How Should I Study the Bible?

This week we ask this question and get our answers from the Bible.

The answers the Bible provided when we asked it “how should I study the Bible?”

Submit yourself to the authority of the scripture.

Copy scripture by hand.

Be conscious of your tendency toward sin and ignorance.

Pray for the guidance of the Holy Spirit before you read, or study.

Ask the Bible a question and search the related terms and words.

Study dispensationally: find out the “who, what, when, and where” of Bible stories, instructions, commands and events in order to determine their doctrinal authority.

Always be reading the Bible. Read it first thing when you wake up, and last thing before you go to sleep.

Here are a few practical tips: since most of us have electronic concordances built into the bible apps on our phones, First: you can simply search a word like meditate. If you want to get more specific, put the word or phrase in quotation marks “meditate”. If you want to see different forms of a word, put it in quotation marks, but leave off the ending where other forms start, and enter an asterisk, like “meditat*” . This will give you meditates, and meditation, and any other forms of the word. You can also typically search in the whole Bible, the OT, NT, Gospels, Acts, the Law, the Prophets, the Writings, the Psalms, the Pauline Epistles, or the so-called “General Epistles” or more accurately the “Circumcision Epistles”. And you can typically search just Revelation too. Because that’s a real audience favorite. But using these search techniques, you can let the Bible lead you to various passages related to your question. And then even search in various historic and doctrinal contexts for your target word or phrase. And if you are yielded to the Holy spirit, and asking for His guidance, and remembering your tendency toward ignorance and sin, the Bible and the Spirit will inform your Bible study and help you understand and explain the Bible.

I Tim 4:13, “Till I come, give attendance to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine. Neglect not the gift that is in thee, which was given thee by prophecy, with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery. Meditate upon these things; give thyself wholly to them; that thy profiting may appear to all. Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them: for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself, and them that hear thee.”

Josh 1:8, “This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.”