Here's a wonderful question from a dad of teenagers named Ryan. Ryan is a ministry partner with us at Desiring God and he and his wife recently joined us in the beautiful state of Washington. And there you led a few look at the book sessions, Pastor John, which is where you teach the Bible by drawing on the Bible text on your iPad.

After the event, Ryan wrote us to ask this, "Pastor John, hello. Watching you work through scripture in lab form is so encouraging to my own soul and my own Bible study. Thank you. As we look to disciple our teenage children at home, however, we can feel inadequate explaining passages this way and are concerned that we are either missing the point or worse, teaching them incorrectly.

Do you recommend using techniques like you do in lab when training children, or do you recommend another technique? How can parents of teens train their kids to do something lab-like?" Well, it seems to me that the first thing a parent has to reckon with is whether the setting has been created in the family or in the church where this kind of teaching will feel suitable for the young person.

So yes, I do think we should try to teach our young people, but this question of have we created the setting? And what I mean is, is the family used to having devotions which simply involves, say, the reading of scripture and prayer? If so, it may feel awkward or strange if we suddenly turn that kind of moment in our family into a classroom setting with assignments and questions and so on.

So it seems to me that every family has to come to terms with, can we create a time or a setting in the family or in the church with a fellowship of younger people or just a family where something like a classroom situation with expectations of rigorous thinking and questions and answers and analysis and assignments feels natural, even exciting.

The mindset needs to be created that these sessions are meant to inculcate a skill, just like you would inculcate a skill of cooking into one of your children or a skill of cutting the grass or tying a knot on a fish hook so that when the big fish gets on there, he won't come off.

The point is not that in every moment of those sessions that you'll experience the fullest joyful payoff of discovery, but later you get to eat the meal, you get to see the beautifully cut lawn, you get to catch the fish without losing your hook. You're trying to inculcate a skill for a lifetime, and so the parent needs to come to terms with, can I create a setting in the family where the teaching of skill can happen?

And then, once you've got that figured out, which I hope they can, the question becomes, what do you do with that time? And here's one suggestion. What's guiding my suggestion here is that the goal of this teaching is a lifelong habit of mind and heart to approach the Scriptures in a certain way.

In other words, being able to do a particular technique is not the goal. So, trying to reproduce Piper lab experiences is not the goal, but the habits of mind, the habits of heart that you inculcate or that you build into your children while working through those techniques, that's the goal.

So, I would explain that goal to my children. I'd say, "That's what we're after here. I'm not trying to make a little John Piper out of you or a little whatever out of you. I just want to build into you certain habits of mind and habits of heart so that you will approach the Scriptures fruitfully for the rest of your life." And as a means of that, I'd say, "Well, perhaps assign them to watch one or two labs a day for a week or two, and as they watch, tell them, jot down the kind of questions that you see John Piper is asking and answering.

Write them down. What is he asking? What's he after? Be as specific as you can." Or another way to say it would be, "What are the specifics that Piper is looking for as he analyzes the text? Make a list. Be specific." And this will be a challenge, especially because oftentimes we don't have vocabulary for what we're seeing.

This is huge. A huge part of learning a skill is being able to talk about what you're seeing. And if you don't have words for what you're seeing, it becomes very difficult. What if you're cooking a recipe and it says, "Add oregano"? Well, you don't have a clue what oregano is, so you may be very skilled in cooking it.

But if you don't know the vocabulary, and the same thing with reading a text or grammar or defining relationships between propositions. So let me, while I'm on that, let me just say that in my book, Reading the Bible Supernaturally, I have a list of all that vocabulary that you need in order to, I think it's like pages, I looked it up yesterday, like 397 to 402 or something like that.

And the list of all the relationships and all the vocabulary, the names you need to talk about what I'm suggesting are there. So let me do this. I want to give you the answer to the question, "What is Piper looking for?" This is what you want your kids to find, okay?

So I have seven questions that I'm asking as I come to a text. So number one, what is the meaning of a particular word in a context? The same word can have many different meanings in different settings. So how does Piper decide on which meaning the word has in this particular setting?

And the answer is that he looks at the most immediate context, the sentence in which the word is used, and then he looks at the paragraph, and then he looks at the book in which the, that is the, like it's Ephesians or Romans in which the word is used.

