The 3 Steps of a Better Bible Study

Perhaps you’re like me—you grew up going to church, youth group and camps where they gave you different study and prayer tools. There were always acronyms (P.R.A.Y., A.C.T.S…) to help you remember these resources. You got excited about remembering and using these resources, but they just ended up feeling stale.

Whether or not you grew up in the church, you’ve probably found various tools like these acronyms or book studies or devotionals, gotten excited about them, and then felt let-down when they didn’t deliver what you’d hoped. I get that.

Those tools can be so helpful, and I still go back to them every now and then. But we need some methods that allow us to go deeper without needing to depend on other tools or resources.

Last week, we talked about how to get the context for the Bible text you’re studying—answering these questions: who, what, when, where, why. This week, we’re talking about the three progressions of your study: observation, interpretation, and application.

You might have seen this before, but stick with me! I’m sure I was taught those three phrases at some point in high school, but no one ever broke them down for me. So, that’s what we’re going to do today!

Observation

We did a little bit of this work last week when we learned how to establish the context of a text, so you’re already a little bit ahead! This is also the step that gets skipped over or rushed through the most. We often want to move along to interpretation and application, but let’s stay here for a little bit longer.

Observation is exactly what it sounds like—we’re observing the text. We’re taking it at face value for what it literally says. Let’s try this out together by looking at John 1:1–2:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.”

Grab a piece of paper and write down what you can observe. It can be helpful to start your observations with, “I can observe that…” 

Here are several observations to get you started:

I can observe that Word is capitalized.

I can observe that Word, therefore, is a proper noun.

I can observe that the Word was in the beginning.

I can observe that the Word was with God.

I can observe that the Word was God.

I can observe that He is the antecedent of (or connects to) Word.

Keep doing that with whatever text you’re looking at, and resist the urge to skip to interpretation. You might find it helpful to also jot down any questions you have while you’re observing. You might come back to them as you move onto interpretation or application, or even as you read and study further into the book of the Bible. Once you’ve observed all that you can observe, now you’re ready to move onto interpretation.

Interpretation

We sometimes come to this step from a wrong angle. We ask, “What does this mean for me?” before we ask, “What did the author intend for this to mean?”

The Bible can’t mean something for us that it didn’t mean for its original audiences. That can be hard for us to grasp, especially when Bible verses are taken out of context all the time (on home decor, t-shirts, blog articles, in conversation, etc.). 

After you’ve observed your text, you’re ready to take a crack at interpretation because you’ve established the foundation of what you’re reading. Now that you know the background, you can ask, “What does this text mean? What is the author trying to say?”

Let’s look at the John text again:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.”

So, what is John trying to communicate in these two sentences? Consider that for a few minutes and jot down your thoughts.

This is also the step where you might want to reference study helps, like commentaries. I don't have a physical copy of any commentaries, but I do like to use Blue Letter Bible and Logos to deepen my study. Before you hop into a study help, try to come up with the meaning on your own. It will help you to stretch your understanding and hopefully better grasp the text.

Thanks to our background work last week and our observations this week, we can probably gather that the Word is referring to Jesus. John is letting us know in just these two verses that Jesus has always existed. He wasn’t created. He was with God at the beginning and He is God.

There’s more we could draw from this text, especially if we read a few verses further, but I’ll keep it short for today. (You can keep repeating these steps for yourself, though!) Now you’ve done the observational and interpretational work, so we can move onto our final step.

Application

The Bible isn’t just something we study. It’s also something we live out! We live it out well by reading, studying and understanding what God says through it.

We’ll discuss application a bit more next week because I want you to really focus on observation and interpretation this week. That being said, let’s take a brief look at the application of John 1:1–2 today:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.”

We’ve written down our observations, and we know that John is establishing the deity of Jesus through this introduction. Now we’re ready to ask, “What does this mean for me? How can I apply this to my life, to my community, to my church?”

Ask yourself those questions. If you’ve been writing down your notes so far, then write down your responses to these questions as well.

If part of what John wants his audience to know is that Jesus is God, not just some other prophet or good teacher, then how should we respond? With the reverence Christ is due! We can trust that the Bible is authoritative and trustworthy for our lives because Jesus is the Word made flesh and He is God!

You might have gathered some other things as you studied today or throughout the week. We’d love to hear about them and how you observed, interpreted, and applied the Bible. Let us know what you learned by commenting on this post or sending us an email—we can’t wait to hear from you!