When I first sat down to read the Bible as a child I didn’t know how to study. Naturally, I started in Genesis 1, because that’s how you read books right? Not necessarily. Using a Bible study guide can help you to enrich your experience with the Word of God.
What Christian Bible study guide should I use? Some great guides to studying the Bible include:
- SOAP
- Discovery Bible Study
- Bible in a Year
- Book Study
- Journaling
- Highlighting
- The 5 P’s
- APPLE
- Survey
- Inductive Study
I have tried many of these and it is up to you to figure out what works best. Once you have chosen, pray about what book of the Bible or passage God wants you to study and jump right in!
1. SOAP
One of the most popular Bible study guides is the SOAP method.
- S – Scripture: Select a passage and read through it a few times noting verses that stand out to you the most.
- O – Observation: What do you notice about the passage? What is being communicated?
- A – Application: How does this passage relate to you? What are you going to do about it?
- P – Prayer: Pray over the passage you just read and for God to help you apply it to your life. Pray that the truths you learned would become integrated into your heart.
When I have used this method in the past I found it helpful to write down my thoughts on each of these points in a journal.
I have also done this method with a group where we would all work on it throughout the week and then meet to discuss what we learned.
2. Discovery Bible Study
Discovery Bible Study is a system I recently learned and have fallen in love with. It works well for independent study but also with a group or for discipling others.
There are six steps to the Discovery Bible Study process:
- Pray – Pray that God will open your heart to hear what the text is saying and that the Holy Spirit would reveal its meaning to you.
- Read – Read the passage aloud a few times.
- Repeat – Do your best to repeat the passage in your own words.
- Questions – Ask yourself a few questions about the passage. I usually ask myself three: What did God/Jesus do? What do we learn about God/Jesus’ character? What good/bad examples can we learn from? You may also want to ask yourself: What did you like about this passage? What seemed difficult? Who are you going to share this passage with this week? With whom will you tell God’s story?
- Obedience – Spend some time meditating on the passage. In what way is God calling you to walk in obedience as a result of this passage?
- Pray – Pray once again that God will help you integrate this passage into your heart and that he will help you walk out that step of obedience.
3. Bible In A Year
Another common way to study the Bible is to follow a plan to read the entire Bible in a year. This is one I have been meaning to try but haven’t gotten there yet.
I know some people who have done it and they said that it was really cool to see the entire biblical narrative unfold in a shorter period of time.
You could also read the Bible in a year chronologically if you are looking to get a better idea of the biblical timeline. Or you could select a key theme and trace that through the Bible as you go.
4. Book Study
This is another way of studying the Bible that I really enjoy and often combine with the Discovery Bible Study method. In this framework, you pick a book of the Bible and walk through it a bit at a time.
One thing I would recommend any time you are doing a book study is to read the entire thing out loud in one sitting before you begin. This helps you to get the birds eye view of the book and notice recurring themes or the overall structure.
I also will watch the Bible Project video on that book of the Bible to help me nail down the structure and main themes to watch for throughout my study.
5. Journaling
Journaling about scripture can also be an effective Bible study tool. I don’t do this all the time but sometimes it’s helpful to journal about a specific verse or passage that God is really speaking to you about or that you don’t understand.
I also do this with my prayer time. I find that I am more focused on my prayers if I am writing them out.
6. Highlighting
I used to do the highlighting method in addition to the SOAP method. I would highlight the passage as I read and then follow through with the rest of SOAP. One of the benefits of this method is it helps you to unpack each verse a bit more.
Essentially, each general topic has a color. As you read you can use highlighters or colored pencils to highlight the different components of each verse.
Sometimes a verse fits into two categories and then you have to decide how the verse is functioning in context to make the best call. Here’s the system that I used:
- Purple: God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, Savior, Messiah
- Pink: women of the Bible, family, marriage, parenting, friendships, relationships
- Red: love, kindness, mercy, compassion, peace, grace
- Green: faith, obedience, growth, fruit, salvation, fellowship, repentance
- Yellow: worship, prayer, praise, doctrine, angels, miracles, power of God, blessings
- Blue: wisdom, teaching, instruction, commands
- Orange: prophecy, history, times, places, kings, genealogies, people, numbers, covenants, vows, visions, oaths, future
- Brown/Grey: Satan, sin, death, hell, evil, idols, false teachers, hypocrisy, temptation
7. 5 P’s
The 5 P’s method is a method proposed by Christian author and speaker Priscilla Shirer. The five P’s are:
- Position yourself to hear from God
- Pour over the passage and paraphrase the major points
- Pull out the spiritual principles
- Pose the question
- Plan obedience and pin down a date
This method is similar to some of the others such as SOAP and will help you have structure in your quiet time with the Lord each day.
