Have you ever sat down to study the Bible and realized that you didn't really know where to start?

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by all the different methods and tools and terms related to Bible study

and wondered if you're really capable of understanding the words of Scripture deeply for yourself?

If that's you, today's interview

will be just the encouragement and help that you need. I'm speaking with Lydia Brownback,

a Bible teacher, a conference speaker, and the author of a number of books, including

the new Flourish Bible Study series from Crossway. In our conversation today, Lydia and I discussed

12 key tools for Bible study that all Christians can and should use, tools that will help

us go deeper into the biblical text and understand the Bible's life-giving message for ourselves.

Let's get started. Well, Lydia, thank you so much for joining me again on the Crossplay podcast.

It's always great to be here with you, Matt.

Yeah, so today I want to spend some time talking about Bible study, and in particular,

some key tools that we can use for Bible study to help us go deeper into the text.

And I thought it would be fun to ask you

because you are a well-known Bible teacher. You've written Bible studies for the church. And so I think

you're going to have some good insights into this. I hope so. So the first thing that obviously we need

when it comes to studying the Bible is Bible, an actual Bible that we're

reading from. And so I guess to start us off, what do you look for in a good print Bible?

I look for a literal translation. I think that's really important. I mean, we want to understand the

Bible in its original context before we make application to our own lives today.

And in order to best do that, we have to be sure we're accurate in understanding how the people

originally would have read it and written it. We want to understand in the original context

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