Transform Your Worship Songs: Master Theology with Logos Bible Software

Hey everyone, in this video, I want to share with you an amazing resource that has really changed my Bible study understanding of Scripture and devotion times for really the past decade. I got this back in 2012, and I had some ministry budget that was allowing me to buy books for continued education basically. And so, I ended up buying some packages with Logos Bible software. So it’s called Logos or Logos Bible software. It’s you know the domain it looks like it’s logos like a brand’s logo, and I’m sure there’s a lot of graphic design companies that wish they had that domain. But Logos is the word of God in the Greek; it’s the written word of God. It’s also used in the beginning of the Gospel of John where it says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” That’s all using that word Logos. It’s two concepts; it’s the written word of God in the Greek text. It’s also even outside of Christianity; the Greeks use the concept of the Logos to think about the mind of God or the template of the mind of God that is man. It’s like the ideal that we all fall short of basically.

First things first, you can spend a lot of money quickly on packages or just eBooks. So, you know, mind your budget, don’t go crazy about this. But I want to show it to you because there’s also a ton of free resources that they offer, including every month they give away new books and have some amazing books on sale for like 1 or 2 dollars. So, there’s a ton. This is like an awesome way to grow your digital library of books. Think of it as the Amazon for Bible study, like the Kindle for Bible study. In fact, most all of the seminaries that I’ve come across, basically worldwide, are recommending their students to buy Logos Bible software because it makes study so incredibly in-depth and fast.

Before we dive into Logos Bible Study software, I want to talk a minute about Bible translations because there are so many English language Bible translations. You might have grown up with one; you might have heard of ten others that have come out in your lifetime or in the last two decades, and you’re wondering, “What does this all mean? Which one should I read or should I trust?” There’s an old saying in American Christianity, at least, that says, “What’s the best Bible translation? It’s the one that you actually read.” In other words, just read the Bible and don’t worry too much about which translation it is because you’re going to glean the gold from it. The Spirit’s going to illuminate things to you as you do. However, I do want to point out the broad spectrum here and why there are so many translations. It’s because of how they approach relaying what the text says.

Over on the left, we’ve got the word-for-word formal equivalents. These are the Bible translations that have taken the original Hebrew for the Old Testament, the original Greek for the New Testament, and they are trying to give you the most accurate word-for-word translation from the original text. When you initially hear that, you think, “Well, that’s great. Why wouldn’t I just go with that? Why wouldn’t you want that? Why would you want anything other than a literal translation?” And the reason for eating other types of translations is because, you know, you could translate word for word from any language to another language, like any conversation, right? But word-for-word translations do not always convey the meaning that the scriptures or the passages we’re trying to convey. An easy example of that is when Jesus is speaking and using idioms, he’s using social phrases that his people understood that we don’t get.

One of the contested passages is when he says it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a wealthy person to inherit the kingdom of God or be granted into the kingdom of God. Well, there are actually localized contextual sayings, idioms. Being that’s an idiom, many scholars believe he’s not literally saying it’s easier for a camel to go through a literal eye of a needle. But if we translate it word for word, then we take it that way, and we think, “Wow, it’s literally easier for a camel to go through the eye of a literal needle,” right? So these are the reasons why these other types of translations exist, is to say, “Here’s what he actually meant,” or “Here’s what the passage is meaning.” Here’s the equivalent. So we call it a functional equivalent over here, thought for thought. This is why the NIB and the NLT and yes, the CSV, Christian Standard Bible, have all become very popular in the last 20 years, maybe even actually NIB was in the ’80s, NLT was in the ’90s, I believe CSV is in the 2000s.

Awesome translations, and they really help convey what the passage was trying to convey to the original readers rather than just say word for word is what we need. So here’s what’s cool: you can use them both. You can use all of these in Logos Bible software, have them all in your library, and switch between them, even show them side by side, and see what the differences are. And it helps you start to see, you know, understand different ways of understanding a passage and even to identify where Bible translators really get to get held up on a certain translation, like a certain passage like, “Wow, this is really hard to translate.”

Way over here on the right, I want to just touch base for a second on the paraphrase or retelling translations. This mainly I’m going to talk about The Message translation, and I’m also going to talk about The Passion Translation by Bryan Simmons. These are paraphrase retellings. The passage is kind of in its own category, and I’ll explain why in a second. It’s kind of a thought for thought and sometimes a paraphrase, and I’ll tell you why in a second. But The Message translation, awesome, awesome. Eugene Peterson is the author of that one, but he set out to specifically convey the meaning of scripture through contemporary language and take artistic liberty to make all of the passages become a bit more poetic and to read in a contemporary language way. I think of it kind of like the way that we explain what the Bible is trying to say to our children. If we just read to them, especially King James version but even any of these other word-for-word translations, they’re not going to grasp everything, you know? A child who’s five years old, seven years old, even ten years old is just going to be like, “There are words I have never heard before. How am I supposed to understand that?” So what do we do as parents? We convey what that passage is trying to convey. What is the thought? What’s the passage trying to convey? We explain that to our children. Paraphrase, like The Message translation, is doing the same thing, and it’s using artistic language to do it, to just kind of make it more poetic.

