T-NET International • Discipling Disciplemakers • April-May 2003 |
||||
The Mother of All Bible Study Websites
Dr. DIMM has discovered what he believes may qualify as the Mother of All Bible Study Websites. This site is amazing and, obviously, a labor of love done with Houston area Precepts Inductive Bible Studies in mind, but quite useful to anyone wanting to find the best Bible study resources on the Web. Take an afternoon and explore it because it will take you that long just to check out this impressive number of links to all sorts of Bible study sites. There may be a Bible-oriented site of note that they have missed, but not many. Of course they don’t include journals, but you already have that from last month’s Dr. DIMM’s Journal List. For example the Reference Search page alone is remarkable. Click on http://www.preceptaustin.org/summary_of_references.htm and scroll down all the way down to see all that's offered on this first page alone. If you enter a Bible verse in the Look Up a Bible Verse box near the top of the page and search it with the default option of New American Standard with Strong’s Numbers, you will be taken to a site that displays your verse so that you can click on the key words to obtain a definition from a simplified Hebrew or Greek Lexicon. Pretty cool! Or you can choose to look up your verses in 23 Other Bibles. However, that is just the beginning. There is also a column of links that take you to various commentaries and other interpretive resources that open up right at that same passage. That is just the first search box. There are 43 others including International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, A. T. Robertson’s Word Pictures, Baker’s Evangelical Dictionary, and Holman’s Bible Dictionary. You can search Spurgeon’s Sermons or, if you prefer someone more contemporary, how about Ray Stedman, John MacArthur or John Piper. Or, you can go to pages with special categories like Bible Dictionaries, Commentaries, Christian Biography, Bible Prophecy and a great collection of Bible Maps & Pictures. Don’t miss the site buried in the Bible Page Potpourri page, a link to a valuable listing called Holwick’s Links to the Best Free Sermon Illustrations. I had no idea there were so many sites specializing in illustrations, and his first column is rated according to its usefulness. Holwick himself has made this a hobby of sorts squirreling away a database of over 20,000 Illustrations culled from like the Readers Digest, local papers, Christianity Today, Leadership, and books and articles. And it’s yours free for the download. The file is almost 20 Megabytes so you may want to take him up on his offer of sending you the file on CD for $2.00 (a gift at that price). You need to have Microsoft Access to utilize it. He has a smaller collection of 4,500 Illustrations in a self-contained database program that you can download and also Microsoft Help File of 2000 Illustrations that is labeled for Win95, but elsewhere it is labeled for Win 95 as well and I have used it successfully with Windows 2000 so my guess is it will work with Windows XP as well. MAC users will note they have a list of MAC Text Files of Illustrations that are presently listed as unavailable, but seem to hold out hope that they will be available in the future. I haven’t even mentioned his free 13,000 Sermon Database. You can find his list of resources at http://ledgewood.1stbaptist.org/sitemap.html If the list of choices there overwhelms you, the Reverend David Holwick has an introduction with helpful hints and directions for those who do not have Microsoft Access. http://ledgewood.1stbaptist.org/database_explanation.html What makes this worth looking at is the obvious care Holwick has taken to categorize the illustrations by multiple key words and scripture referenced while usually carefully documenting his source. Enjoy! Well, that ought to be enough to keep you busy for a while. Coming up, look for Dr. DIMM’s Guide to Using the Internet to Get the Most for the Lord’s Money (Does that sound spiritual or what?) when you rent cars, stay in hotels, or travel by air. Dr. DIMM knows that conference budget is sometimes the first to be cut, so you might as well cut every corner you can. (Note: Above links should show up "live" in your browser so that all you need to do is click on them. If that doesn't work just cut and paste them into your Internet browser's address box.)
|
||||
|
|
|
|