One of my favorite ways to study the Bible is with word studies. I love digging into a specific word and variations of the word to find out all I can in both the Old and New Testaments. I do not think anything can take the place of reading and studying the Bible book by book and verse by verse and I find the greatest capacity in sitting under expository preaching. However, dutiful study of words in the Bible is also profitable and is quite the adventure! I never know where a word search will take me in God’s Word and in what context I will find myself engulfed. 

It was many decades ago that I was challenged by a teacher to use The Proverbs as a reading plan for one year. The challenge was to pick a word and its variations to search for that word/s in The Proverbs each month. At the end of one year, a person would have read through The Proverbs twelve times and researched, of sorts, twelve words. I took the challenge and it changed the way I valued the gift of the written word and the beauty and complexity of God’s Holy Word. Though not a Greek scholar by any means, I began using Strong’s Concordance, Greek, and other old fashion reference books to dig deeper into biblical words and their meanings. That one year in The Proverbs actually set me on a more deliberate path of writing in various forms for a living and for charity and just for the fun of it.

For a multiple of reasons that don’t seem very important now, in the last decade I lost the “fun of it” piece of writing…anything. And then I lost the joy of reading (really reading, not just haphazardly) and then I just lost joy because I wasn’t studying and showing myself approved by God by truly being in His Word, the Bible.

Begin Here gives a quick guide in reading The Proverbs in a word study!

But God! He is so very faithful! He has brought me back to The Proverbs and His Words! No lightning bolts. No earthquakes. Not even a knock on the side of the head could jolt me out of my desperation and bring joy and peace back to me. It was just a little thing called a virus…a microbe…a tiny enemy to the human body. Even today we see our word as “Before Covid” and “After Covid”. And even though it brought me physical challenges, I can honestly say that Covid was actually a teacher of sorts for me and I thank God that He opened my ears to hear Him clearly once again. Coming back to a daily study in Proverbs is just one piece of my journey to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. (Westminster Shorter Catechism)

In the midst of continued horrible human events, God has rescued me and guided me back to joy in Him and not just for a few moments, but daily. He has used and is continuing to use The Proverbs and the wealth of words within this mind-blowing book! In this series; 31 Days in The Proverbs, I share just a fraction of that wealth and commit the results of your readership to our Creator God!

Thank you for reading and I pray you will find great joy in the revelations you find in God’s Word! 

(All Scripture quotations are from the 1995 NASB Bible Translation unless otherwise noted.)