In the same, in a similar way, The Passion Translation is a very unique translation, particularly for the New Testament. And here’s why: Bryan Simmons explicitly says, in the opening of that translation as well as if you hear him on YouTube, look him up, basically, he says the Lord commissioned him to use not the Greek text, the Greek manuscripts that all of these other translations used for the New Testament translation, but instead to use Aramaic text. And the reason for it is Jesus did not speak Greek to his disciples to teach them the teachings of Jesus and all the writings of the New Testament got written down in Greek, but they did not speak that language one to another. Instead, they were speaking Aramaic. And so there apparently are Aramaic manuscripts. The problem that Bible scholars, you know, kind of criticize Bryan Simmons for, one of the things is that there’s three, there’s three reasons why Bible translators and scholars, in my opinion, from what I’ve observed, three reasons why they critique The Passion Translation.

One is the Aramaic text. There just aren’t, there isn’t like apparently a vast, you know, vast amounts of copies and intact copies of every passage. Whereas for the Greek New Testament, there are tons of Greek manuscripts that are ancient, that have been preserved. And so wherever there might be a missing piece from a passage, there are other manuscripts, Greek manuscripts, to use. With Aramaic, there’s just not that huge resource. And so it’s kind of like you have less data to work with to translate to Aramaic. The second reason why he gets critiqued is he does take liberties in terms of when he’s using the Aramaic text versus when he’s using the Greek, versus when he’s using the Aramaic text, willy-nilly, ad hoc usage of, “Well, okay, here I’m going to use the Greek translation. Here, I’m going to use the Aramaic.” And not always providing a footnote about that. The third and most important reason why Bible scholars have critiqued Bryan Simmons’ Passion Translation of the New Testament is there are some very key spots, you know, there’s a whole like series of this on YouTube. You can go look up what other Bible translators have as critiques against The Passion Translation. And then, and you’ll see that some of them are pointing out very specific passages in Ephesians, for example, I think it’s, I think it might be chapter 5, where, or chapter 4, it’s basically where Paul is saying, “Slaves and masters, here’s how you are to work together and treat your slave or treat your master, your servant, your master, all of that stuff.” And also, I think maybe the husbands and wives stuff. Again, look it up on YouTube, the critiques. But basically, there are key passages, in my opinion, just a handful throughout the New Testament, where Bryan Simmons’ translation has kind of come up with a completely different application and interpretation of a passage than what all of these other Bibles and Bible scholars translated us. And so, and it has implications for the Christian life, and that’s why they critique it. So anyways, I just want to throw that out there. I love The Passion Translation. I use it. I have it set as my default right now because when I open it, I just want to have a devotional reading first, and then I’ll dig into Bible study. I switch all the time between Passion Translation, New Living Translation, Message Translation, CSB, ESV, and New King James. Those are like my go-to’s. And also, one more that’s not even on here, which is called The New English Translation, the NET Bible. I love that Bible. So, sorry for the long-winded background of translations, but I just wanted to kind of give some advice on your Bible study.

Now let’s get into actually using this amazing software and why this speeds up your Bible study in such great ways. Let me do this real quick. Let’s just say I’m going to read John chapter 1 out of The Passion Translation. “In the very beginning, the Living Expression was already there. And the Living Expression was with God, yet fully God. They were together, face to face, in the very beginning. And through his creative inspiration, this Living Expression made all things, for nothing has existence apart from him. Life came into being because of him, for his life is light for all humanity. And this Living Expression is the light that burst through gloom, the light that darkness could not diminish.” Then suddenly, a man appeared who was sent from okay, and that gets into the Gospel of John, but down here, you know, whatever. So, “Living Expression” is what Bryan Simmons is using for some more modern language that’s kind of easier to understand, as opposed to saying, you know, “The Word.” So, okay, cool, that’s pretty cool. And I think that he’s basically basically saying the same thing. But now let’s, you know, let’s just see, let’s see how this looks in a different translation. Here’s how easy it is to switch to a different translation, and you’re off to the races, reading through that one. Then okay, now I want to get a little bit deeper into the word-for-word translations. Let’s get over here. Okay, so here we are. So, that’s, these are some of the areas that are that it’s really cool.

