Monday, September 6, 2010

How to Study the Bible - Topical Searches

How to Study the Bible - Topical Searches

Looking up, studying, and memorizing verses by topic is another way that may be useful to you in finding a way to study the Bible. This might not be a long term plan, but it may be useful at different points in your life. For example, you may be going through a time in your life where you are worrying a lot. It may be useful to you to look up verses about fear, being anxious, etc… I have been using this technique a lot lately because I have been teaching a topical Bible study. We had topics like faithfulness, prayer, purity, not worrying, etc… For these topics I did searches on different words that had to do with the topic. On the topic of faithfulness, I looked up the word in the dictionary to give me a start on thinking more about it really means.

Then I looked it in my Bible’s concordance.





Or I looked it up on BibleGateway, which is a great online resource. You can search by topic or by verse in different languages and versions of the Bible.


BibleGateway: http://www.biblegateway.com/

I looked at faith, faithful, faithfulness, and then the opposite; unfaithful. This way it gave me different ideas of what God has to say on the subject from all angles. Using a thesaurus may help with your search to come up with other words that mean the same thing.








If you decide to do a topical search like this, I would suggest getting a notebook, journal, or index cards to write the verses on. Then you have the topical verses all together. Also, consider memorizing the verses that mean the most to you from the search.

This can be a very helpful way to understand more about specific issues that God teaches us about in His Word. Try it out and see if it might be right for you!



Topics that might interest you:

• Faith
• Joy
• Love
• Prayer
• Worry
• Women of the Bible

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