Transcription
If you want to become a student of scripture, sooner or later you're going to learn how to actually study scripture, not just read it. And what I want to share with you today is the first thing I learned about this over 20 years ago, and the method still stays with me now as I learned how to do it, but it is slowly adapted and changed into the way that I read scripture and engage with it every single time I sit down, and it's called the detailed observation.
So, I've talked about this a lot on the channel and the way that I read and use my Bible and my whole Bible note-taking system with the colors and the pen and that sort of a thing, then it really is just a fancy way of inductive Bible study. And as I was reading last week, I realized that so much of the way I take notes in scripture and I study scripture, all goes back to this one process I learned in seminary in inductive Bible study at Asbury Theological Seminary, and it was a method called the detailed observation. And all it takes is a single [music] sheet of paper. And I want to teach you how to do that in this video. And not just teach you how to do it, if you want something looks a little bit prettier than a single sheet of paper, I actually have a free PDF download where I will send you a copy [music] of this sheet where you can use it in your own Bible study.
So, what's up, friends? I'm Chad Brooks, I'm a pastor here in Louisiana. I make videos about the Bible, the spiritual life, and the everyday life of a pastor. And what I really do a lot on this channel is talk about studying your Bible, marking up your Bible, taking notes in your Bible, all of those sorts of things. And I've got a lot of different colors that I use for that. I'll throw this image up on the screen where you see what my color code system is as of 2026. All of this goes back to it, especially when I think of the primary colors I have in my color coding system of yellow and orange, which are just notes. And then I have a light blue color, which just means questions. And then I've got this reddish color that means research. That's kind of this fundamental understanding of how inductive Bible study works using the detailed observation sheet.
Now, when I was in seminary at Asbury, we had to take two different inductive Bible study classes. And there wasn't really a book for it at point in time. Their whole methodology came from a guy named David Traina, and David Traina had a book that was out of print. And after I left seminary, Dr. Bauer helped him revise it. And it was a massive methodical tome for inductive Bible study. I've got it. I'll go get it real quick and I'll show you what it looks like. Inductive Bible study by David Bauer and Robert Traina is subtitled a comprehensive guide to the practice of hermeneutics, which is a method of reading and understanding scripture. What I will also say is uh Traina trained Eugene Peterson when he was in seminary and uh in New York. We didn't have this when I was in seminary. We just had these tons and tons and tons of printouts on the methodology. And we had to do uh detailed observations quite often. Uh we had to have a second inductive Bible study, and I took Dr. Donahue with Mark, and then I took Dr. Donahue again in the uh inductive Bible study of John. And uh it was the same exact methodology. It was just you already know what to do, so we're not teaching you what to do in the John class. We're just going to kind of go deeper and deeper and deeper. And you know, there's a lot of different methods that are in here. There's a lot of different things, and I might make future videos on those things later on cuz they are absolutely part of my study system. But the kind of beginning point of this methodology is the detailed observation sheet.
So, what is the detailed observation? Let's just get straight into it. First thing you're going to need is a piece of paper or get the free PDF download, which I've got linked below, but it doesn't matter. You can do either one. The next thing you want to do is you want to pick out a pericope of scripture. Now, that's a fancy word, pericope. We can all say it together. But what this is is a segment of scripture that is related. And the easiest and quickest way to do this is just to look at your Bible and see the section heading. Sometimes you might find two or three of these in a single chapter. Sometimes the whole chapter will have a single uh will be a single pericope under the same heading. But you need to pick out what you're going to study in scripture. The detailed observation is not for deep dives into one particular verse. It is for segments of scripture. So, pick out a segment of scripture that you want to study. And then the next is you're going to draw three lines and make three columns down that sheet of paper. Now, the column to the far left is going to be titled observations. The middle column is going to be questions, and the right column is going to be answers. And the next.
