How a Top Bible Publisher Studies Scripture w/ Philip Nation│Coffee & Bible Time

In this episode we are joined by Philip Nation, Vice President and Publisher at Thomas Nelson Bibles, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of The OPEN Bible! 

From exploring Philip's own story of faith, to advice on using topical indexes and Bible translations for encouragement and spiritual growth, this episode offers fresh inspiration to approach God's Word with intention and joy. Join us to discover how The OPEN Bible continues to make Scripture accessible and meaningful fifty years after its groundbreaking publication.

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Philip's favorite journaling tools: Pigma Micron Pens │Mini-ruler │Interleaved Journaling Bible

Philip's favorite Bible study website

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If you are a Christian woman seeking to know God deeper, study Scriptures, pray with and for others, strengthen your faith, and support other in doing the same, this is the place for you! 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Coffee and Bible Time
• 2:03 Philip Nation's Faith Journey
• 6:56 The Open Bible: 50th Anniversary
• 11:48 The NKJV Translation Explained
• 22:09 Effective Bible Study Practices
• 26:06 Bible Resources and Personal Favorites
• 30:59 Closing Prayer for Listeners

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

At the Coffee and Bible Time podcast. Our goal is to help you delight in God's Word and thrive in Christian living. Each week, we talk to subject matter experts who broaden your biblical understanding, encourage you in hard times and provide life-building tips to enhance your Christian walk. We are so glad you have joined us. Welcome back to the Coffee and Bible Time podcast. I'm Ellen, your host.

Speaker 1: 0:33

Today's episode is going to be something very special. We are celebrating something huge in the world of Bible publishing, and that is the 50th anniversary of the Open Bible. And to help us understand why this Bible has stood the test of time and how it can help us grow deeper in our faith, we're joined by someone who spent his life making God's Word more accessible and understandable. Our guest today is Philip Nation, vice President and Publisher at Thomas Nelson Bibles. In addition to his work in publishing, philip has also served as pastor, church planter and professor, and he's authored and edited many resources to help believers meaningfully engage with scripture.

Speaker 1: 1:26

Philip brings a wealth of wisdom for helping people fall in love with the Bible, and today we're going to talk with him about his journey. We'll find out his top tips for studying scripture and dig into the story behind the open Bible, including what makes it unique and how you can make the most of it in your own spiritual life. So grab your coffee and get ready to be inspired to open your Bible with fresh eyes and a renewed heart. All right, philip, welcome. We are so glad to have you on our podcast today. Thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 2: 2:08

Oh, thanks, ellen, it's going to be a fun conversation today.

Speaker 1: 2:12

Absolutely. Why don't we just start out by having you tell us a little bit about what's given you, your passion for working with God's Word, and just want to know a little bit about your history?

Speaker 2: 2:27

So my history is a very blessed one. My mom and dad my mom is with the Lord now, but mom and dad raised my sister and I as church-going kids. They have been believers since they were young adults both, and so church was just always a part of our life. So I grew up in church and healthy churches, with really good Sunday school teachers, and so learn the value of God's word from an early age. But then I would say it really that whole valuing it for myself took root in my later teenage years.

Speaker 2: 3:07

I felt a call to the ministry and to preaching when I was a teenager and a young associate pastor in our church took me under his wing and discipled me on a weekly basis for about three years, on a weekly basis for about three years. And so even before I finished formal training at the university and in seminary his name was Matthew. Matthew had already driven into my life this great hunger and value of the Word of God on a very personal level. So I attribute a lot of it to that discipling relationship level. So I attribute a lot of it to that discipling relationship. And then God has just been so very gracious to allow me to serve the church in ministry and then serve the broader church through Christian publishing work and now in Bible publishing. So it started from an early age and I have tried to just simply maintain a faithful life of devotion to God and His Word.

Speaker 1: 4:07

That's beautiful and how profound that you can look back and see the faithfulness of your parents and, I'm sure, praying and believing and trusting that God would work in your life and he clearly has given you a passion for God's word. What was the start of that passion, would you say? Was it? You know you described that relationship with the pastor. Did you start reading the Bible on your own before school, or how did that come into play?

Speaker 2: 4:40

I did. Again, I was very blessed to be in a very healthy church that had a healthy set of staff members, and so as a teenager, we were encouraged and not just encouraged to go do it, but taught how to do it. Of this is how you study the word on your own, this is how you have a quiet time, a devotional time, devotional time. And so I would say, kind of as a younger teenager, I began that whole kind of endeavor of figuring out how to read my Bible on a fairly daily basis. I mean, teenage boys are somewhat unfocused, so I wouldn't say that I was hitting seven days a week with it, but I did figure out the rhythm.

