The other day, I shared a post about three key questions that the writer always asks during any bible study. You can read that post here. I thought the questions were good ones if you were doing a bible study from scratch with people. So, turning to a passage cold, these are the kind of questions I would want to be asking too. They are certainly three good questions to get anybody going on personal bible study.

However, my experience is that often we spend so long on the first two questions that the third one gets edged out. The three questions in the post were:

1. What do you notice?
2. What’s the flow of thought?
3. How can we apply this?

It’s that third one – interestingly often in our sermons too – that gets nudged out as we spend most of our time thinking about the text, what we have noticed and what the flow of thought is. We’re quite good at getting the ‘what is this saying?’ and the ‘what does this mean?’ questions covered. We’re much less good at meaningfully getting to the heart of the ‘How can we apply this?’ question.

One way we have tried to address this is not to come to passages cold in our bible studies. So, at our midweek community groups, we don’t look at a new passage nor do we work through a book or course that runs concurrently with whatever we’re doing on Sundays. Instead, we take the passage we looked at on Sunday – that was preached to us – and then we spend much more time thinking about the ‘what does this mean for us?’ question.

There are several advantages of doing things this way. First, whilst we might ask ‘what did you notice?’ or ‘what’s the flow of thought?’ we spend much less time here. Most people ‘notice’ the things that the sermon pointed out that stood out to them. Someone can notice something entirely legitimate that isn’t the main point of the passage. In that second instance, we are able to spend a bit of time midweek thinking about a side-issue whilst being clear on Sunday that it isn’t the main point of the passage.

Second, it means we can spend more time pointedly applying the passage into the lives of the people in front of us. Sermons of 40-minutes have to spend a good chunk of time explaining the passage to get to the application necessarily limiting the time applying it. But bible studies building on sermons that have already explained the passage can spend most of the hour making sure we are actually applying the passage to ourselves. We have already done the work of understanding what the passage means and working out its main point(s). We can spend the time midweek unpicking what that means for us in the varied aspects of our lives.

Third, the main points of the sermon can be reiterated. I don’t presume everybody remembers everything I have to say just because I said it once. I, frankly, don’t remember everything I preached word-for-word and I spent a darn sight more time thinking about it, preparing it and delivering it than anybody did listening to it. If I can’t remember everything I said, it’s a tall order to expect everybody in the congregation to do so. That being the case, revisiting what we said midweek – without just rehashing everything as it was in the sermon – is a great way to help people actually remember the key points that they should be taking away and applying to themselves as they go about their lives.

Fourth, we have to accept that most people listen to sermons and engage in bible study not so much to just understand what this passage means but to really understand what God wants me to do with this. Sermons and bible studies that spend too much time just unpacking the text tend to lack application and not scratch where most people are itching. Don’t mishear me here, we have to properly unpack the text to get to the legitimate things that God wants us to hear and apply just how we are to do respond rightly to them. But we so often forget the task is not just an intellectual exercise to understand some text; it is to meaningfully apply the text so people can live in line with God’s revealed will for their lives. I think this means we have to spend more time in application than we typically do. but sermons cannot do all the applying alone so it helps if, for an hour midweek, rather than focusing on the ‘what does this mean?’ question, we devote most the time – having already answered that on Sunday – to the ‘what should I do with it?’ question.

So, whilst I think the three questions laid out in the linked post are really good for reading a passage from cold, I am convinced it is better not to come to passage cold in the first place. I think it is more helpful to take the passage that we have already taught, take what we have already shown people what it means, and help them to see how to move from what it means to how to apply it. That isn’t to put the work of expository teaching in second place. It is to recognise it for what it is: the foundation upon which we point people to what God would have them do and be.