How to Hear God When You Study the Bible | POWERFUL Bible Study Tips for Women

After over 20 years of reading, studying, and teaching the Bible, I know what makes for a powerful and life-changing bible study. If I had known 20 years ago what I know now, I could have saved a lot of confusion, doubt, and fear when it comes to studying God’s Word. But you can avoid all that by watching this video because today I’m going to share the most powerful tips I’ve learned about studying the bible so you can take your studying to the next level. Enjoy!

I taught my first Bible study as a sophomore in college as part of a campus organization called the Impact Movement. Throughout the week, we held Bible studies on different parts of campus. At the time, I was newly rededicated to Christ, and despite having no experience, I felt a strong urge to lead a Bible study. Impact made it simple by providing all the necessary materials, but it was still quite the ambitious endeavor.

Every week, I reserved a conference room on campus and met with two to three people, including my best friend, Shade, who attended nearly every study I led. It was a humble beginning for what would grow into a Bible-teaching ministry I couldn’t have anticipated. I’ve written with Proverbs 31 Ministries, YouVersion Bible app, and reached millions through Beloved. Being in a leadership position, I ensured I studied the Bible on my own for myself, which has been a consistent practice for years. Despite the abundance of study guides, online sermons, and podcasts, nothing compares to hearing from God directly through His Word. This is why it’s so important to learn the skill of reading and studying the Bible on your own.

Bible study can seem intimidating, especially if you think it’s only for theologians or pastors. But everyone has to start somewhere. When I began, I had no theology degree or experience—just my Bible and God. If you have that, you have the makings of a very enriching and life-changing study life. In today's video, I want to share some of the most important lessons I’ve learned about reading and studying the Bible. These tips will help you level up your own study and most importantly, build your confidence in hearing God through His Word.

In this video, you will learn:

• The 4 important steps every Bible study must include
• The best way to approach reading the Bible for accurate interpretation
• What you should always look for when studying your Bible to ensure you are really hearing from God. 

📚 4 steps of Bible study

📖 How to accurately read the Bible

✝️ What to look for when you study

Disclaimer: This is going to be A LOT of information. Take what you need and reserve the rest for later. 

Before diving into the tips, we must understand the purpose of Bible study. The purpose is to gain a better understanding of God and our relationship with Him. The Bible is God’s love letter to His people, telling the story of Jesus Christ. Even in the Old Testament, we see Jesus through the pages and stories leading up to His victory over sin and death, allowing us to come into a relationship with God.

I've learned that there are four crucial steps in every Bible study, which I call the four R's: Read, Reflect, Respond, and Request. This method has been used by thousands of women in our Beloved Women community to deepen their understanding of the scriptures. I’ll go through each of the four R's and provide simple tips for each part to help you not just know God’s Word, but experience His love and transform your life.

READ:

The first step in studying the Bible is to actually read the Bible, but you don't read the scriptures like you would read any other book for entertainment or recreation. The Bible is not a history book, a poetry book, a prophecy book, or a book of laws. It’s all the above. (More on that later)

But before you can begin to study any text in the scriptures, you're going to have to read the Bible. I think that this is pretty self-explanatory and if you want to know how to figure out where to start reading in your Bible if you're a beginner or how to choose a scripture to study, then I have two videos that I'll link below where I walk you through that process, but for now I want to give you a few tips for Bible reading.

TIP 1: PRAY BEFORE YOU READ YOUR BIBLE

The first tip is to pray before you read the bible. You want to prayerfully approach God's Word as a surrendered act to realize and remember that God is with you in this process. I love to say “Bible study is not what we do for God; it's what we do with God.” When we start our Bible study with praying to God and asking Him to speak to us, to teach us, and to guide us in this time, God will answer our prayers and it also takes a lot of the pressure off of ourselves where we feel like we have to figure everything out and know everything because the truth is we don't. Remember, the Bible is God's gift to us and it is His desire to reveal to us its meaning so that we can better connect with Him. I provide a detailed list of what to pray before you study your Bible in my free Bible study toolkit linked below.

TIP 2: READ IN CONTEXT

Next, you want to make sure that you read whatever text you're reading in the Bible in full context. This means studying the surrounding verses of your scripture, its containing chapter, or even book. (You can do this over time) Reading the surrounding scripture ensures you’re pulling out the intended meaning of the verse and can prevent a lot of misinterpretation. 

It’s kind of like when only a clip of a video goes viral online and everyone is so upset about it, but when you see the full video, it gives a completely different meaning to the short 10 second clip of the video that you saw. 

When it comes to our Bible study, we don’t want to make conclusions from one verse without reading and understanding the verse in its full context. So when you study your Bible, you want to read it in full context, meaning not just one verse here or there, (that’s fine for a devotion or quiet time) but not for Bible study. 

