Page 21 - Homiletics I Student Textbook

Mechanics of Expository Preaching – The Preparation Phase I

The Process of Bible Study

Most scholars reduce this method of Bible study down to a simple three-step process, that of
observation, interpretation, and application.
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1. Observation answers the question, “What do I see?”

If you want to dig out real gold from the Bible – if you desire to pull out of God’s Word some of the
serious “meat” that he has placed there for us to sink our teeth into – you have to exert considerable
effort. It takes work – hard work! And you, the reader, have to decide whether you are content with
shallow “baby food” that comes from casual reading or whether you want to work for the “mature food”
that comes from serious reading.
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Being a serious reader of God’s Word is about practicing good skills of observation. Observation is more
than seeing words on a page. As Sherlock Holmes once said, “You see, but you do not observe.”
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With all that we are exposed to in a given day, it’s very easy to miss the details unless we take the time
to stop and purposefully observe that which we see. The same is true in our study of God’s Word. Verses
that we’ve seen a hundred times typically hold truths that are never unpacked simply because our skills
of observation are weak.

29 Hendricks & Hendricks, 35.
30 J. Scott Duvall & J. Daniel Hays, Grasping God’s Word, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 29.
31 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” in Grasping God’s Word, J. Scott Duvall & J Daniel Hayes (Grand Rapids:
Zondervan, 2005), 67.
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