Arcing

I recently discovered a pretty awesome way to study God's Word for personal devotions. It's called arcing. Basically, "arcing involves dividing the text into its propositions and then noting the logical relationships between the propositions." So then what makes up a proposition (not to be confused with a PREPosition)? John Piper puts it well: "Paragraphs are made up of propositions. These are statements, questions, acclamations. They have a verb, they have a subject, and then other things surrounding those. That's a proposition."

Here, John Piper explains the importance of arcing:


I recently finished the 44-step tutorial on learning how to arc at the website here. It was pretty deep for me, mostly because my English isn't very strong right now. But it was totally awesome!! I loved learning how to arc, and then being able to see the bigger picture of the text that was being looked at. It really helped me to gain insights into God's Word that I wouldn't have been able to see if I hadn't broken up the verses into propositions.

This seems like a great tool to use for sermon or lesson preparation, but I'm planning on using it for my personal devotions; and maybe if I run into some sweet passages of scripture that I really like, I will post my arcs of them here on my blog. They definitely won't be perfect though.

The tool that I have been using (not very faithfully though) is Tim LaHaye's method of personal devotional study. He outlines it in his book "How to Study the Bible For Yourself". I really like his approach to Bible Study and will definitely still use some of the same principles that he recommends. However, I am going to supplement that with some arcing, because frankly, arcing excites me! It really breaks the text up and helps me to delve into the issues of the text that I never have before. My impression has been that only those who have been to bible college or seminary have received training on how to properly exegete (sp?) scripture. But now there is a method for the common, untrained laborer to really wrestle with the text, the author's intent, the nature of the passage, and how that applies to my life??? SWEET!! Sign me up.

I encourage everyone to check it out, if you haven't already.