Bible Study Tools
- Posted by Julee Huy
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“Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.” – 2 Timothy 2:15
The first time I read the Bible was out of boredom. I was a baby Christian, maybe about three years in the Lord. Brianna was only months old, and I was looking for something to read when I picked up a Bible. I remembered that there were stories in the Bible like Samson and Delilah, Moses, and King David. So I started reading, skipping over the ‘begats’ and the books of the law. I’d love to tell you I fell in love with God’s Word at that time, but the truth is that I read it as a book—nothing more. I had given my life to Jesus, but I was yet to open His Word for serious Bible study. By the time Brianna was 8 months old, we had started attending what was then Calvary Chapel West Covina where Raul Ries was the Pastor. Except for church, however, I didn’t read the Scriptures for teaching me—still just as a book. I did start to understand a little more of what was happening in the ‘Stories”: that the heroes of the faith were flawed individuals who loved God and whom God loved.
“But if anyone loves God, he is known by God.” – 1 Corinthians 8:3
When Raul announced that the church was moving to Diamond Bar, we left and started going to Morningstar Christian Chapel in Whittier. It was there that I started to learn how to study the Bible. Anything I learned about studying the Bible, I learned from Pastor Jack Abeelen. I learned to use the concordance in the back of my Bible, how to use the Scripture references on the side of the Bible verses to read similar verses in order to flesh them out. For example:
Luke 17:33 – “Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.”
Correlates to
Matthew 10:39 – “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
The ‘for my sake’ in Matthew 10:39 made me see and understand a greater picture: that the Scripture means ‘to die to self (self serving, self indulgent, selfish and uncaring of those around me) and live for Jesus.’
My study tools now are the same, except now I read God’s Word, writing the Scriptures that speak to me into my journal. As I write them, I’m reading them slower, mulling over the words, and then I write my thoughts on the Scriptures.
Example:
Verse- Isaiah 43:18 & 19 – “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”
My journal-
God doesn’t want me to live in the past, remembering my sins and paralyzing me in shame, but instead, He is doing a new fresh thing in my life, filling me with hope and joy – proving to me again and again His Love for me. HE is doing the work; I need only to walk the path He’s cleared for me.
One of my greatest pleasures in life is to sit before the feet of Jesus. Sometimes I can sit for an hour or longer, but most days, it’s ten minutes here or there. Sometimes, it’s reading from a favorite devotional like ‘Day by Day’ with Charles H. Spurgeon or Oswald Chambers’ ‘Utmost for His Highest,’ which highlights Scripture and then contains some words to encourage and strengthens our faith.
I want to end this with a passage from Charles Spurgeon’s ‘Day by Day’ devotional:
“Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against you.” – Psalm 119:11
The gospel is the sum of wisdom, an epitome of knowledge, a treasure house of truth and a revelation of mysterious secrets. Our meditation upon it enlarges the mind and as it opens to our soul in successive flashes of glory, we stand astonished at the profound wisdom manifest in it.
“Holding fast to the word of life, so that in the day of Christ, I may be proud that I did not run in vain or labor in vain.” – Philippians 2:16
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