It's been interesting as I read the posts going back and forth in my Inductive Bible Study forum. Some of the people are quite assured of themselves. I simply figure they have no idea what is about to hit them. Others are a bit panicked because they realize that this is much more intense than they originally thought.
The fourth step in IBS is Application ... getting what you have learned off the page and into yourself. Start with the big ideas and then move into the specific points. Isn't that interesting? Sometimes we get so caught up in the itty bitty details of scripture that we forget what the big information is all about. When God says love your neighbor as yourself, we get all wrapped up in what we are supposed to do to make that happen. When Paul tells us what the fruit of the Spirit is in Galatians 5, we instead focus on each segment rather than his general teaching of living fully in the Spirit. Big to small ... encompass it all.
One of the coolest things I read is the impact of Inductive Bible Study on the community. As we transform our lives, we are doing this to transform our community. In the Old Testament, God was redeeming the entire nation of Israel. Everything they did in relationship to Him was as a community. Today we focus on the redemption of ourselves, forgetting how this works within the community.
After we apply scripture, we finish by working through Correlation - seeing how what we have learned correlates with the entirety of scripture and then how it correlates with the rest of our life learning.
While this may look daunting, I believe that IBS is something that can become a part of our daily scripture lives. I'm kind of looking forward to working through it this semester and see if I can fully translate this information into something that is doable for us.
4. Application
a. Begin with major principles
i. Central points
ii. General principles
b. Ideas and Actions
i. Growth in both inner and outer lives
ii. Scripture affects and changes the reality of daily life
c. Corporate and Individual
i. Individuals are members of community
ii. Transformation of the community is God’s goal
d. Positive and Negative will occur
i. Affirmation / Rebuking
ii. Comfort / Confrontation
iii. Assurance / Unsettling
e. Probes and Questions
i. Apply to entire life – every aspect
ii. Application questions
1. How does this affirm God, Jesus, me, others, the world
2. Confirm goodness due to God’s grace
3. Confess what sins are brought up
4. What should change now
5. What should my prayers be?
5. Correlation
a. Connect passage to entire Biblical message
b. Make generalizations from the specifics
c. Means
i. Topical studies
ii. Passages that relate to each other
d. Connect passage with learning outside of Scripture
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment