I have a half cork board, half chalkboard thing hanging on a wall in my room. Yesterday I decided I was going to use it for more than writing random things on it so it isn’t empty.  I decided that every week I would pick a word to focus on, pray about, study in the Bible, and try to really live out.  I wrote the word “Humility.”  I then proceeded to go to Books-a-Million and buy a journal that I would use for word studies. I started my word study tonight and I just wanted to share with y’all how things are going so far and why I find this so neat.

I started with the definition of the word and its synonyms.  I then proceeded to get out my NIV study Bible and I flipped to the dictionary/concordance and found “humility.”  Then I got out another NIV Bible and my VOICE Bible for translation comparisons and found verses about humility in the concordance and writing them in the journal. As I was going along, I noticed a lot of common themes about humility – for example, humility and wisdom go hand in hand – and wrote those in, too. Next, I’m going to look into verses linked to the word “humble” and add those.

So that’s the “how things are going so far” part, now to the “why I find word studies so neat” part.  We often read the Bible a book at a time – I’m currently in Job.  We’ll read different books and notice that the Bible talks about “patience” or “kindness” or “insert word here,” but it’s really cool when you do it backwards and take a word and then see how it is spread across the Bible. You get to see how one word can relate in so many different ways and you get a fuller view of the word.  Also, that one word can lead to many different words, i.e. wisdom, which starts a whole other study in itself! Which. Is. So. Cool.

So I encourage you to take the time to do a word study and see where it takes you and see what God shows you through it. God’s Word is powerful.

Photo Credit: Cathy Mü