Layering on-top of what we explored last week, this week we look at another technique which we can use to help get to grips with God’s Word.
Our main focus with these studies is to study a book as a whole. Usually this begins by reading the whole book through once in a single sitting. You should then keep doing this regularly. With a book like James, you’re really only talking 10-15 minutes so you could set aside 15 minutes each day whilst you’re studying James to read it through, again, in one sitting.
Being as you don’t want to get distracted, it would make sense to read from your physical bible. Digital bibles have their place but lack the ‘focus’ that you get with a physical book. Apart from the temptation to start clicking away, on a phone or tablet for instance, you may be interrupted by message and notification tones to mention just a few of the potential distractions. The other benefit of reading from your actual bible is that you’ll start to develop a sense of ‘where things are’ on the page itself. This is great for memory recall – imagine you’re studying another book sometime else and a verse in James comes to mind. Because text in a physical bible is laid out in physical space you’ll be able to recall whereabouts on the page that verse is and therefore will find it more easily. That’s never going to happen when using a digital bible because the text is just linear.
So, reading the book through in one sitting you can start to use the additional technique we explored this evening, highlighting and annotating as you go:
- key words
- key ideas
- use of metaphors and other literally mechanisms
- key doctrinal points
- use of OT scriptures
Tonight we experimented with this approach, just on chapter two. As an example, here’s what I came up with: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s4/sh/4fe987e7-136a-4585-a52f-019926e34ee9/ce38c42f8906fae5244297ad2e399d48. I copied the text from a version I’m not familiar with but in any case, it serves to illustrate how by using different colours you can draw out the key ideas and words. With just a glance it’s obvious to see because of the colours, how significant the point is that James is making in relation to faith and works/deeds/actions. When you take this approach for the whole book you’ll quickly identify the major hooks on which the whole thing hangs together and may even see patterns emerging which help to grasp the flow of thought.
These annotations can be made in your physical bible or in a online bible. Bearing in mind the other comments in this post about using your physical bible, why not photocopy/scan the book in to your computer and then either print and annotate with pens or digitally annotate using an app like Skitch. Either way you’ll be looking at the layout of your physical bible to benefit your recall of scripture without spoiling your physical bible with lots of scribble!
