Last night I finished a small group study of Rick Warren's Bible Study Methods. I was able to find some of the charts he uses online for people to take home with them, which made teaching it much easier.
I went over to my office and grabbed a few of the tools I have used over the years for Bible study. Now I basically am an internet user, but I used to have to pull books like Strong's Concordance, Bakers Bible Dictionary, Robertson's Word Pictures, etc. off the shelf to do serious work. The internet makes that simpler, and good Bible study software like Bible Explorer really helps a lot.
We looked at various study Bibles as well. Remember how awesome it was when the NIV study Bible came out? Then the Life Application Bible, the Hebrew-Greek Study Bible and all the rest really accelerated a person's ability to dig deep without having to carry a library with them.
But which version to choose? Well, I'm an NLT, HCSB, Message man myself. Here's a link though to Wayne Lehman's studies on evaluating English Bible versions.
I came away from last night's group believing that we needed to do a much better job of teaching our people how to study the Word. The people around the tables with one exception had been Christians for decades. They should already be past this and they weren't. Where does that leave the new believer?
We need to help people grow deeper. Next week's project is to develop a vehicle to get that done.
Not only is how to study an issue but when to study what. I've been to too many studies where a vast majority of people there have been Christians for years and yet they're still going over "Christ died for you" Yes, I know he died for me, that's why I'm here, now lets move on to something a bit more meaningful to this stage of my walk.
ReplyDeleteGod Bless
That is a GREAT point Jason. Thanks for pointing that out.
ReplyDeleteNow you've got me thinking about just what would do that (what process, what program, what....)