Reading in full context also gives you an opportunity to better understand the background or the surrounding events of what it is that you are reading, so that you have a little bit more information to understand why this particular text was written or why this particular event happened which is important for you to know as you study the Bible.

TIP 3: UNDERSTAND THE GENRE OF THE TEXT YOU ARE READING

Next, you want to understand the genre of scriptures that you are reading. As I've stated before, the Bible is not like a normal book because it consists of many types of genres or literary types that impact how you will understand and interpret that particular scripture. Those genres include poetry that you'll see in the Psalms, there is history that we see a lot of in the Old Testament outlining the events that took place surrounding God's chosen people, there is prophecy that shares what is to come, there are the gospels that outline the ministry of Jesus Christ, and there are Epistles or letters that were written by our church fathers to specific churches that we find in the New Testament. I share more about these different genres in the Bible study toolkit. Knowing which type of genre you are reading in the Bible matters because you wouldn't treat poetry the same way that you would treat history, when it comes to pulling out the meaning and the interpretation of the text.

TIP 4: READ MORE THAN ONCE AND DIFFERENT VERSIONS

When it comes to reading your Bible, I definitely encourage you to read the text more than one time and even in different translations. This will give you a more well-rounded understanding of what you're reading. What I like to do is read the text one time just to read it to get a broad overview of the scripture, but then I like to read it a second time with the intention of focusing on what points really stand out to me, what themes do I see pop out, what lessons immediately grab my attention, and I write those things down or I highlight and underline those points. This is also the time where I write down any questions that I have as I'm reading the text and these questions will serve as points to start with when I actually get to the next part of the 4 “R” Bible study method which is to reflect.

REFLECT:

Reflecting is where we actually pull out the meaning of the text and look for one of three things: promises to believe, principles to live by, or commands to follow. 

TIP 5: CHOOSE A BIBLE STUDY METHOD

In order to do this, my next tip that I highly suggest is that you choose a Bible study method to study your text. A Bible study method provides specific steps for reading and studying your Bible. So, for example, I'm sharing with you the 4 “R” Bible study method that I use which is to read, reflect, respond and request. 

First, you read the text to understand what the Bible is actually saying and what is happening in this text. Next, you reflect on the text to pull out lessons and meaning from the text. Third, you respond to the text which means you discover ways that you can apply what you've learned to your own life. Finally, request means that you pray about what you learned and for the power to apply those lessons to your life. 

The 4 “R” Bible study method is similar to the S.O.A.P Bible study method that stands for scripture, observation, application, and prayer. There is the inductive Bible study method which involves reading the text and asking specific questions that follow a who, what, when, where, why and how format.

There is a verse mapping method where you select a verse and highlight key words in the verse by looking up their definitions, translations, and cross references or other places that word is found in scripture. This is a good approach to use for a word study where you study a particular word in the Bible.

The character study method focuses on the people in the text to learn about God’s character based on how He moved in their lives.

A topical study method focuses on one topic in the Bible and will usually include various scriptures that reveal biblical truths about that topic. Topics can include womanhood, prayer, hope, and more. Check out that Bible study toolkit for a list of topics you can study with correlating scriptures about that topic.

Each method has specific steps to take as you study the text with the purpose of helping you to understand what you are reading and apply it to your life. The goal is always the same: to help you live out what you are learning. 

The benefit of a Bible study method is it gives you a system by which you can approach God’s Word that you can use repeatedly to make it easier for you to study God’s word consistently.

If your Bible study is not pointing you to Jesus and empowering you to become more like Him, you’re either doing it wrong or you need a new method.

TIP 6: LOOK FOR JESUS

This leads to my next tip: your study of the Bible is not a self help book to only make you a better person. Fun fact: it’s not about you at all. This book is all about Jesus. Yes, it’s about His love for you and how you can become like Him, but it’s not all about us like some have made it. This means your study should always lead you to Jesus. It should reveal His character, His story, and His love. No matter if you’re reading the Old or New Testament; look for Jesus. 

In the Beloved Membership App, we’re studying the Book of Esther. While the book does not directly mention God's name, we see His character and providence in every chapter.

There’s a point where a law has been created to kill all of God's people, and now a new law must be written to provide a way to save them. This is a beautiful reflection of how the law in the Old Testament reveals our sin, yet does not save us and still leaves us open to death, but the new law of the Spirit through Jesus provides a way of salvation and life. The entire Bible is a reflection of the Gospel story of God saving us even in the most unassuming parts of the Bible.

So, how can we find Jesus in the text? We must familiarize ourselves with the Gospel story. To do that, we must study what the Bible teaches us about Jesus. Now, this takes time, so don’t be discouraged. This is why we also have commentaries.