Now you can do another thing. You can right-click, and you can do a text comparison. If I can find it, let’s see, the reference. What I want to do is a text comparison. So let’s do tools, text comparison, John 1:1. Now, what is it showing me? It’s showing me each verse, and it’s showing me 5 Bible translations side by side, and it’s showing me, you know, how much difference there is. So 46% difference, moving down through there, here we got 65% difference, and you can just see what the nuances are. Okay, so that is a really cool thing. And the next thing that I’ll show you about why this Bible study is such an awesome thing to do if you know the ESV, you’ll know that most all of its footnotes that you have, that you see at the bottom of your paper Bible, are basically just cross-references. They’re saying, “This passage has other passages in the Bible related to it, and here they are. You can go look them up.” Well, in Logos Bible Software, it makes that so easy because you don’t have to go anywhere. You just hover your mouse, and you can see what those passages are. Okay, super easy. And if you do want to jump to that, you just click it, and it opens it up for you. Now it’s opening up to my default Bible, so that’s why it opened it up over here. Again, though, for footnotes, you can see here Bryan Simmons has a note, a footnote on this, and I didn’t have to go anywhere to see it. It’s just there, and it says, “See also 2nd Peter 1:4.” I can click that, and it’s going to jump right over to it. Just super easy, and you can click the back button to just go back to where you were. These are some amazing things.

Now, there’s also some other ways to get amazing Bible study going here, and that is, let’s just say again like, “Oh yeah, this.” Alright, left-clicking, you can see when you left-click, it will highlight everywhere else that word is in the text that you’re looking at. Let’s do the word “Word.” Here’s all the times that the word “Word” is mentioned here in the opening of John. So, a lot of stuff about John the Baptist. Boom, so that’s cool.

And then, let’s just say, “I want some guidance on this. I’d like to even consider what other resources do I have in my Logos Bible software that have something to say about this passage?” So, what we can do is I just right-clicked, I’m on the reference of John 1:1, and I come down here and click on “Passage Guide” or “Exegetical Guide.” I’m going to do “Passage Guide” in this case, and this is showing me all of the Bible commentaries that I have that have something to say on this. So, some of these were free; most of those were purchased, but Logos offers free resources every month. And I’ll show you that real quick. If you just go to their website, come over here to “Deals,” you can come down to this month’s free book and more. And what they will have here is one free book every month, and then they also have some deals. So, this one here is normally nine; they’re going to give it to you for two dollars if you want it. And then they have, they always have like basically it’s a little upsell, all of these that are on sale. And many of these, like this is a commentary, you know, commentaries are expensive; you can get it for eight bucks in this case. So, every month they’ve got all this stuff. Similarly, notice they also have a section for a free eBook. Logos Bible software thinks about their primary library, their primary resources as scholarly resources, commentaries, historical context books, books introductions to books of the Bible, as well as Bible translations and study Bibles and that sort of thing. So most of their stuff is meant for that deep Bible study, but then they also have a section that they call eBooks that basically are, is like your general mega church pastors who write a book or your, you know, your Kay Arthur and your C.S. Lewis, those are going to be in the eBook section. So, for we go to this month’s free eBook, then you can see here we’ve got, you know, some devotional thing from Mary DeMuth and, this is Kay Arthur, and then these ones cost, but again, it’s like you’re getting savings. So, there’s always a lot happening with free resources. I have picked up a ton of commentaries for either free or cheap, just making sure I check every month of every year to see what they’re giving away for free.

So anyways, back to our passage guide, those are the commentaries that I have that have something to say about John 1:1. We also have some cross-references that it’s providing, we have parallel passages in the Bible that relate to this. This gets really helpful when you are in the Gospels because you can see Matthew, Luke, and John, how they are providing similar content. I’ve also got some sermon libraries that I’ve purchased from people, John Piper, D.A. Carson, guy, so I could see what some of these big kind of like Gospel Coalition pastors have preached and taught about that passage. And then it’s got, you know, some other stuff here. So on topics. So yeah, that’s the passage guide. It just makes it so easy to just for me, like one of my go-to’s is gonna be the classic Matthew Henry commentary right here. So I’m gonna open that up, and I’m gonna see what he has to say about John’s prologue, chapter 1 of John. So easy to jump in there. And again, because you’re in Logos Bible Software, all of this works exactly the same on mobile. It’s amazing. It just makes it so easy. You’re reading through a commentary, and here Matthew Henry says something about Proverbs 8. Well, what? Proverbs 8 have to say, it pops up.