Speaker 2: 5:23

And as I figured out that rhythm and began to just feel the Lord's drawing to certain books and passages of the Bible, that I have her Bible back here on one of my shelves Mom's Bible was just a kind of a visual marker in our house. I can still picture it in my mind's eye, exactly where mom kept her Bible in the kitchen with her notebook that she kept all of her prayer list in, and so it was just a very regular presence in our lives. And so, as a teenager, beginning to read the Bible on a regular basis and hear it publicly taught very well, and then having these personal relationships where talking about the Bible was just a normal occurrence. That is all of these things. God conspired all of these details together to give me that hunger so that when I launched into my 20s and into adulthood, that was already the foundational portion of my life.

Speaker 1: 6:38

Thank you for giving us a little bit of a glimpse to behind the scenes there. Well, let's talk about the Open Bible, because we shared with our listeners that this is a special event that's happening with the Open Bible. For those that aren't familiar with it, fill us in. What is it and who is it made for?

Speaker 2: 7:01

Well, we love talking about it. So this is the 50th anniversary of Thomas Nelson Bibles publishing this particular edition, as you've said, called the Open Bible, that they had all of these great resources out of a couple of different study and reference editions that they wanted to see collaborated together into one edition, and a keystone in it was what was at that time known as the Cyclopedic Index, which we've renamed as the Nelson Topical Index, and it's about a 300-page topical index in the front of the Bible. So before you get to Genesis there's this giant topical index and alongside of that they wanted to show how it is that the Scripture interprets Scripture. One of the great basic principles of how we approach the Bible is, when you find yourself in a difficult passage, you find a passage that you understand already that perhaps has clarity for you, and allow Scripture to inform the other passages. So they constructed this edition, this reference edition of the Bible that had this giant topical index, this really great set of cross-references, and then a chain-link group of small study notes to carry you through the major themes of the Bible.

Speaker 2: 8:36

And so the hope is with this edition is that there's lots of articles and ancillary material in it, but the hope is that, for readers of any maturity level, whether you're just starting out or you've been reading the Bible for a long time, is that, once again, these are tools in your hand to be able to see oh well, I'm over here in Joshua, but there are cross-references to later on in Old Testament history. Or I'm here in Psalms, and, oh, there's cross. There's cross references over to the New Testament, to the Gospels to see how the Bible is one unified, beautiful message from God of who he is and who he's making us to be.

Speaker 1: 9:17

You know, I had the opportunity of looking at it and I think that index is pretty incredible. How would you say you use that in your own personal use?

Speaker 2: 9:31

Yeah Well, and I'll just say I've been using a copy of the open Bible since I was 17 years old. It was one of the first study Bibles I received and so I've been using that topical index my whole life. That whenever it is that I am just at a loss for well, what does the Bible say about? And then fill in the blank. And it could have been what does the Bible say about forgiveness, or what does the Bible say about anxiety or a particular sin that I was wrestling with, that temptation, or a big theological idea like grace or justification.

Speaker 2: 10:11

And so it has served as just a great tool in my hand so that when I want to know what the Bible says, I could go and look it up, Even if it's the largest idea, like you want to know what does the Bible say about God? And so you go to the word God and then it has all the little subcategories about all of his different attributes, that then you can just kind of rifle through the Bible, all of these different verses from Genesis to Revelation, about where does this idea show up in the Bible. And so for me that topical index has just been a gold mine to be able to dig into a particular idea, whether it was because I was in need or because I was on the hunt studying some big idea that I wanted to just understand better. That's how I've used it over these years.

Speaker 1: 11:02

Yeah, that's amazing. I was thinking about wow, I wish I had that, because so many times we want to encourage someone. Maybe they're experiencing grief or, like you said, anxiety. I think that could be a wonderful tool too, to be able to use the index and pull out some applicable passages. To use the index and pull out some applicable passages. Well, this version of the open Bible was published in the new King James Version and there might be people out there listening who don't really know where that falls on the spectrum of word-for-word translations versus more thought-for-thought. Can you share with us some perspective on where that falls in there?

Speaker 2: 11:49

Yeah, that's a great question.

Speaker 2: 11:51

The New King James falls more on the formal side of the translation spectrum, as you say, more of the word-for-word versus the dynamic side of more of the thought for thought or phrase by phrase.

Speaker 2: 12:06

And the New King James Version was commissioned by Thomas Nelson Bibles back in the 1970s and then it first was fully published in 1982. And so, even though it feels a long way away, we're already beginning to think about the 50th anniversary of the NKJV, and the translation committee sought to bring to the forefront an optimal equivalence kind of translation where they wanted to maintain all of the beauty and the poetry of the old King James Version, that kind of magisterial feel, that lyrical feel to the scripture, while also bringing the language forward in order to make it a more accessible and readable translation. So you get this trustworthy kind of feel from it being a more formal translation, but then it is in a modern language that is helpful for any reader. It is still in all of the vocabulary of what we're accustomed to, but maintaining some of that really important theological language as well. So it is a it's a fun translation. For me.

