Archive for February, 2008

Greg at GregQualls.com writes a practical post about how to spend time with God regularly. He says of his devotions in the past:

The reality was that I wasn’t going to the Father with my needs. I wasn’t going to Him and growing in my relationship with Him. I was basically getting spiritual crumbs from books, podcasts and my pastor. I was living vicariously through others’ relationships with God.

Greg has several tips to help you regularly meditate on God’s Word, from setting up “triggers” to keeping a planner nearby when you’re reading the Bible, so when you have stray thoughts of what you need to do during the day, you can write them down and get back right away to studying the Bible. He also talks about using the “SOAP” method for approaching the Bible.

His final tip? “Keep it simple. The goal of your time with God is to try to grow closer to Him. It’s not to check off your list. Don’t add extra burdens to this focus.”

Note: we fixed a couple of typos in the quotes.

If you resolved to read through the Bible in 2008, how’s it going for you? As you can see from the below chart, a good number of people start reading their Bibles daily in January. The traffic tapers off until around March 1, after which it remains pretty steady for the rest of the year. We interpret this data to mean that if you can keep reading your Bible daily for another month, there’s a good chance you’ll stick with it for the rest of the year.

Hall Harris at the new, semi-official NET Bible Revolution blog has two posts about using commentaries in Bible study. The first post surveys the types of commentaries available and talks about why you might or might not want to use one:

Although some Bible students shy away from using commentaries, not wanting to be “influenced” by the teaching of others, commentaries provide a good way to check your own understanding of scripture and your own interpretations of passages. They help even the casual user to avoid misunderstandings and mistakes about the Bible. They can also help you get a better grasp of major Bible themes and topics and see the flow of the author’s argument better in a given passage of scripture. If you are concerned about being unduly influenced by a particular commentary, I recommend you read two or three on the same passage, which will serve as a “check and balance” on one another.

The second post provides tips on using commentaries, especially commentaries of a more technical nature.