Thursday, March 6, 2008, Part 1
IDEA: The observation of a passage begins by reading the entire book in which it is found.
PURPOSE: To have listeners understand the importance of context to the understanding of a passage.
Suppose you've decided to drive from New York to San Francisco. In addition to a road-worthy automobile and money for gas, what do you need? You need a good map.
How do you use a map? First, you need to get the overview of the journey. Then you get to the details.
I. What is the overview we take as we approach how to study the Bible? There are three phases: observation, interpretation, application.
What do these phases mean?
Observation asks, "What does the text say?" What is actually there? Interpretation asks, "What does the text mean?" Application asks, "What does the text mean to me?"
The three phases build on one another.
You don't start your Bible study by asking, "What does this mean to me?" You start by asking, "What does this passage actually say?"
Then what did it mean to the people to whom it was written? When you've answered those questions, you can then ask, "What does this mean to me?"
On the letterhead of policy letters sent out periodically to the managing directors of the Allied Stores Corp. is the following:
To look is one thing.
To see what you look at is another.
To understand what you see is a third.
To learn from what you understand is still something else. But to ACT on what you learn is all that really matters.
II. To observe the passage you're studying, you must see it in its context.
Many of the books of the Bible were written as a whole, not as a group of parts.
Therefore, read the whole book of the Bible in one sitting.
As obvious as that seems, most people do not do it. Why not?
Most letters of the New Testament can be read in less than 30 minutes.
A letter like Philippians was probably dictated by Paul at one sitting and read by the church at one gathering.
The Gospels can be read in 90 minutes or less.
While you read you're looking for the way the book is put together and what its major messages are.
Sometimes just taking notes can help you.
After you've looked at the whole book, then look at the passages before and after the passage that you 're studying.
Do you see any connections? A passage does not appear by itself, it is always related to what surrounds it. There's more wisdom in understanding the context of a passage than understanding the details of the passage. The context gives you the flow of thought.
You need to get a bird's-eye view before you go for the worm's-eye view.