Speaker 1: 13:27

It feels like home when I read it Right, right, what I love about it is kind of how you've described like for those of us who grew up memorizing scripture in the King James version. I do love that. The flow is similar. It's just not the these and thous and that really kind of help. You see that it's the same thing just how we talk today.

Speaker 2: 13:52

It is, and some of the other things I love about what the translation does is it does convert all of those these and thous into modern pronouns. But then the translation committee had the foresight to go ahead and do certain things with. When you're reading it and you see it on the printed page, there are certain words that are in italics. And if you read the preface and as a Bible publisher I will encourage everybody you should sit down with your Bible and go to all of the stuff that's before Genesis and you should read all of it, because there's a preface there to the translation that helps you to understand it.

Speaker 2: 14:33

And in the preface it describes that these italicized words are part of the supplied words, so that these are not words that were in the Hebrew or the Greek, but in order for it to be readable in the English, you have to supply words in. Sometimes they're modifiers or connector words, and so it helps you to get a better view of exactly what's here in the text. And then also the inclusion of translator notes that are usually at the bottom of the page, where the translators would say, oh, but here's another way that we could have translated this phrase, or there is a textual variant here, that another translation may use this word or this phrase here, and so all of those little things put together just continuously kind of build confidence that this is a great translation and it's a modern translation, it's one that is useful for all of us today, and I just love the way it sounds when it's read publicly as well. It's comforting and challenging all at once.

Speaker 2: 15:47

What would you say to someone who might be considering maybe they have another translation now, but using this one for the first time, I am a big advocate of using multiple translations in your personal devotional life, because you will find that there's a richness that will come to bear in your reading of Scripture if you will use a translation that is dynamic and thought for thought and one that is more formal.

Speaker 2: 16:15

And so the inclusion of a translation like the NKJV helps you to stand in that wonderful tradition of what was happening with English translations from the late 1500s all the way up to our modern day. It will be one that, if you are more accustomed to a dynamic translation, there's some points of accuracy that I think that you'll find to be very helpful by reading a more formal translation like the NKJV. And then there is and I know I've said this already, but there's a certain measure of poetry that happens with the NKJV. That is not absent from other modern translations, but certainly I think it's highlighted in the NKJV, especially when you're in Psalms, proverbs, ecclesiastes, song of Solomon and even Job and the other places in Scripture where a song is sung or a letter is received, there's a certain way that it is typeset on the page that helps you to visually see, and so to read it properly, for the lyricism and the poetry that God had intended for those passages to have. There's just benefit there that I would encourage people to look into.

Speaker 1: 17:37

Yeah, absolutely, and I completely agree with you that having more than one translation really does help to expand your understanding of the text as you're reading it. Well, you're someone with a wealth of experience and knowledge in Scripture. Tell us some advice that you might have pertaining to studying God's Word, how people can use that in their own personal time of study.

Speaker 2: 20:08

Studying God's Word often the advice and the counsel I want to give. It often depends on when somebody is brand new or somebody's very seasoned at it. But there are some universal principles that I want to encourage people that you do have a plan, but that you not be driven by that plan especially those that people who love to check off the boxes and they like to get things done that you just have to keep remembering that the purpose of your Bible reading plan is not to finish the plan, it's to meet God in His Word, and so sometimes the meeting of God and the interruption that the Holy Spirit is going to make in your life is a good interruption to your Bible reading plan, because you get to stop and instead enjoy the presence of the Lord. And so I think that it is carrying a careful balance, that you do want to consume the whole of the Bible, you do want to study deeply into passages, but it's keeping at the forefront of your mind that the purpose here is that I want to meet with God, and so any interruptions that the Spirit has are good interruptions. That if he wants me to pause on this chapter and spend the next week here, that that's a good thing In terms of then digging into the scripture passages.

Speaker 2: 21:35

I encourage people to learn how to ask really great questions About. I guess it was eight years ago I wrote a book that I had published, called Habits for Our Holiness, about the spiritual disciplines, and one of the chapters was specifically about Bible study, and in that I laid out a series of questions that we can ask of any passage we encounter, and the first question is always the God question. You know, what does this passage tell me about God? Because, as humans, we often will rush to the application question of what does this mean for me? What does this mean for me at work? What does this mean for me, you know, in my daily chores, but keeping at the forefront what is the God question here? Who is God telling me that he is in this passage?

Speaker 2: 22:29

But one of the other really important questions that I've learned to ask is the rebellion question, and that is how do I naturally rebel against the truth in this passage? To go ahead and get yourself alert to. You know, god's told me something about himself, about his work, about who I am, about the redemption that he has for me in Christ. Let me go ahead and get myself armored up to understand what is it that I've done in the past to rebel against this idea, or what are the temptations I'm currently facing that are trying to draw me away from this truth of who God is and what he's doing in my life? And so just being willing to pause for whatever the Spirit has and then make sure that you're working to ask really insightful questions so that you can hear from what the Spirit wants to teach you, those have been really important practices for me in my own devotional life.