TIP 7: KNOW HOW TO USE COMMENTARIES

A commentary is a resource you can use while studying that provides observations and interpretations of a text in the Bible. In short, it helps your understanding of the text from someone else, usually someone who put a lot of time and work into studying that particular text, although there are some good whole Bible commentaries like the one from Dr. Tony Evans that I use all the time. So commentaries are like notes from someone else’s Bible study which is great, BUT my next tip is that you need to know how to use a commentary to get the most out of it.

For one, always read the scripture yourself before you open a commentary. God wants to speak to you directly and not through someone else. So practice the tips I shared at the beginning of this video, read the text a few times, and write down your observations and what you think it means. Then write any questions the text brings up that you can’t find the answer to. Once you’ve done this for yourself, then select a commentary to read. I would stick to 1 to 3 depending on how deep you want to go and read those commentaries to see if they noticed the same observations as you, if they provide any background that you didn’t know, (and think how that changes your original understanding of what the scripture means) and does this commentary answer any of the questions you wrote down while studying.

A commentary is not a Bible study; it is a resource to help confirm or correct your own observations as you study and provide insight you might not yet have on your own. 

Pro tip: Here are some other resources you can use:

• A Bible dictionary that gives you the biblical meaning of words in the Bible
• A Bible concordance that lists all the places you can find a particular word or phrase in the Bible.
• A Bible lexicon that gives the Greek or Hebrew translation of words in the Bible. 

Now the cool thing is you can find all of these resources in a digital format. 

TIP 8: USE TECHNOLOGY TO YOUR ADVANTAGE 

Studying the Bible has never been easier, so my next tip is to use technology to your advantage! Have you ever forgotten a Bible verse and quickly searched in Google the few words you could remember to find what you were looking for in fractions of a second? Well I do it all the time and every time I do, I thank God for the resources we have to make Bible study that much more accessible.

So don’t be afraid to embrace new technologies when it comes to studying your Bible. I know that a lot of Christians are very weary of AI or artificial intelligence especially when it comes to studying the Bible, but what we have to realize about AI or any technology for that matter is that it is only as good as the information that we put into it and the person using that particular tool. So what that means is if you have a false teacher, it doesn't matter if they are using a new King James commentary or chat GPT. They are going to come up with erroneous interpretations of the scripture. What we need to focus on is developing believers with a heart to truly understand God's truth and not make it what they want it to be. With that, you can then leverage technology to study the Bible even more deeply and faster than before. 

I know some of you are still skeptical, but hear me out. A few years ago, I was writing a study for Beloved Women and I was listening to a sermon from John Piper that he delivered before I was even born, and in the sermon he was sharing that PCs or personal computers were just becoming more popular during that time. He was expressing excitement about this new technology that a lot of other Christians may have been skeptical about, yet he saw how much of an advantage it would give to a Bible teacher Pastor like himself. Now many years later, he's written so many books and many resources using the PC and now we all have embraced the use of a personal computer. Artificial Intelligence, like a Chat GPT is probably going to be much of the same, and I don't know why it is that Christians are usually slower to the technology curves, probably because we are afraid or skeptical of being misled or deceived and I understand that, but we also need to walk in the Spirit, and make sure that we are not being led by a spirit of fear. 

With that in mind, here are a few of the apps and websites that I absolutely love to use to help me study my Bible:

Apps & Websites I use:

• Logos Bible Software
• Blue Letter Bible
• The YouVersion Bible App
• Beloved Women App
• Google Docs
• Google search
• Openbible.info/topics
• BibleHub.com

If you’d like me to share more about these apps and websites and how I use them, just let me know in the comments and I can make another video. 

TIP 9: MESS UP YOUR BIBLE

As you’re studying and reflecting on the text, my next tip is to not be afraid to mess up your Bible. Bookmark, write notes, highlight, circle and underline! 

Charles Spurgeon once said, "A Bible that is falling apart usually belongs to someone who isn't."

Now, your Bible doesn’t have to be completely falling apart, but the sentiment is to use it often and mess it up because the point is a clean life, not a clean Bible. But, pro tip: if you’re like me and you like your things a bit more put together or you cringe at the thought of permanently altering your Bible, use erasable pens and highlighters. 

TIP 10: KNOW WHAT BIASES AND EXPERIENCES YOU BRING TO THE TEXT

The next tip that I want to give you for studying your Bible, which is very important that a lot of people overlook, is to know what biases and experiences you bring to the text. We are all different and have different experiences and backgrounds and even just the way that we process information and how we think is different. While much of that makes us who we are and helps us to see the Bible in ways that other people may not be able to see, it's important to have a well-rounded approach to studying your Bible, meaning understanding what those biases that you may have and how someone else that's different from you would understand a particular text or verse in the Bible. 

