But however you choose to do it, please DO write your answers down somewhere. Writing forces you to think through what you’ve read and formulate your thoughts on the matter, in a way that just thinking about it doesn’t.
Here are the key questions we’ll ask about each passage:
What’s going on?
This is where you record any observations about what you’ve read. What’s happening? Is Jesus healing someone in a synagogue? Is David writing a poem expressing his fears to God? Is Paul explaining justification through faith to Christians in Rome? A one sentence answer will totally suffice, but if you want to go deeper, ask yourself the five “W” questions: who, what, when, where and why.
What’s the main idea or “moral of this story”?
What do you think the author is trying to say? What point do you think God is trying to get across, by including this in scripture? There might be several important ideas that you could jot down, or it might be hard to find one. Don’t stress about it—just ask yourself what you can learn from this passage.
How might this apply to my life?
If there’s not an obvious application, don’t force it, but in my experience the Holy Spirit has an uncanny way of directing us to things we need to hear. So think about it, pray about it, and if appropriate, act on it.
If you want to go deeper, here are a couple more questions to consider:
What stood out to me about this passage?
What was my favorite thing about it?
What bugged me about this passage?
(And don’t get huffy and tell me nothing “bugs” you about the inspired Word of God. If nothing in the Bible bugs you, you haven’t been reading it very carefully, my friend!) What was confusing or disturbing? Don’t just gloss over these things—use them as an opportunity to do more research, to learn more about the Bible, the historical and cultural contexts it was written in, and ultimately, more about God. You may or may not resolve your immediate question, but you’ll learn a ton looking for the answer!
And if you’re a total overachiever:
Find the main idea of each paragraph, and give the paragraph a title that reflects its main idea. This makes it easy to create a chart and find the main themes of entire books of the Bible—but we’ll get to that later.
More things to know
More things to know
The readings for each day will be short and sweet (like, shorter than this blog entry), but if you can’t do them every day, don’t stress! Just jump in when and where you can.
Since it might be easier for some of you to do the readings and answer the questions in a chunk (that’s how I studied the Bible when my kids were babies—I’d snatch an hour or so when I could get it, and chew on what I’d learned over the next several days), I’ll send the week’s readings out in the weekly newsletter. (You can sign up in the upper right-hand corner—no spam, just me.) That way, you can get in on all the good stuff, even if you can’t participate every day.
Since it might be easier for some of you to do the readings and answer the questions in a chunk (that’s how I studied the Bible when my kids were babies—I’d snatch an hour or so when I could get it, and chew on what I’d learned over the next several days), I’ll send the week’s readings out in the weekly newsletter. (You can sign up in the upper right-hand corner—no spam, just me.) That way, you can get in on all the good stuff, even if you can’t participate every day.
We’ll go through one book of the Bible at a time, so we can get the full sense of what the author is trying to communicate. (After all, you wouldn't read a chapter of Jodi Picoult one day, and a chapter of Jan Karon the next, would you? They might be enjoyable reads, but you'd be missing something--like the point of the book!) Each blog entry will be tagged with the name of the book we are studying, so by the time we’re finished, we’ll have a nifty online archive of all the things we learned together. Cool, huh?
Remember, this is just a fun way for us to study the Bible together, so don't get uptight about this! If you don't have time to do the readings, or don't feel like answering the questions, don't! Gold stars and lollipops for everyone, just for being created in the image of God and loved by Him--no performance necessary!