Speaker 1: 23:36

Yeah, that is so important, and I love your reminder about the checklist that we can't just get it checked off the list. It's the value of doing it and meeting with God, as you say. Well, how can people find out, philip, more about the Thomas Nelson Bibles and be able to find out more about you?

Speaker 2: 23:59

Yeah, the easiest thing to do is just go to our website, thomasnelsonbiblescom, and there you will be able to filter a search of all of our Bibles, either by translation of the various English translations that we publish or by Bible type. If you're looking for a reference Bible that's got lots of cross-references, or a study Bible, or a devotional Bible, or one of our journaling Bibles that's got wide margins, so that you've got place to make your own notes of what you're learning, and so you can go there and filter by that. So that's the easiest way to find the Bible that is right for you and the one that you're looking for.

Speaker 1: 24:45

Okay, Well, we will make sure we have links in our show notes to those Before we go though. Philip, we have to ask. We ask all our guests these questions, but I think I might know the answer. But I'm going to ask you anyway what Bible is your go-to Bible and which translation is it?

Speaker 2: 25:05

Yeah, so the translation it is the New King James. That's the one that I kind of live and move and have my being with all the time and the one that I carry with me most often. It is called the large print thin line Bible, and so I like a Bible that's kind of as thin as it can be, but I'm getting a little older and so I like the larger print and that's also very helpful for when I preach, and so I have an NKJV Large Print Thin Line and we've got this beautiful edition that the words of Christ often in many of our Bibles are printed in red, but this is one that the words of Christ are printed in this really beautiful blue color, and so it's just a really pleasant read. I deeply, deeply enjoy using that Bible.

Speaker 1: 25:58

Oh, excellent, okay, I'm glad I asked that Bible. Oh, excellent, okay, I'm glad I asked.

Speaker 2: 26:06

Do you have any?

Speaker 1: 26:07

favorite journaling supplies or do you enjoy doing any type of?

Speaker 2: 26:08

Bible journaling Absolutely. And so I've got a set of pens. They are Pigma Microns, are the type of pens that I use because they work so well on our very thin Bible paper. And I actually have this little tiny six-inch plastic ruler that I know that's very old school that I like my lines to be very straight, and then we had the opportunity to publish an interleaved Bible several years ago, and so that is it's really thick, but that means for every page of scripture then there is an entirely blank page next to it, and so you can make as many notes as you want on those, and so I love having it and being able to write and journal and put down my prayers, and so I generally use those micron pens and that's the addition that I use to to do a lot of my journaling.

Speaker 1: 27:07

Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, my daughter actually has that interleaved one and, uh, she she absolutely loves that. I should say that is her, her current Bible. She's had many but that one, uh, she really does love because it has all that space, like you said, to take notes. So, yeah, All right. Last question what is your favorite app or website for Bible study tools?

Speaker 2: 27:33

Yeah, so the website that I use most often is Bible Gateway, and I find it to be just super helpful and easy to navigate. I do have several Bible apps on my phone that I access when I'm on the go and don't have a Bible with me and need to look something up or have a moment that I want to read, but in general, most of mine is done when I'm at a computer, and so I like Bible Gateway as my go-to website to do extra study and have extra resources.

Speaker 1: 28:09

Awesome. Yes, great website. Okay. Well, thank you so much, philip, for being here. That was such an inspiring conversation. I appreciate all your insights and tips.

Speaker 2: 28:20

Well, God bless and blessings to all of your listeners. Hope that it was an encouragement to everybody.

Speaker 1: 28:26

Yes, it certainly has been To our listeners. I hope you're walking away with a fresh excitement to dive into God's word with intention and joy. We will have the links to all these different things that Philip mentioned in the conversation, and if something from today's episode has spoke to you or you know someone who might need a new Bible, be sure and share this episode with a friend. So, philip, can I tap into your pastor's heart and ask you to pray for our listeners before we go.

Speaker 2: 28:57

I'll be glad to. I'll be glad to, father, thank you. Thank you so much for the blessing of giving us your word so that we might know who you are, we might understand Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, and that we might be the beneficiaries of all of your good work. I pray for these listeners today that you would just well up great joy for your salvation in their lives, that you would just anchor a hunger and a thirst for your word in their lives. And for those that are searching for answers, I ask that today would be the day that they would be able to find those answers from you in the scripture, that they would find hope and healing, that they would find forgiveness and freedom through Jesus Christ and his word. It's in his name we pray, amen.

Speaker 1: 29:48

Yes, it is Amen. Thank you so much, Philip again, and thank you to all of our listeners for joining us today. We will talk again with you very soon.