I just returned from the annual Fundamental Baptist Fellowship regional meeting for Southern California. I’m not technically part of the FBF, but many of those men are my good friends and favorite ministry coworkers. The Southern California FBF is struggling, but there are several men who are being faithful, God is at work, and new churches are being planted.

This year’s speaker was Dr. Bruce McAllister, head of the ministerial training program at my alma-mater, Bob Jones University. It was a delight to hear him again. In those formative college years when potential pastors are big on excitement and little on wisdom, he was a steady voice pointing us to humble, holy, passionate, evangelistic shepherding. He loves pastors, and it was a delight to have him challenge us from the Word. As I am reminded of the great influence he has had on my life, many other names flood my memory (in no particular order):

• Dr. Mark Minnick, who modeled how to labor in the Word and doctrine with passion and humility.
• Dr. David Doran, whose tenacity and courage combine (once again!) with great humility and expository precision.
• Dr. Gary Reimers, who loves to train pastors to shepherd their people through the careful preaching of the Word.
• Pastor Dan Brooks, who showed me what a Christ-centered ministry looks like.
• Pastor Eric Sipe, who wouldn’t let me shy away from really loving and shepherding people.
• Drs. Michael Barrett and Robert Bell, who made Hebrew a joy.
• Pastor Tony Miller and Dr. Jim Berg, who held the lines like bulldogs while loving and weeping and praying and shepherding. Though far busier than most, one thing was never in doubt: they were tending to their own private relationship with their Savior. They were humble shepherds, despite some student body opinion.
• Dr. Bob Jones III, who showed that you can have very influential positions, significant authority, and down-to-earth humility at the same time. 
• College and seminary friends like Ron Perry, Steven Mock, and Evan Collier who were less interested in arguing about nuance and more interested in modeling Christ-like attributes like prayer.
• My Dad, whose diligence and faithfulness and godliness influenced me more than the rest of the list combined.

Many more could be named. As I’ve typed that list, one characteristic dominates my impression of all of those men: humility. The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them …. it is not this way among you.

My friend Dr. Chris Osborne is teaching a new online class called “A Biblical Worldview of Science.”  It is “an inexpensive online course tailored for science teachers at Christian schools or any high school student or adult interested in creation science apologetics. This course fulfills the requirements for 3 semester units of continuing education credits for ACSI.” The course is offered through San Diego Christian College.

Chris is especially skilled at helping Christians think through the various biblical models for understanding origins, ultimately helping them to understand the biblical and scientific evidence pointing to a young earth, 6 literal day creation.

The course begins January 11, so if you are interested it would be good to contact Dr. Osborne soon. His email is cosborne{at}sdcc.edu.

I’m working on a topical study on ransom/redemption. My mind is swimming with texts, words, and things to remember to look up and check on. In the process I come across a handy chart in one of my commentaries that I want to return to later. Logos Bible Software 4 gives me three great ways to get back to it. First, I can put it in a “clipping.” These are quick files that contain clippings of anything you want from your library – kind of like a notepad sitting on your desk. (click for full-size images)

So you can see how I copied the chart into the clipping. I could also add this page to my favorites list, so I can return to the page easily:

 If I forget to do either of those things, I can just go back and find it in the history (this isn’t actually the history from that study):

I love how you can see your location in L4 books and browse around the index. This is not really a new feature in Logos 4, but it is a little easier to use, more self-explanatory, and prettier (for lack of a better term). Any time you have a resource open, the frame shows you where you are at in that resource, and gives you an easy way to pop open an index that you can scroll through. Elsewhere I’ve illustrated the cntrl-F search function that is also built into the frame. Very handy:

This post from the lead software designer gives an idea of the incredible amount of work that goes into a program like Logos Bible Software version 4.

I mentioned in a previous post that in my regular sermon preparation I do 9/10 tasks in Logos Bible Software 4 and 1/10 in Bibleworks. But that 1 out of 10 is very important, and I can’t figure out any way to do it quickly in Logos 4. Here it is: start by right clicking on a word in the Gk or Hebrew text, and selecting “search on lemma”:

This gives me a list of every NT reference where the lemma of this word occurs. Right click in that list, I can can select “copy to clipboard”:

This bring up the copy verses dialogue, where I can choose to copy the text of the verses in my preferred version:

That entire process takes about 10 seconds. It’s a process I do repeatedly in my sermon preparation. Would be nice to do it in L4, but for now I switch back and forth because it’s so fast in Bibleworks. If anyone knows a fast way to do this in L4, I’m ready to learn!

