People have studied this out. If you read an hour a day, thirty minutes in the Bible and thirty minutes doing something extra, maybe some survey type of work, reading a book that explains what you read, the studies show you can finish the Bible in six months. It takes about seventy hours to read the whole Bible. So getting through the Scripture should be a big goal for us, so study the Scriptures in that way.
Prayer, Practical Application, and No Ruts
Another good suggestion for you is to study with prayer. Study the Scriptures with prayer. We talked about this in the last lesson, or maybe two lessons ago, that there is a humility with which you approach it, but actually and truly study the Scriptures with prayer, asking God to help you and to illuminate the Scriptures for you. Psalm 119 says, “Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.” So that was number seven, study with prayer. Number eight is to study the Bible and try to get something practical every day. Try to get something you can obey, something that changes your life in some way. It might just be something to believe. It might be something to lean into. It might be just a simple thought that you jot down and think about through the day: “Man, I want to think more about fearing God today,” or reverencing God, or witnessing: “Today I want to tell somebody about my faith, and that is what I got from my Bible reading.” “I want to show compassion today.” “I want to do a good deed and help somebody today.” “I want to serve today.” “I want to be more faithful.” Whatever it is, find some way you can use the Scriptures in your life, and let it change you. Number nine, maintain a prayer diary and a prayer closet. First Timothy 2 says, “I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.” So there should be a prayer habit that goes along with the Bible reading habit. A prayer list: maybe it is a note on your phone, maybe it is a physical prayer list you write down, and you are praying for your spouse, your kids, your family, your parents, your pastor, the workers at your church, your friends, your family. The verse we just read talks about praying for the government, those who are in authority. We pray for the sick. We pray for the needy. We pray for persecuted believers. We pray for those who are lost. We pray that God will intervene in their lives. And you do not have to spend hours and hours on each particular prayer request. Many times in the Bible, in Romans 1, Ephesians 1, 1 Thessalonians 1, the Apostle Paul, when he was writing to these churches, would say this phrase, “making mention of you always in my prayers.” So his prayers may have been only a quick mention of the people he cared about, of the people in the churches he was praying for. I pray regularly for the people in the church I pastor, and many times it is making mention of them, just a passing thought of them, my words speaking to God on their behalf. So couple prayer with the Bible study time. And then the last one I will mention, which I think is the tenth topic for today, is do not get into a rut. Do not get into a rut. You know what I mean by that? Do not just do the same thing every day, year after year, so that it gets so routine that you lose God in it. I mean, you can get into a good rut, as long as you are seeking the Lord, and that is good, but do not let it go dry and boring, where you are just doing this out of routine because “I have to.” Try something new. Try something fresh. I have gone through many, many different routines. I have done the Bible in ninety days. I have done the Bible in thirty days. Right now I am in a pattern of Bible reading where I read two or three chapters in the Old Testament every day, and then I jump to the New Testament and read the same portion of the New Testament every day. Maybe it is a whole book: maybe the book of Philippians, maybe the book of Galatians, maybe the book of Ephesians, maybe a portion. Right now I am in a portion of Matthew, so it is several chapters of Matthew, the same chapters of Matthew every single day for a month, and I am really getting to understand what is going on in that section of Matthew, and I am loving it. I am loving the repetition. I love doing that. This is the first time I have ever done a Bible study quite like this. I am still getting the systematic reading in the Old Testament, and then I am getting the intensive study of the New Testament by repeating it every day, and that is just helping me not get into a rut, not stay in a rut, doing the same thing day after day, year after year, decade after decade. So I encourage you: find something, to get into the Scriptures, starting tomorrow, or starting tonight, or starting right now, if you have not had a habit of Bible study and Bible reading. Find some way to get into the Scriptures. Like I said at the beginning, I am giving you lots of different options today, lots of different approaches you can take, and I encourage you to find one and lean into it, whatever it may be. Well, we went a little bit longer today with this lesson, but I hope it was a help to you, and I hope some of the things we talked about today can be a help to you in your own Bible study. The whole key is just to start. I am looking forward to the next class we will have together. 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.
