Living by the Book/Living by the Book Workbook Set (30 page)
Read Living by the Book/Living by the Book Workbook Set Online
Authors: Howard G. Hendricks,William D. Hendricks
Tags: #Religion, #Christian Life, #Spiritual Growth, #Biblical Reference, #General
A grid chart such as this can help me follow these four themes through the letter so that when I’m done I can see the relationships.
PHESIANS
The final chart is different from the others. It summarizes a topical study on love. Topical studies are fascinating because they look at one subject that appears in many passages, and then correlate the results. Here, the study revealed that two key passages in Matthew are central texts on the subject of love. One gives the pattern for love, which is God’s love, and the other describes the process of love, which is to love others as you love yourself. Notice that a related text is 1 Corinthians 13, the love chapter.
The study also discovered that when it comes to practicing love, there are three domains—loving God, loving ourselves, and loving others. In each case, there is revealed truth to consider and a response to that truth.
OVE
: A
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NTRODUCTORY
S
ERIES
There are obviously many other ways to organize this material and show the relationships. What matters is that the chart makes sense to the person who constructs it. It needs to show what he or she has found in the text. It’s a tool, a way of owning the text.
AKING A
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TART
W
ITH
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OUR
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HART
Are you ready to try your hand at making a chart? Let me give you a few suggestions.
1. | As you study a text, assign titles and labels to the content in a way that summarizes the material. Be creative. I talked about acquisitive Bible reading, making the text your own. Placing your own titles on the verses, paragraphs, sections, and books of the Bible is one way to do that. They help you retain your insights in neat packages. |
2. | As you visualize your chart, ask: What are the relationships? What am I trying to show? What’s this chart all about? When I’ve finished it, how am I going to use it? |
3. | Keep your charts simple. You can always add detail; the challenge is to trim away the clutter. What key ideas, characters, themes, verses, terms, and other data from the text ought to take priority? What is the big idea? What structure needs to be shown? What material do you want to see at a glance? |
4. | If you find that you’ve got too much material to include in a chart, chop it up and make several charts. By the way, too much unrelated data may be a signal that you need to go back to the text and do some more observing. |
5. | Be creative. I’ve only shown a handful of possibilities. There are dozens of other ways to show relationships in the text. Let your imagination flow. Draw illustrations or symbols if they help. It’s your chart, so make it work for you. |
6. | Revise your charts in light of your study. No chart can summarize everything in a text. And as you continue to study a passage, you’ll gain new insights that should cause you to revise or even redo your chart. Remember, charts are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. |
N
ow that you’ve seen several illustrations of how to make a chart, try to construct your own chart of the book of Acts, using the suggestions given in this chapter. To get started, review chapter 6 where we looked at Acts 1:8. I pointed out that the four places mentioned—Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost part of the earth—form an outline for the book. You might want to use that observation in organizing your material. Or, come up with your own overview. But develop a chart that summarizes the account in a way that helps you quickly grasp what is going on in Luke’s book.
ACTS
A
RE
S
TUPID
T
HINGS
U
NTIL
. . .”
R
emember the story of the great scientist Louis Agassiz and his method for teaching students to observe the fish? He left his students in front of their specimens for days and weeks, giving them only one instruction: “Look! Look! Look!”
If I could give students of Scripture only one instruction, it would be the same: “Look! Look! Look!” The truth of God is in the Bible, but most people miss it primarily because they don’t look for it. They never put forth the time and effort required to answer the fundamental question of Observation, What do I see? As a result, they have no basis for understanding what God has revealed.
In this section of the book, I’ve given you an introduction to this process of seeing. As I’ve pointed out, Observation is only the first step in Bible study method. But it’s an absolutely critical step, and unfortunately one to which most people pay scant attention.
But we’ve seen that in order to observe Scripture, we first must learn to read. We have to learn to read the Bible better and faster, as for the first time,
and as though we were reading a love letter. And we looked at ten strategies that can help us become first-rate readers of God’s Word.
Then we learned what to look for in the biblical text. We discovered six clues that unlock the text for our understanding: things emphasized, things repeated, things related, things alike, things unlike, and things that are true to life.
We practiced these skills on three kinds of biblical material—a verse, a paragraph, and a section. We saw that there is no end to the amount of detail that the observant person can uncover. And all of it leads to greater insight.
Finally, we looked at the value of charts in summarizing the fruits of our study. We saw that charts are efficient tools for visualizing data so that we can use it in understanding the text.
Now we need to move on in the process. Professor Agassiz trained his students in the method of discovering facts and their orderly arrangement, but he was never content to leave it there. “Facts are stupid things,” he would say, “until brought into connection with some general law.”
That brings us to the second step in Bible study method. Once we’ve seen what the text says, we’re ready to ask, What does it mean? So let’s shift into second gear and look at the second stage in the process, Interpretation.
