Personal Growth Template

Now, I don’t know about you, when I read the Bible, I am not approaching it as just another book from which I gain information and understanding.

I am looking to the Bible to allow God’s holy and living word (Hebrews 4:12) to speak to me, my situation and guide me along (Psalm 119:105).

And over the years, I have developed my own personal style for reading and allowing the text to minister to me. But as a parent with a desire to impart this to my children, I have had to try and formulate some questions to help them dig into the scriptures and allow God’s word to speak to them as well. The result of this is a set of questions to ask in each scripture portion. The current iteration of this reading tool looks something like this Daily Template.

The red section contains the questions to help to unravel the text a bit to dig in and see what is happening in the text

The purple section is there so that we do not lose any bits of information that may be useful for further study later. It is better to note those to do later so that the time of personal devotion in the word is more focused on what what God wants to impart to you now…which leads us to…

The green section is the most critical of the  time of this personal time because it causes you to note down God’s personal word of revelation to you for your situation.

Finally the blue section is where you commune with God and give Him  your response as a result of the word He has spoken to you personally.

So, if you do not yet have a tool to help you read the scripture for yourself, may I suggest that you give this a try. This works really well in a journal format as well.

Before I came up with the above fancy colorful template, I just had the questions with spaces for the responses that I would print out and use. It looked something like this:

It worked out pretty well for when I would do joint devotionals with the kids. As we would read the questions out loud, I would be the scribe and jot down the responses that each of us came up with. Then I would make photo copies of the sheet for each of us to save for ourselves.