Where to start your Bible Study

Where to start your Bible Study? is a help article I am writing for those who wish to study the Bible using theWord program. In this article, I am assuming that you already have theWord installed on your computer with a growing number of Christian Bible Reference Library modules. (If you need to add more Christian works to your library, I would suggest you visit my other sites, twmodules.com (General works), https://theword-modules.com/ (Bibles in various formats), https://www.theword-dictionary-modules.com/ for Bible Dictionaries in theWord format, and https://www.theword-commentary-modules.com/ for Bible Commentaries useful for making sermons.

I am also assuming that you are wanting to prepare a sermon, a Sunday School lesson, etc.

First, decide on the main topic

This is where you should start a sermon or Bible study. Get a general topic. This is quite frankly a task that is only between you and God. You must seek a message that God wants you to give to your audience. You must pray about this and focus on exactly what it is that God is moving in your heart to say. If you fail in this task, the thing will turn our poorly.


Dagg Manual of Theology
(and links to this work in various other formats).
Dagg Manual of Theology (MySword for Android)
Dagg Manual of Theology (theWord Bible Format)
Dagg Manual of Theology (esword format)
Dagg Manual of Theology (PDF Format)

Additionally, you need to formulate a concisely phrased statement of this idea. You can expand on it in the sermon, but you need to have something concise and to the point to title your sermon.

Now we turn to theWord to continue your preparation.

Secondly, search for a book on that topic

In theWord program, you need to open a Book View window (F12) and then search for a book in the book locator search box.

search for a book theWord
search for a book theWord

The most information and most specific is if there is an entire book in your library on that topic. For example, if I am preparing a sermon for Easter, then I would search for say atonement. In this book search box, that is where you will find it the quickest.

After you have exhausted those hits, checking out and using any books on your topic, then you need to go deeper into the chapter titles of any book in your library. Here you do a search of all topics (chapters in your modules) for the keyword. Search window for books is F10.

topic search theWord
topic search theWord


First of all, note that what you get is a pure factor of what you already have in your library. The program is not going to find what doesn’t exist. So this is why you should download a lot of theWord modules to have in your library.

Next, note that I changed my search topic from the Atonement to simple Atone because I might have some hits that are only that part of the word, atone, or even atoned. This search will pick this up.

As an added factor in searching, you need to choose what modules you want to search in (normally all or all in a set).

Book search choose what modules theWord
Book search choose what modules theWord


Note that you can choose all or even a specific module layout set. I would recommend for example, if you are reformed, then make a module set of reformed authors, and search that subset of your modules first before searching all modules. This will help you to cut through so many works that are just not helpful for you.

Thirdly, search for the keyword within the text of the topics.

Once you have done the above, this search will only be when your keyword is in the topic of a chapter in a module. Now we want to go deeper into the topics or chapters and try to find information on our sermon within chapters.

search topic contents theWord
search topic contents theWord

In this way, you will pull up hits that are within the chapters or topics of the modules you are searching for.

Note that each time you refine your search, it will take more time to do the searches. Usually the first time you do any search, theWord has to index any modules that are not already indexed, and that will also add to the search time. Once all works are indexed, it will not need to index again.

search in text of topics theword
search in text of topics theword

As you can see in the image above, this is a very detailed and extensive search. Where the book search didn’t bring up a single hit, and the topic search brought up 5 modules (this is a test subset of modules from my library), the content search brought up 1144 hits. So you can go through them and pick what you want.

More posts on Bible Study Methods

See also Bible Searches

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