There is only one truth, and so our interpretation of the scripture should be able to be applied and true for anyone regardless of their circumstance or their experiences. One important way that we can expound on how we view the world that will impact how we study the Bible is to ensure that we have a diversity in the resources that we read, the people that we interact with, and more. Read commentaries written by people who don't look like you and don't have similar experiences as you do to give yourself a more well-rounded understanding of how God’s truth applies to everyone. If we're honest, most of these resources that are written are highly popularized and are written by older white men, so it is important that we're intentional to learn the Bible from other perspectives. 

RESPOND:

Now, there’s no point in doing all of this studying and understanding the text and having an accurate interpretation of the scripture if it doesn’t change your life. What that means is one of the most important parts of Bible study is called application or in my 4 “R” Bible study method, it is the third R that stands for respond. This is essentially us using what we’ve learned from the scripture and determining how we will actually apply it to our everyday lives so that we can live it out. As followers of Christ, the Word of God serves to share God’s love with us in a way that actually changes us so that we can not just know the Word, but so that we can embody the Word. This is what changes lives, families, communities, and the world. So here are a few tips on how to do just that.

TIP 11: BE A DOER OF THE WORD

For each lesson that you’ve pulled out from your study of the Bible, think of a practical way you can live that lesson out. So, for example, if you’re reading Philippians 4:6 and you learned that we are called not to worry, but to pray, you might make a commitment to start a prayer journal or a habit of praying every morning before you get out of bed and then you actually do that thing. 

The Bible tells us that the Word of God is living and active, which means that it is applicable to our everyday lives and that God is speaking to us through the scriptures. He’s not speaking to us just to be heard, He is speaking to us so that we will be changed, so that as we approach the scripture to study, it’s not just about learning facts and history and details about the text although those things are important, it’s about coming to a conclusion on how we live out what we’ve learned.

At the end of the book of Philippians, the Apostle Paul tells the church at Philippi to put into practice all of the things that he’s taught them and that they’ve seen him do himself. Practice is something that you do habitually with the intention of getting better at it. That means when you start off with a practice, usually you are not very good at it, but as you do it more and more, you get better and better. Bible study helps to uncover the important spiritual practices that we need to implement in our lives so that we can become more like Jesus. The purpose of a practice is not perfection, because we will not experience perfection on this side of eternity, but the purpose of practice is progress. This is called spiritual growth which is one of the key benefits of Bible study, as it gives knowledge and creates a path for us to grow spiritually if we actually act on what we learn.

TIP 12: LET GOD LEAD YOUR STUDY

Now, when it comes to growing spiritually, this is something that we do with God and so my next tip is to ensure that we aren’t only selecting scriptures that we feel like we need. It’s important that we really seek the Lord as I shared before when I talked about the importance of praying before you study.  This should include asking God to lead you in what to study. God sees and knows the inner parts of our hearts even more than we do, and He knows what we need and what applications we need to apply to our lives even when we don’t know ourselves. 

So don’t only choose a text to study based on what you think you need, but be led by God. Even if you get to a particular part in your study where you feel like this doesn’t apply to me, don’t tune out because you never know when God‘s living and active Word is going to illuminate an area in your life or your heart that He wants to transform. So when it comes to applying God’s truth to your life, you want to keep an open heart and you definitely don’t want to put God in a box and feel like He can only speak to you through one topic or area based on your feelings or circumstances. That’s good sometimes, but be open to studying different parts of the Bible that you might not have thought to study before because God is speaking through every single word on the pages of your Bible, and you don’t want to miss it because one word from God can completely change your life.

REQUEST:

Now, both you and I know that living out God's Word is not the easiest thing to do in the world, which is why the last part of my four-part Bible study method stands for request. 

TIP 13: Use your study to shape your prayers

This means using what you’ve learned to shape your prayers to God so that you can receive His power to actually live out what you’ve discovered by studying your Bible. In short, my last tip is to pray about what you studied so that God can help you live out what you’ve studied. Prayer unlocks God’s power in our lives and when it comes to living like Jesus and becoming more like Him, we don’t need willpower, as much as we need God’s power and we get that power through prayer.

CLOSING 

In just a few minutes, you’ve learned 20 years of Bible study tips and maybe that feels like a lot, but if there is one point I want to leave you with is this: Bible study gets deeper the longer you do it and a little consistent study each day will go a long way. So I invite you to click here to learn more about my 4 “R” Bible study method that can make studying God’s Word both simple and life changing.

For more encouragement, download my free Bible Study called “Worry-Free” to learn the 3 lies feeding your worry and the truth to set you free at belovedwomen.org. Thanks for watching, and until next time, be beautiful, be blessed, and beloved.