ZACH WINDAHL’S BIBLE HIGHLIGHTING TIPS

So what are some Bible highlighting tips?

Welcome to Sunday Bible Study Basics where we provide weekly Bible study tips to help you dive deeper in your faith.

When it comes to Bible highlighting everyone kind of has their own version that works best for them. I’m going to share what works best for me in hopes that some of it helps you as well.

First off, you know how at the beginning of every book in the Bible there is the title? Like, at the beginning of Matthew there is the title on top with some extra space on the side. Now your Bible may be a journaling Bible where there’s a bunch of space on every page to write notes or it may be a normal thin line Bible without tons of space. Mine is a thin line, skinny Bible because I just like it smaller. Either way close to the title of every book there will be some space. So where it says Matthew for instance I find it super important to write down some of the historical information so that I always have it close by and I can reference back to it. I’ll include the author, date that it was written, who the audience was, and what the main theme throughout the book may be.

And if you don’t know where to find this information, we have it all laid out in the Bible Study, some Bibles have an intro to each book that may include it, or you can do some research online.

So, for our example of Matthew, up top I’m going to write “tax collector” because it was written by Matthew the tax collector. I’m going to write AD 50-55, which is when it was written. I’m going to say that it was written to the Jewish people of the time. And then I’m going to write “Jesus is Jewish Messiah, the fulfillment of the Old Testament” because that’s the theme that we will see throughout the Gospel.

Once you have those written on the top of the page by the Title, I’m going to read through the entire book to get the big picture of the text. This isn’t a time to really dig in, this is an overview perspective, no need to go slow.

Then now I’m going to go back through and highlight. When I lived in Australia we called this color coding because you would have different colors of highlighters for different things that you wanted to highlight in the text. And I think it’s a great idea for you to do as well.

So buy a few highlighters, they actually make Bible highlighters so they don’t ruin your pages if you have thin pages, and then I would assign each color to a specific quality that you want to remember in the text, whatever is important to you. This could be highlighting a characteristic of God,
every time that Jesus spoke,
every miracle, every command for us,
every location if you’re really into the history.
Pick 3-4 things that interest you and now go back through the text slowly, highlighting according to your colors and afterwards you’ll be able to see the text through a new lens.

I hope that helps! Have the best week!

Know someone who is looking to dive deeper in their faith?

Invite a friend to receive Zach Windahl’s weekly emails using the form below.