And then he looks at the rest of Paul's writings, and then he looks at the whole Bible. So there's a kind of concentric circles as he moves out from those immediate context, and the most immediate context would have the greatest force or power, authority in defining a word. Second, what are the propositions that the author has created by putting words together?

Propositions are the basic building blocks of meaning. Words get their meaning from their use in propositions, and propositions are the most basic assertions. They usually have a subject and a verb with some modifiers. So we might be looking at Romans 1:16, and the word we want to define is "gospel," and the proposition in which it stands is "I am not ashamed of the gospel." That's what I mean by words and propositions.

Third, how are the propositions related to each other? Does the proposition start with "because," or does it start with "therefore," or "in order that," or "although," or "when," or so on? It really helps to have names for all these relationships, and that's what I was referring to on pages 396 to 401, I think it is, in reading the Bible supernaturally.

This is the way an author communicates his meaning. He puts words together in propositions, then he puts propositions together in certain logical relationships. So, for example, we notice in Romans 1:16, "I am not ashamed of the gospel," and that has a relationship to what's in front and what's behind.

It says, "I am eager to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome because I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God unto salvation." So you have three links in a chain of argument. When I began to see that as a 22-year-old, my world exploded with excitement and insight.

Number four, what's the flow of the argument as these propositions with their relationships pile up, and what's the main point in this flow? Number five, what are the similar flows of thought elsewhere in the Bible? For example, in this "I am not ashamed of the gospel" flow in Romans 1, we might go over to 2 Timothy 1:12, where Paul says, "I'm not ashamed because I know whom I have believed," and asked, "What's the relationship between the flow of thought in how shame is overcome in 2 Timothy and how shame is overcome in Romans 1?" And when I make comparisons like that, similar flows of thought compared side by side, insights multiply.

Number six, what's the actual reality—this is so important—the reality behind the words and propositions and flows of thought? Lots of young people and older people, when they're getting excited about seeing the meaning of words, seeing how propositions work, seeing how logical flows of thought develop, they get all excited about words and logic, and suddenly they're playing a game, and they're forgetting that there's heaven and hell and life and death and God and Satan.

Massive realities are behind these words, and so I want to push myself through words into reality. That's number six. What's the reality? And finally, number seven, what are the personal applications that I can make of the author's meaning to my life and the world around me? And in all seven of those questions, the most helpful tool is the concordance—that is, the book or the computer program that enables you to see all of an author's use of a particular word, every place it's used.

This is my most commonly used tool in Bible study. Commentaries don't even come close. Bible dictionaries don't even come close. What issues all the insight, almost 90-plus percent, are looking up words that put me onto the trail of trains of thought in an author's mind. And once you have helped your children identify those seven kinds of questions, you simply want them to form the lifelong habit of asking and answering those questions.

And you can't do it for them. They have to do that for themselves, and you can do that by working through texts with those questions. You can do it together. You can assign them to do it, and over and over. One last suggestion. Writing down the answers for every text to those seven questions is vastly more fruitful than trying to do it in your head.

So, keep in mind that the aim is not to master a technique like arcing or lab work with John Piper. That's not the aim. The aim is lifelong habits of mind and heart that humbly, eagerly ask and answer questions from the Bible. What a great little outline of how you attack a text, Pastor John.

Thank you. And I hope that's helpful for you, Ryan, as you train your teenagers at home. For more on how Pastor John reads his Bible, see that book, Reading the Bible Supernaturally. You can download the entire book free of charge at our site, DesiringGod.org/books, and look for the title, Reading the Bible Supernaturally.

And for examples of Pastor John teaching the Bible by writing and drawing over the text itself, go to DesiringGod.org/LABS, DesiringGod.org/LABS. Thanks for listening to the podcast. Over at our online home, you can explore about 1,300 past episodes. You can scan a list of our most popular ones, read full transcripts, even send us a question of your own.

Go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Also, be sure to subscribe to the Ask Pastor John podcast in your favorite podcast app. There's a lot of ministry happening at DG Books and Labs and podcasts, all made possible by our ministry partners like Ryan and his wife and many others out there who support us.

We thank you for your support. We break for the weekend and return on Monday to talk about a multi-billion dollar industry in the states called fantasy sports gambling. Is it sinful to gamble on fantasy sports? That's next week. That should be very interesting. I'm your host Tony Ranke, and we'll see you then.

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