8. APPLE
This method is a bit different in that it has a more particular focus. This process is a great one if you want to focus a bit more on the attributes of God and how his character is revealed through scripture.
- A – Attributes of God
- P – Promises
- P – Principles for Living
- L – Lesson Learned (or sin to avoid)
- E – Example to follow
This method is great for studying the attributes of God but also helps to reveal other components of the text you may not have considered.
I haven’t done this one before but I am eager to give it a try.
9. Survey
You can also use the survey method. This is essentially the beginning of the inductive study method where you will explore the context and structure of the book.
Begin by reading the entire book aloud in one sitting and watch for four things:
- Natural breaks – Look for any natural breaks that would indicate how the book is structured or organized.
- Themes – Notice key themes that are evident throughout the text.
- Main Idea – What do you think the main idea of the text is?
- Key Verse – What verse sums up the main idea of this book?
I have found the Bible Project to be very helpful in understanding these things, especially the structure of the book. After making an effort to figure it out myself I like to “check my work” against the Bible Project video.
Then I ask myself five questions:
- Who wrote this book?
- Who was this book written to?
- When was this book written?
- What was going on culturally that made this book relevant?
- Why was this book written?
These help me to understand the context in which the book was written and together, this gives me a good survey of the book. From there I can study the book more a bit at a time, or leave my notes on the context for the next time I want to study that book.
10. Inductive Study
If you want to really dive deep into a particular text this is the way to go. It is the method I learned in my hermeneutics class and I got a ton out of my reading when I was using this method.
Whenever you do any in depth study of a book or passage of the Bible it is extremely important to understand the context in which it was written, and the structure of the book.
I like to start by reading the book all the way through aloud in one sitting. This gives me a good sense of what it is about going into it. I look for sections in the book and try to understand how it is organized.
Then I ask myself five questions:
- Who wrote this book?
- Who was this book written to?
- When was this book written?
- What was going on culturally that made this book relevant?
- Why was this book written?
Once I have answered these questions it is time to dive in. I look for natural transitions in the text and take it one section at a time. For each section I observe, interpret, and apply.
For observation, I am simply noticing things about the text and taking notes on it. I also like to color code. Sometimes the 5 W’s are helpful in this regard.
- Who: key people, pronouns
- What: events (important events or turning points), repetition (words, ideas, themes), key words (unlock the meaning or theme), definitions (look up words you don’t know), lexicon (check meanings of greek words), lists (are they in a particular order?), questions and answers, difficult passages
- When: dates (if a date is given note the equivalent in our western calendar BC/AD), time elements (before, during, after, etc.), verb tenses (past, present, future)
- Where: geographic locations, general locations (heaven, earth, north)
- Why: not there yet, we’ll come back to this one
- How: illustrations (drawing from history, quoting the Old Testament, using personal experience, using everyday life situations), commands, advice, promises, warnings, predictions, connectives (conditional statements, comparisons, contrasts, reasons, results, purpose), atmosphere, moods, emotions, emphatic statements (words that add emphasis), progression of logic (therefore, however, so then), figures of speech (simile, metaphor, analogy, irony, sarcasm, personification, apostrophe, rhetorical question, litotes, metonymy, synecdoche, euphemism, anthropomorphism, types, and symbols)
Once you have noticed everything you can about the passage, you can move into the second step, interpretation.
When you are interpreting the text, you are making an observation that you made and asking what its purpose is or why it is significant.
You are not asking why it is significant to you. You are asking why it was significant in its original context. Why was it valuable to the original audience? What was the author trying to communicate?
Then, once you have made your interpretations, you can start step three, application. Now, by looking at your interpretations, what is the underlying truth that will always be true no matter when this was written.
What is the timeless truth associated with this interpretation? How can you apply that to your life? How does it affect the church? How does it affect the body of Christ?
At the end, I also like to take a minute and summarize the purpose of the passage in a few sentences. This helps to bring it all together.
This study is not for the faint of heart but if you are looking to dig deep, this is a great way to do it.
Each of these options are valuable in their own way. Take some time to pray over which one is best for you and take the next step on your journey towards a mature faith.
You can find more Bible studies here.