Ok, the last thing I want to show you about this, and part of what really made me want to make this video for you guys, is, like, you can do some massive, easy Bible study with all of these resources like I just showed you, but what they have also done is they have created courses. So if you come to books and courses and you come to Logos Mobile Education, they have basically hired our country’s and international renowned Bible scholars and professors from the world’s leading seminaries, and they have brought them in, and they have created a video course on everything. So, you basically, Logos Mobile Ed is basically their online seminary now. You don’t have to pay, you’re not going to get a degree from this, but you are going to get the same training as if you’re, it’s like audit, paying to audit a course from the world’s leading Bible scholars and professors. And again, they have a ton of these. You can spend a ton of money on this stuff, which, you gotta mind your budget, of course, but sometimes some of these are free, sometimes some of these are on sale, like this one says it’s 73% on sale right now, “Learn to Study the Bible,” which by the way, there are, when you go to seminary, there are courses on just how to actually read and interpret Scripture. So, you know, this is going to be some really helpful stuff. And I’ll just show you from my library. If I go to course, if I open up my courses, let’s see here. You go, so in these courses, they have a video, they have videos from the professor, so that you’re doing, you’re experiencing like a lecture, you know, the passive learning style, traditional seminary lectures. You just go through, go through this, and then you hit continue, and you keep going through. Now, let’s just see, they’ve got, you know, it’s like there’s already a lot of notes from the professor, from the course, and then, you know, they’ve got some reading for us to do, so we’re in the suggested reading. And look how easy it is to just like pull this stuff up. And again, like any Scripture references, it’s easy to jump into it. So it’s just, it’s just an amazing platform, and it has amazing content and tools for accelerated learning for Bible study from anywhere. And again, I love the mobile app.

Alright, before we close out, I want to show you one

more feature and one resource. I really love the NET Bible; it’s the New English Translation. And the reason why I love it is it had, it had over, I think it was over 20,000 Bible scholars basically do kind of a, they did a peer-reviewed translation of the Old and New Testament. It took them like over a decade, and they included 60,000 notes or footnotes to bring you complete transparency to all of their translation decisions. And, you know, what some people have to say about it is it overcomes the tension between accuracy and readability. And so, as you can see here, there’s a lot of footnotes. It’s not overwhelming, but so this one here, it has “sn,” and that means a scriptural note, and it has some cool stuff there. This one is “tn,” that’s textual note, and so this gets into the actual original language. And the implications, they give you other references to see. See, what this one text will note, sometimes it’s a, you’ll see two on the same, like this is scriptural note here and textual note here. So, I really love this one for a great Bible study Bible. And so it’s kinda like, I’ll do Passion Translation or New Living Testament for my devotional time, and then when I see something, I’m like, “I wanna lean into it,” I will switch over to, or have questions about a difficult passage, I’ll switch over to the NET, check out any of their footnotes on it, and then I will also, if I wanna see cross-references, like, “Hey, I wonder about like other areas of the Bible that speak to this,” I’ll switch over to the ESV and check out, you know, every one of these cross-references throughout the passage that I’m looking at. And then finally, I’ll run a passage guide, and mainly, sometimes I don’t even do a passage guide, I just open Matthew Henry’s commentary, jump to that. I also enjoy John Calvin, with his, his commentary on stuff. I love, I love that he, he has such great insights on stuff. So, I got the Calvin commentaries that I’ve purchased.

The last thing I want to show you is a feature, and that is, again, we’re in the ESV right now. Let’s say, what we can do is we can say, “I want this to be set to a group of scripture, a group of resources that are open. I want them all linked.” So, I’m going to set it to “A,” and now I can come over here to my commentary and also set it to “A.” And now, if I go somewhere else, let’s just go to Revelation 19:13. I open that up. Oh, okay, that opened up my default Bible. Let’s move that to “A” as well. So, let’s just try that again. We’ll go here, Revelation 19:13. It’s now opened Revelation 19:13, and if I switch to Matthew Henry, guess what? It’s tracking with me. So, it’s just amazing. You can have basically unlimited resources open, set ’em all to the same link set, and whenever you jump to a new passage, they all jump with you. You can see what those authors have to say. In the desktop app, it is even better than this experience because you can have your resources laid out as tiles, so kind of like in the way, in this particular browser I’m using, I can say, “I want to tile all three of these pages and see them side by side.” And in the same way, you can do that in Logos Bible software on the desktop app. You can have all your resources open across the top but then have them tiled in specific areas so that when you scroll your text, you’re seeing all of your resources scroll with it.

So, I really encourage you to check this out, to escalate, accelerate, and deepen your Bible study. I caution you on spending. You want to make sure you don’t go overboard. It’s so easy to do that. If you’re like me, you just get giddy about wanting to buy more stuff, so pace yourself. Download all of their free resources. They have free Bibles, they have free study Bibles, they have free commentaries, so you can literally get into this without spending a dime. And then, you know, over time, just buy the ones, the resources that you would really like to have and know that you’ll use. And you’ll be, and then you just download the mobile app, and you’ll be able to do some great Bible study and devotional reading from anywhere.