Topical Method

   Hope you are enjoying yourself and getting into the Bible Study habit. It will take time to be comfortable in Bible Study. Take it easy and don't strain If you are a Christian you have the Holy Spirit living within you. He is the teacher. He will help you discover deep truth-- those vains of truth found in Scripture.
  Today's method I want to share with you is known as the Topical Method It follows a vein of deep spiritual truth running through the Bible.
   The steps to this method are three.

1.  Coillect all the references in which the topic appears
2.   Compare or classify the material
3.   Construct a chart or organize the material in some other way.

    Remember I told you earlier to have a pad with you and a writing instrument. In this method you will be using them.

    So you start off by collecting all the reference to the topic. If you were doing the judgements, for example, in the Bible you would look up the word judgement and all the related terms in a concordance. Hint-- there are over four hundred references , so you will need to narrow it some.
   Let us say you are using the book of Ephesains for this study. You want to collect all the references by reading through the book and jotting down all the occurences of your topic. You would  thus get the topic in what is known as context . Sometimes you will need your concordancce to note the words used in the Greek or Hebrew. Hate to inform you but soemtimes the original Greek or Hebrew word in not always translated by the same English word.
    Next you compare. You will need to compare and clarify the teaching gleaned from the references This will depend on your purpose for this study.
     Finally you construct a chart. Or at the most you will be organizing the material in a logical manner.. You want to be able to pass this material on to others. Some places to pass it on is in your Sunday School class. Or in your small group. If you are able to explain it to another it will help you in understanding it better for yourself.


    Please use the comments link on the bottom of this post to keep in touch.

     Next time we will look at outlining