Deeper Bible Study

Every single person can become a better Bible student. The Word is divine and grand and we are not. So it will always have something to show us, some message to place into our lives.  In fact, the whole Bible, page upon page, shares beautiful insight into our King, and every single student of the Bible has more to find if they know how to look.

The key to deeper Bible study is the combination for FOUR simple, daily decisions. These four things will connect you to the Word in a special way. You will see the Truth, interpret it, lock it into place, and share with with people you love. Today's episode walks you through those four steps. 

If you would like to purchase an ESM 3-Month Journal, as discussed in the episode, you can do so here:  www.excelstillmore.life.

If you would like to start the Color Bible Marking series, please like the Facebook page of that same name.  You could also subscribe to the Color Bible Marking YouTube channel.

- Who needs to go deeper in the study of the Word?

- Why is it important to be a daily Bible student?

- Is Bible reading and Bible study different?

- What are the Four daily tips and how do I implement them?

- Is is time for me to become a teacher of the word and not just a student?

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hello, welcome back for season two of the Excel Still More podcast. I am your host, Chris Emerson, and I'm here to encourage you with tips and strategies to help you build stronger relationships, deepen your faith, and just get the most out of your life. Thank you for joining. Let's get started. All right, so today's episode is entirely focused on the word of God. We want to build a deeper, fuller, more inspirational connection to the Bible. The Word of God is the only perfect, flawless thing on the face of this earth. It came directly from God. It never changes, and we need as much of it as we can get, and we want to make sure that that connection is fruitful. I have intentionally entitled today's episode with an action term at the beginning that ought to connect to every person. We are talking about deeper Bible study. And here's what I mean about that. No matter what kind of a habit you have built in terms of the way that you read or study the Bible, there is always room to grow. No matter who you are, there is a next level. And we're going to talk about how to reach it. If you are an incredible Bible student, if you have been working through the word for 50 years, there is still room to improve. There is more to learn. The word of God is infinite in power and divine in origin. And we want to talk about how someone like you who knows the word really, really well, can get even more out of it. If you are more of a casual Bible student, a bit more hit and miss, maybe you read the Bible with some regularity, but maybe you're not super clear on the difference between simply reading and actually studying, we can show you how to make that connection better. And I promise, if you put into place some of the things you hear today, you will connect with God in a better way than before. And remember, this podcast is not called Stay the Same. It's called Excel Still More. So even if you consider yourself to be really good at this, like the Thessalonian brethren were super good at loving one another and standing for the truth, Paul told them, that's awesome. Let's excel still more. And I'm telling you, that's great, but let's go even deeper in the way you interact with God's Word. Maybe you're someone who is not a Bible student at all. Maybe your only interaction with the gospel is when you sit in church or something like that. Well, you know what? It's time to break ground. You can go deeper also by breaking ground and really starting to plant that seed. Everybody knows, no matter where you are in this process, that growing in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ is exactly what God wants us to do, that giving attention to the reading of scriptures, learning to diligently understand scriptures, and growing in the ability to share them is exactly the way Christians strengthen their faith. So we are going to look today, you and me, at four ways to do that. If you can go deeper in any of these four categories, you will see improvement in your life and you will connect to God in special new ways. If you are able to go deeper in all four of these areas, I am guaranteeing that your life will change. And no matter where you are in your study skills, habits, wisdom, or understanding, these four ideas are applicable to all. And here they are read, write, mark, and share. That's it. If you can explore with me over the next ten or fifteen minutes how we go about getting deeper in the way that we read the word, in the way that we write about the word, in our approach to marking the text, and in our exploration into sharing it with others in unique ways, the benefits will be there. You may already be doing these four things. Let's go deeper on that. So let's begin with the first one. It's really difficult to get to the others without starting with reading the Word of God. Paul told Timothy, do not neglect the daily reading. And I don't think I can put it any better than that. It is crucial that you are fed by God every day. Get the book open each day. If it's just for a minute or 10 minutes or 60 minutes, find a time that works for you. Make sure you don't have other distractions in place and you devote that time to letting God speak to you. He will speak to you through the word. You will see his message, but not if it's sporadically done, not if it's just occasionally done, and certainly not if there are distractions all around you while you're doing it. So the first thing is not just try to read the word. The first thing is pick a time each day when you can sit down and interact with the word of God. Now there are people who don't think that's very productive. Oh, a little reading here or there, or 10 minutes in the morning before I go somewhere, you know, I forget halfway through the day everything that I read. Well, I