And so, now you're just going to start reading scripture. You're really going to focus on those two columns on the far left and in the middle, the observations and the question. Let's talk about what these three columns are. Observations are just that, they're the things you observe. They're the things that you're noticing. They are the things that you are seeing. They're the things that just make you stop and think something bigger might be going on here. Questions are also just that. It's you see something and you specifically have a question. I'm doing an IBS of Ephesians 2:1-10. This is what I'm doing my detailed observation for the sake of this video. And very first verse, I'm like, why is Paul talking about death so much? So, I just wrote that down as a question. Like, what's going on with this death thing? And then the answers, you're not going to worry about that just yet. Your initial pass through this passage is just going to be either noticing things uh and observing things or asking questions. And also, don't feel the need and actually don't try to get both of the things down. Realize that your entry point into a thought will either be an observation or it will be a question. And just start going down the list. You might decide to do the pericope uh from A to Z, like super super deep the whole entire time. Or you might realize that uh you want to do kind of a cursory level first and make a whole pass, then try to go back by and go even more detailed. This is when the paper method of just a blank sheet of paper and the three columns can kind of bite you in the tocus a little bit is because things will get out of order. And yeah, I gave you this PDF sheet to learn from, but the way that I like to do it is to go into Apple Pages, my favorite word uh processing software, and to create this out as a table so I can add as much as I want to and I can always be going back and I can add in uh new rows and delete rows, that sort of thing. That's for the people that are really really doing this a lot and really understand the method. Don't worry about that right now. Uh but once I get either observations or questions and I come to a stopping point, then I try to look at each one. And if I have a question, I try to think about, okay, what is a statement I can observe about this? Uh and it might be simple like, this looks weird to me and I don't understand it. Uh you know, don't feel the need to just try to reduplicate the question, but just make some observation like, this is why I feel like this matters. And go through and hit all of your two columns until you then have both observations and questions in the far left column and the middle question in the middle column. And then you're going to go into the answers. Now, sometimes you might kind of all right already realize the answer. Or if this is a passage you're really familiar with, or if you've done a detailed observation of the pericope right before it, sometimes you can link it in the answers to, oh, this actually refers to chapter 1:17-20 in your answers. Or you might need to go find resources, and that's what study Bibles that's what commentaries, that's what other books about the Bible, that's what, you know, internet searches might be. You might not know the original languages, but you can use a tool like Blue Letter Bible to do that. Also, when doing an observation, it's sometimes really helpful to look at multiple translations to see and understand cuz a lot of times you can understand something better in one trace translation than the other translation. Uh the bigger your detailed observation is, the more effective you might find for it to use multiple translations. And you're going to work through your columns then and give yourself the answers that you need. Uh and once you get that done, you'll have that section. And I just draw a line through if I'm doing this on paper through and kind of each run is over. Uh then you're going to have a full uh sheet filled out with all three columns, and you're going to have a pretty good understanding of what that passage means.
Editing Chad here. I don't know if I was clear enough about this, but what I found out in my own system is that the orange and yellow markers are the observations, that that light blue highlighter is my questions, and the red is my answers. Or most of the time what I'm actually doing is leaving a note that I need to do future research. So, I didn't want to leave y'all hanging cuz I know the types of questions folks normally ask in the comments. So, there you go.
Now, you also might be saying, Chad, when am I going to fit detailed observations into my Bible study schedule? Slowly. This is slow work. This isn't the thing I feel like you do. If you're like me, you read the Bible in the morning and you read the Bible in the evening. And morning for me is the discipline. I do the daily office. Yes, I do use my colors all over the place when doing that, but I'm not trying to study necessarily. I'm just building up that language of scripture in my mind. In the evening is when I like to do study. And for me in my in my life and my rhythm of life, I can do that almost every single evening. But what you might find is, hey, you know, once or twice a week I'm going to have the time to go do more work on this detailed observation. Um this might be a you saying I'm going to read this one book of the Bible really deeply over the course of a year. And you spend the first couple of months of the year just reading the book a couple of times. You might spend uh the second lap through just kind of making some notes and getting some bigger ideas. Then you go in and do a really big detailed observation. If it's a big book, if it's something like Jeremiah or Isaiah, find yourself taking, you know, 3 to 6 months to do a detailed observation of the entire book. But when you have that done, it's pretty strong.
And what I've started doing is when I'm doing a detailed observation, I like to do it digitally. Like the way I talked about earlier where I'm making out the table and I'm having the different size cells. Because when I am done with that detailed observation, I will save it as a PDF and I will file it in a new tool that I've been developing. I've been hinting it to y'all. And I'm going to be making a video about in the next couple of weeks and releasing this out into the wild. But I will take my detailed observation and I will drop it into this massive digital database I have made of the whole Bible and I will save the file there. So if I ever come back to that passage again to preach, to write, to teach, I have my detailed observation that I made on that passage already there, ready to go, and it is a study resource in my own language.
So that's the detailed observation. As I said earlier in the video, this is a fantastic way to begin doing in-depth [music] Bible study. And you also might be saying, Chad, I need to see an example of this to really understand it. So what I'm going to do is a show up an image here of a paper one that I used. And this is just a handful of the notes that I made in the detailed observation I did for this video. So this is what the hand done one is like. Now, I also want to show you the digital version because my preferred method to do this, especially when it gets to the point in time where I'm answering questions, is I do do this in a Apple Pages document with the expandable uh tables that I like. And you'll see this side by side with the Accordance Bible, which is my preferred Bible software. That way I can do some of the language work >> [music] >> that I want to do to understand this. And so there's an example right there ahead of you of the two pages that I used there. I'm also going to put this PDF in the email that you get um where you end up getting [music] the template sheet. So you can see this example right in front of you. You can see, okay, this is how Chad does this.
But if you want to start studying scripture seriously, you need to have a way to study it. And I can think of no better way to jump off than the detailed observation. My next video is going to be about the best easiest way I have found for people without a language background or without a heavy biblical studies background to answer the questions that you might see in something alike the detailed observation. So just wait for that video next week. And I'm also thinking the next video you should probably watch is going to be this one. It's all about my color coding system and how I use that to make Bible [music] notes. So I will see you back in the next video.