[Darris McNeely] Do you ever get stuck trying to remember a verse or a phrase or a word someplace in the Bible that you know is there, but you can’t remember the verse, or how to get to it? Well, there are tools that we have at our disposal that can help us in getting to those places in the scripture and starting a study of the Bible. We’re at number ten of our points here on keys to understanding the Bible. What we are wanting to talk about a little bit here today is using Bible study aids in a proper way. I’ve touched on this in previous episodes here in this series, but I want to give you a tip here today that was given to me many, many years ago when I was in college, studying the Bible. One of my Bible instructors gave us some very, very good knowledge, and his basic point was flowing from what the Bible tells us to do, and that is to labor in the word.

Laboring in the word involves that we really work at studying the Bible, the word of God. It’s easy to read a lot of other people’s ideas and thoughts about the Bible and their commentaries, their renditions and their descriptions of various things of the Bible, and many of them have their place. But nothing is a substitute for laboring in the word of God and pure study of the Bible. And so, to use Bible study aids in a proper way is one of the most effective keys to studying the Bible, but here’s the clue: it takes work. It takes a little bit of effort that we might not be used to doing, but it pays big dividends.

Let me tell you what my instructor told us. He referred us to three different types of books that we could use to study the Bible. Now, I’ve already touched on one of them in this series, and that is a topical Bible. This is the old venerable Nave’s Topical Bible, and there are others on the market – all of these aids are available online for ready access, as well. But if you like to just turn pages the old fashioned way, take a topical Bible, take a topic and study it. We talked about this already, but it puts you through the many, many scriptures that are associated with a topic on prayer, on Bible study, on fasting, on humility – whatever it is that you want to study, a topical Bible is a very, very good aid.

Let me give you another tip. Have you looked in your Bible and noticed in the margins of your Bible the little bitty numbers that are in there that point you to another scripture connected with the one you might be reading that is back in Isaiah, Genesis, or some other book of the Bible? Well, what you find in some of our Bibles can be very helpful, but it’s not complete. There’s a book that is kind of the granddaddy of this – it’s called the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge. This is a version of it here. Again, this is online. But this really opens up so many verses that are connected to a particular one that you are studying in every book and verse of the Bible and shows you how the Bible comments on itself. You want to labor in the word? You want to see what the word has to say about a particular verse or concept? Let it interpret itself, which is another one of the keys to understanding the Bible that we’ve gone through. This book – and a book like this – a Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, pure scripture knowledge, allows you to do that.

The third book that my instructor told us about was just a basic, simple concordance, where we can take a word that we want to look up and run an entire reference throughout the entire Bible to find every place where that particular word, in both the Old and New Testaments, may be used. And that too can be a very effective form of Bible study.

Taken together, all three of these can be one of the most effective ways and means by which you and I labor in the word of God and come to understand its richest depths of understanding and meaning, from just the word of God, and we dwell there. Coupled with God’s Spirit guiding our minds, guiding our hearts to understanding, it can be a very effective key. So use Bible study aids, but learn to use some of them in a unique way that helps you to labor in the word.

That’s BT Daily. Join us next time.