Bible Studies - Learn from The Bible

Susan Slobac asked:

You may not even realize it but there are audio Bible Study programs going on all over the world. Audio Bible study is one way that scholars and students are making use of the audio Bible. Audio Bible Study brings the Word of God to people who cannot read, the majority of the world’s population at present. The Bible on audio CD allows missionaries and local pastors to share the treasures of the Bible to all who would like to hear about them. The audio Bible on CD is also being used worldwide as an aid to literacy.

One of the first steps a missionary or pastor might take is to begin an audio Bible listening group. The Word of God is presented in a language familiar to native speakers, and it begins to work on the hearts of the listeners.

This often leads to the building of new churches. People then come to the churches to listen to the audio Bible and continue after with discussions of what they have heard, in order to build their faith.

Listening to the Bible also helps new believers to memorize passages from it. Those living in a predominantly oral culture respond to dramatic readings of the Bible, and audio Bibles are available in dramatized versions, with sound effects, music and staged readings.

Some places in the world do not have the luxury of reliable power. This might put a damper on hearing the audio Bible, because without a power source electronic equipment will not run. However, improvements have been made in this area with the application of recent scientific digital technological advances. There are now solar-powered CD players that will play the audio Bible CD without the need for any local energy at all, allowing the audio Bible to reach into indigenous areas that might otherwise have not been blessed with God’s Word.

If you are learning how to read, it helps speed the process by listening to what you are trying to read being spoken as you attempt to read it. The audio Bible is used in this manner to help improve literacy skills of people all around the world. Over half the world’s population cannot read, so audio Bibles are being used as one method of sharing God’s Word, and are also used to help improve reading skills.

Illiteracy is even a problem in the United States, where many do no reading at all after graduating from high school or college. This can hamper spiritual growth, if a congregation is simply not reading the Bible. One way to overcome that obstacle is an audio Bible program that allows listeners to listen to the entire New Testament in forty days while spending only 28 minutes a day at this endeavor. Because the audio Bible also comes in an MP3 player format, it can go with you to the gym or on your commute, so that in spare moments you can catch up on your Bible study.

Deja

Susan Slobac asked:

If you have children, then you know you want to get them started off right with good habits that will help them mature into wise adults. One way to do that is to encourage them to spend a little bit of time every day in Bible Study. But with between classes, sports and homework after school, and the myriad other responsibilities and tasks that your teenagers must deal with, it can frankly be a little hard to find the needed time to devote to this useful activity. You can get some Bible study in easily, however, when you consider using an audio Bible. An audio Bible CD or an MP3 audio Bible will provide the means that will help enable your kids to grow spiritually.

An audio Bible CD can contain dramatized versions of the complete Bible or the New Testament on a single CD. MP3 technology is used to contain all of that text into one small disc. An audio Bible CD is convenient to listen to at home or on the go and can played in a any CD or DVD player. This portable audio Bible can be used in any CD player or car stereo systems, so your kids can take the Word of God with them on their travels.

The MP3 audio Bible compresses the text of the Bible down so that it all fits into a tiny playback device no larger than a pack of chewing gum. You use an mp3 player with a set of ear buds or small headphones in order to hear the Bible. Because of their extreme popularity with youth, this format that the Bible can take makes it very inconspicuous, and its small size makes it easily transportable. You can do your audio Bible Study as you walk around campus, or while you do a workout.

There are even new podcast versions of Bible study that are appropriate for teens. A podcast is a recording that can be listened to on your computer, or downloaded onto your mp3 player to listen to at your convenience. There are podcasts that are under 10 minutes long that allow you to hear the whole New Testament if you listen for that long every day. Other portioned readings of the Bible are also available in podcast form, covering favorite Proverbs and Psalms.

The fabulous advantage to listening to podcasts and mp3 format material is that you have the ability to play the material any time that it is convenient to you. You can fit it into little snippets of time that might be otherwise wasted. Now Bible Study for teens is much more possible, because when they have a free moment, they can listen to God’s Word.

Paul

Susan Slobac asked:


Did you know that most of the people in the world cannot read? We take free, public education in the United States for granted sometimes, but with it does come the opportunity for public literacy learning. This is unfortunately not the case worldwide, where political conflicts and poverty take a toll on the educational needs of citizens of other countries. When it comes to reading the Bible, therefore, there are many in the world that simply do not have the skills to do so. There is a solution to this problem, however, and that is the introduction of the audio Bible.

The translation process has been brought to the King James audio Bible, for example, bringing the wonders of modern technology to bear on the problem of sharing God’s Word in a way that all can understand. The NIV audio Bible, as well as the King James audio Bible have been downloaded onto a CD that uses mp3 files to compress the entire New Testament so that it fits on a single CD. People can then listen to the audio Bible and even conduct audio Bible Study groups using this fantastic audio version of the Bible. Of course, there are thousands of different languages spoken around the world, so how is Bible translation work done so that all listeners can understand what is being said on the CD?

There are several groups whose purpose is to translate the Bible so that everyone in the world will be able to read or hear it in their own language. Wycliffe Bible Translators is one such group. They take a scholarly, linguistic approach to Bible translation. Linguists are sent into the field to work with a people group whose language has never been written down before. These linguists work with native speakers to document a language’s phonetics, phonology, syntax and grammar. After this painstaking research, they apply what they have learned to translating the Bible into this newly recorded language.

Phonetics refers to the sounds of a particular language. The human voice can make many sounds, yet not all of them are used for language production. The linguist’s job is to listen well and document each of the individual sounds used in the particular language, in a way that is verifiable and repeatable by all speakers.

Phonology has to do with how the various sounds identified phonetically function within the language. The linguist will work, after gaining phonetic data out in the field, to identify what the phonemes, or the smallest unit of speech that characterizes meaning, of the language are.

Syntax is the study of sentence structure, and grammar is a listing of the rules that apply to the structure of sentences. Wycliffe, and other Bible translation organizations, apply linguistic standards to the study of languages that have never been written before, and then apply what they have learned to Bible translation. Some of these organizations have also partnered with audio Bible production groups, so that the Bible is now available in languages that many of the world’s speakers can understand.



Ava