think the other three observations we will make today are going to change a lot of that for you. But even if all you were doing was focusing on reading each day, and even if you felt like you forgot it, it would change you over time, especially if you're reading about Jesus. If you're consistently reading about who he is and what he has done and what he is doing and what he is going to do, you may forget the particulars, but you will remember the message. And hear me clearly, the Bible has one message: Jesus and victory in him. But even then, when you repeat this process and you stay consistent, it begins to change you even on a subconscious level. It cleans you, it prepares you, even if you don't remember all the details. Last year I did an episode called The Wicker Basket, and I told the story about the grandpa sitting on the front porch reading the word. And the grandson said, I don't know why you do that every day. I tried it for a while and I forgot everything by lunch. And so he gives the grandson a wicker basket, a dirty one, and he asks him to go down to the pond and fill it with water. Three times the boy goes down to the pond and tries to fill the wicker basket with water, runs back up to his grandfather, but it was empty every time. So finally the boy is like, Grandpa, see what I mean? Nothing comes out of all that effort. It's futile. And grandpa said, I don't know about that. That's the cleanest that basket has looked in 10 years. So even when you don't think you're being filled up, you're still being affected. You're being cleansed. It is doing something, and you have to believe in that. Part of believing in the power of God is believing in the power of his word. Part of having a daily fellowship with God is having a daily fellowship with the Spirit's work. You can get a Bible reading program, you can join a program on most cell phones through Bible apps. You can just start reading and put a bookmark in, but make it happen every day. Now that leads us to the second thing. Write stuff down. When you are reading the word and you see something that makes a difference in your life, when you are clear that God is speaking to you and you don't want to forget it, write it down. Make some notes. Type some things up. When you do that, you are interacting with the information in two ways. The first way is with your eyes. You see it, you read it, you think about it. The second way is with your hand where you're taking the information that went into your brain and you're actually producing it from your brain to the paper. You have magnified your chances of remembering this, and later you can build on it and do a lot of great things. I'm certainly not saying you have to write down everything or hand write the letters, though I know a couple of guys who do that. But when you see things, write it down. In fact, people say, How much should I be reading every day? And instead of saying get a program and read a chapter a day, though I do sometimes advise that, I say, look, you read until you are sure God is showing you something. Then you stop reading and write it down. Write down what you think, what you feel, what you see, and what God is doing. Now there are lots of great ways to do this. So let me give you some practical tips. You already know if you follow this program that I've created a journal, the Excel Still More Three-Month Journal. I've been writing in mind every single day for about the last 11 months. There are eight little sections I fill in every day, but one of them is Bible read and notes. Every day I read a chapter of the scripture. This is my habit. I read a New Testament chapter every day, five days a week, so that I can progress all the way through the New Testament in one year. And then I started in Genesis doing two chapters each weekend, and that'll take however long it takes. At first I was just writing down the outline of what I saw, not a bad idea. But then I started writing down just the parts that I felt like God was showing me, the interesting observations, the things I hadn't seen before, ideas that I wanted to remember and develop and maybe even preach. It doesn't really matter. Just see it and document it. Another great way to do this is to have a Bible in your hand with some nice wide margins. If you see something powerful, make a note of it to the side. If you notice something you never saw before, make a note there in the margin. The next time you open your Bible to that text, there will be your note. You can start with that and move forward from there. Just by virtue of our first two steps on a daily basis, read the word in a quiet place daily, make notations, you will see tremendous growth. If you'd like to use that journal I mentioned, you can go to excelstillmore.life and you can purchase it there, and I'll get it in the mail to you. But even if you just use scratch paper somewhere or a notebook or just your margins, get it done. Okay, number three is something I'm uber passionate about. Listen, I've been passionate about Excel Stillmore for maybe 18 months now, but I have been passionate about color Bible marking for like 23 years or something. I learned it in my youth from the preacher where I grew up, Brother Steve Fontaneau, and I've worked it and developed it and customized it since then. If you opened up my Bible, any of my Bibles, you will see color-coded marking on almost every page, and it's been incredibly valuable in my growth, and it helps me remember what I've previously studied. The third thing is marking. Color Bible marking. Now I was going to devote the whole episode to this. Instead, I'll keep it short. If you want to know more about this, I have a Facebook page called Color Bible Marking, a YouTube channel by that same name. We're going through a video series of color marking first John right now. You can join right in on either one of those mediums. You don't need much. I use a Bible with nice size font and margins. I have six color pencils, a matte pencil, and we're ready to go. I would love to teach that to you and I hope you check it