Personal Bible Study: A New Approach

Personal Bible study is important to spiritual growth.  Yet sometimes it seems dry and tasteless.  Or I don’t feel motivated to do in-depth word-studies or make a list of detailed observations from the passage… So usually I end up just reading the Bible. (Which, by the way, isn’t at all a bad thing!)

However, I recently came across a new approach to reading and  breaking down a passage that I’m finding to be quite enjoyable and profitable!

It goes by the self-explanatory name of Phrasing.

In its most simplistic form, phrasing is just taking a set of verses and visually identifying each phrase and the relationship each phrase has to the phrase next to it.

Let me show you what I mean: 

I’m working through doing a few verses each day from 1 Thessalonians.  Here’s how I phrased 1:2-3:
 

2 We give thanks to God always 

                    for you all,

                                 making mention of you in our prayers.

           3                    Remembering without ceasing

                                              your work of faith,

                                             and labour of love,

                                             and patience of hope
                      
                                                                           in our Lord Jesus Christ,

                                            in the sight of God and our Father;

As you can see, each phrase is placed directly underneath the word it is related to.  In other words, “for you all” from verse 2 is placed under “thanks” because it is telling us for what or who Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy are thanking God for.  “Making mention of you in our prayers” then is also placed under “thanks” because it gives us further detail of how they’re giving thanks. 

In verse 3, there is a list of how Paul is remembering the Thessalonians: He mentions their work, their labor, and their patience of hope.  And because this hope is in the Lord Jesus, the phrase is placed under the word “hope.” 

The relationship of“in the sight of God and our Father” was trickier to determine.  Does it refer back to the work, labor, and patience of the Thessalonians?  Or does the phrase  more closely qualify their hope in Christ? 

After reading and re-reading the verse, I concluded that it modified the list of work, labor, and patience, instead of just their hope. To properly reflect this then, I placed the phrase “In the sight of God and our Father” directly under the words work, labor, and patience.

And that’s pretty much all there is to phrasing! Can you see how simply breaking down a passage into phrases and then arranging the phrases to reflect their relationship to each other is helpful in understanding what the passage is saying?  It is amazing how clear a passage becomes when you take the time to just look at the words and identify their relationship to each other! 

I’m thankful to have come across this method and appreciate its contribution to my time in the Word. 

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In case you want to learn more about the technicalities of phrasing, here are some resources to get you started:

>  These posts were what originally introduced me to the approach of phrasing:  How We Study the Bible and Find Phrases. 

>  In doing a little searching online, I came across the actual chapters from Mounce’s book at this website…available for free download HERE!