The Bible is God’s primary vehicle for communicating with us, revealing who He is, who we were created to be, and how we are to live. The Bible has one divine author—God. God used over 40 different human authors who each wrote from different perspectives and in their own style, but who all were inspired and guided by the Holy Spirit to write God’s message (2 Peter 2:21). The Bible is one book, but is made up of 66 individual books—39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament.
If you’ve read the Bible, you are probably familiar with some of the stories in the Bible and facts about the Bible. It can be challenging to take these far-off events from over 2000 years ago and make them meaningful and applicable to our lives today. Often the approach is to glean some moral lesson from the hero characters and their stories. But it is important to remember that the Bible has one hero —the triune God, with Jesus Christ being the centerpiece of all the Scriptures. To accurately apply the Bible to our daily lives, we must ensure we are reading and interpreting it correctly. That is the goal of 6 Steps to Study the Bible.
Download the 6 Steps Quick Guide for details on each of the six steps. We also use the “bridge” graphic to help communicate the study process.
If you’re new to studying the Bible, begin with the first few steps. Apply some of the suggestions from Step 2 related to the context and content of the passage by making sentence observations on the passage you are studying (download the sentence observations guide). You’ll find that using these six steps requires you to read the passage repeatedly. This is one of the most crucial steps in studying God’s word. So begin here…pray, read the passage repeatedly, and make observations each time you read.
“Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.” —Psalm 119:18
Rejoicing in Christ Jesus,
©2016 Susan Cady, susancady.com