out. I've been teaching classes on this forever, it seems like. And there's something that I always do in the very first class. I tell everybody, listen, this is hard work. If you don't know that Bible marking is for you, if you don't see the value, let me show you one thing. If it doesn't resonate with you, you can go join another class. Here's what I tell them to do. I ask them to point to the wisest person in the room, and they'll pick out some Bible scholar or something, and I ask he or she to sit in a chair. Then I ask them to go across the hall if it's a Sunday Bible class or something, to the high school class. Get me the sleepiest kid you can find in the back, and they bring him in. And I set them both there and I give them both Pew Bibles and I say, Let's look up baptism in the book of Acts. I would love to know every place the word baptism or baptized or any of that is located in Acts. So I ask the Bible scholar to go through the Pew Bible in Acts and let me know how many times that word or words like it appear. And I ask the sleepy teenager to do the same. Within a minute, the teenager raises his hand and he says, uh, twenty three times. And I say, Man, that's right. Can you tell us where some of them are? And he says, Well, yeah, here in Acts 1 and here in Acts 2, and he can go all the way through. So I do that a couple of times. I actually switch the Bibles and do something different, but then I send the kid away and I ask the room, how do we do that? And I always get all kinds of answers. It's kind of fun. But the answer is actually quite simple. One of those Pew Bibles had baptized and every word like it underlined and read through the whole letter. All he had to do was look at it. If you would be interested in having important themes and words and ideas already marked for you so that you could find them in an instant and then multiply that throughout the entire Bible, then I hope you will check out Color Bible Marking. It's made an enormous difference in deepening my personal Bible study. So again, check that out. YouTube page, Facebook page, color Bible marking. So before we talk about the final thing, let's recap. Imagine if you were reading every day in private, focusing on the word. You had a notepad or margin or some device where you were taking notes and writing out what you were learning, and you were watching some occasional color Bible marking videos. We have bookmarks and stuff, and you printed those out, and you were spending time in those chapters marking important themes. All of that would make a difference. But it's when you combine those three things with the fourth thing is when you see the greatest results. Our fourth word is share. Share in this experience with people that you love. Don't just do all this by yourself. Communicate this with others. If you have a family at home, read the word with them. Make some notes or discuss your notes with them. Go through the first John Color Bible marking videos as a family or at least compare your markings with one another. If you have brothers or sisters in Christ that you text frequently or maybe share Bible reading programs with, communicate about biblical themes and ideas. A major shortcoming in the Christian life today is that we talk to God's people about everything on the planet except sometimes God's word. Find a group of friends that you can text with on a certain topic that you're studying. Get other people involved. You might say, well, who would want to do that? Oh, I assure you, many people do. They just don't know where to start. Most of your friends who are Christians, if not all of them, want to go deeper in their Bible studies, but they lack the information or discipline to do it on their own. Maybe they're not disciplined enough to read regularly. Maybe they've never written anything down because they felt like it would never get used. Maybe they don't know what color Bible marking even is. But if you were to share some of that with them or join in a reading program with them, it would strengthen you all. It would give some accountability and you would be able to share the things you're writing down, and that makes all the difference. It can even help in the simplest form, Bible reading. I remember about 10 years ago, I had never read the whole Bible through in a year. And a friend calls me and says, Let's do that together next year, and let's check on each other every day at two o'clock until we're done. And in a snarky little tone, I jabbed back, hey, let's read it twice this year then. And he said, Okay, and I instantly felt like I might have made a mistake. You know, he had to push me hard the last half of that year, but we did it. Neither of us had ever gone through the whole Bible in a year, one time, but together we did it twice. I have a few friends that I text with every week, Bible ideas and thoughts, and compare what we've seen in our regular readings. And I'm just telling you that sharing it adds something special. The ultimate, by the way, form of sharing it is teaching. The Bible talks in Hebrews 5. It says, you ought to be teachers by now, but instead I have to keep feeding you the same basics. Do you want to get past those basics? Do you want to go deeper? Then study to be a teacher. Sign up to teach a Bible class when things get back going in the churches. Set up a Bible class in your home. Prepare. Nobody learns more than the one who is preparing to teach. So there you go. A stronger connection to God, accessible by each and every person. All you need to do is get better in four simple categories. Read the word, write some notes, mark the text, and share with others, and you will enjoy deeper Bible study. Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you enjoyed the program, please remember to share with your family and your friends. Also, you can go to excelstillmore.life to sign up for emails, order the three month journals, or just catch up on old episodes. So until next time, let me leave you with this whatever you choose to do today in the name of the Lord Jesus, excel stillmore.