personal Bible study

Thanks for the idea Jen!  I now have added that book to my ever-growing wishlist!

Becky – it really depends on the season of life I’m in, to be honest!  This year I am focusing on reading through the Bible using this plan: http://www.esv.org/assets/pdfs/rp.esv.study.bible.pdf .  I journal and use the Scriptures I read through to pray along with the Bible. Sometimes this will lead me to further study the Bible – for example, I read about “stillness” and wanted to see other verses so I used my concordance to look those up. 

I also have found a neat resource that I am using to help me memorize and meditate on Scripture: http://www.tbsis.com/  I am doing Psalm 139 (I picked that because I am expecting a baby and all of the references in this Psalm to life in the womb)  There is a cd with the psalm put to music and then a Bible study that takes you verse by verse through the passage.  It’s not an inductive study, like a Kay Arthur (which are WONDERFUL!), but more for the purpose of meditating on the Scripture.  One plus to this study is that while I have been playing the songs my children are picking them up and thus memorizing Psalm 139 with me! 

I can’t wait to see what others will recommend!

=) Erin

I usually just conduct my own studies as I’m reading the bible or if I’m listening to a bible teaching and want to understand a passage better – or if I want to see how the bible defines a word.  I use eSword, which is a free (mostly) computer bible program, and basically I just look up all the times an English word is used and take note of it’s context or various contexts, and then I see how the Greek or Hebrew for that word is translated into different English words.  You can search the bible for an exact phrase and a while back I searched for “Christ Jesus” and read all those verses and wow!  Was it a blessing!  Sometimes I think of a “biblical” word – for example, “justified” – and I want to understand how what the bible really means when it uses this word, so I can search for “justi” and select Partial Match and it will show me all the verses with “justified” and “justification”, etc.

There is a copy feature in eSword where you can copy all the verses in your search, and I have pasted into a Word document with a 2-column table – the verses on one side, and the other column blank for my notes .

I said eSword was “mostly” free because there are some versions of the Bible, like the NIV, that are copyrighted and must be paid for.  But we’ve only gotten free versions like the KJV and the ESV, I think we have about 8 different bible versions on there which is nice to compare them.  We also have several commentaries and images, like maps, that were free to download.