Not every study can be completed in one sitting, especially if you are doing a topical study rather than a passage study. For example, several years ago, I determined I really didn’t know or understand how the Holy Spirit worked. I started a list in the back of my Bible and every time I came across a verse dealing with the Spirit, I made a note. I wrote down the reference and what the verse taught me about the Holy Spirit. After a year or so, not only did I have my own personal Holy Spirit ‘concordance’ but I had a much better grasp on how He worked.

I have several of these long-running studies in progress. The biggest one is ‘fear of the Lord’. I read a fantastic book called When People Are Big and God Is Small by Edward T. Welch. In it, he described the trouble we run into when we let people’s opinions influence and affect us more than God’s opinion. He cited several Scriptures dealing with the fear of the Lord. I started marking them and keeping track on my own. Here’s one of my entries:

Proverbs 14:26 In the fear of the Lord, there is strong confidence
It produces not only faith in God’s actions and character, but faith in my own course of life.  If I am constantly living in fear of the Lord, then I can be sure my choices are the right ones and the things I am doing are within God’s will.  It makes me much more attuned to His ways and purposes.

I have a list of benedictions, of verses for my husband that describe men of character (he is one, for sure) My newest one is on the wilderness. A lot of stuff seemed to happen in the wilderness, so I got curious and started a list. I also have a few lists that are more narrow in scope like the names and descriptions of God in the Psalms, and the righteous vs. the wicked in Proverbs.

This is a good, no-pressure way to study something that interests you. The only caution is… don’t lose your list! I lost a chunk of some of my lists in a computer hiccup so I’m ‘restudying’ those topics.