Here’s another walkthrough with screenshots from Logos 4 Bible software searching and graphing:

• Graphing Search Results

(looking for screenshots and visual stuff? scroll down to “features,” and also check out the videos about L4)

Today Logos Bible Software has rolled out Logos 4. Through an unexpected bit of providence I ended up beta testing this software for the last couple of months. I’ve spent my last six years as a pastor using my paper books, Bibleworks, and an occasional dabble in Logos 3. No longer.

Logos 4 isn’t an upgrade to Logos 3 – it has been completely rebuilt from the ground up. It was a gutsy move for the company to undergo a project this ambitious, but those of us who love Bible study will benefit from a product that will be able to keep up with the changes in the digital world (for  example, see the new iphone app that syncs with your L4 library). It’s worth reading the Logos blog post today for more on the decision to completely rebuild the program.

Through the beta testing process I’ve been able to observe first-hand the company’s dedication to the product, to their customers, and ultimately to the Word and the God of the Word. They subjected L4 to a team of beta testers who criticized, complained, suggested, scowled, cheered, groaned – something like 14,000 posts in the private beta forum over 2 months. And the Logos team listened to all of it, graciously interacted with us, and worked like crazy to keep improving the product. How many companies will do that?

L4 isn’t perfect, but from what I’ve seen through the beta process, I think we can be certain that Logos won’t just put a product on the market and then let users deal with it, warts and all. They are going to continue to push and improve and rethink and rebuild in any way they can to improve the product. They really do listen in the forums.

Pricing

Logos has never been cheap, and obviously there are some free software programs and websites that can do some of the basics. But I think it’s helpful to keep things in perspective.

First, the typical American vacation costs $200-350 a day – $1,600 for an average vacation. And we fuss about paying for software to study the Bible?

Second, look carefully at the contents. For example, with the introductory special Logos Scholars’ Silver costs about $750 right now (don’t trust the price on the website – call customer service). It includes 37 volumes of the very helpful New American Commentary series. In print you’d pay about $22 per volume (=$814). You can get the electronic set for about $485. But the set – and 650 other books – is included in Scholars’ Silver.

By the way, the standard Scholar’s Library is a great deal right now at $472.46. It combines many of the best parts of Bible Study Library and Original Languages Library into one.

And just in case you just received your inheritance, see this.

Features

I’ve created a few pages to illustrate some of my favorite L4 features. Most of these aren’t powertools for scholars, but the kind of stuff that the average Bible student can profit from. Keep in mind that different packages have different resources, so what you see in my screenshots might differ from what you would see in L4 on your computer. Clicking on the screenshots should bring up the larger image if needed. Check out:

• Book reading plans
• Bible Word Study
• The Sidebar (my favorite!)
• Customization
• Control-F
• Scaling
• Reading out loud
• Visual Stuff
• Word for Word
  

Problems

I have Bibleworks 6, and I love the quickness with which I can perform basic study tasks. There are still a couple of things that are easier in the Bibleworks interface than in L4. I’ll put it this way: in my sermon preparation, L4 is better for 9 out of every 10 study tasks, and I switch to Bibleworks for 1/10.

The L4 homepage is innovative. Whether it’s good or not, I’m not certain. It’s designed to be kind of like a website that you browse each morning, to see if anything interesting catches your eye. Some people love it. When I first saw it I called it “horrific.” I’m over that now, but I still prefer to avoid it.

The L4 interface is very powerful and visual, and it tries to do a lot of things at once. Sometimes it tries to do too many things at once, and you have to wait for it to catch up with you.

The basic search tool is not especially helpful, especially when searching for topics or keywords (for example, “centurion”). You get a bazillion returns (depending on the size of your library) from many types of resources, and it’s just overwhelming. You really have to learn about library organization (making collections, prioritizing resources, etc.) before searching becomes helpful. Thankfully, library organization is both powerful and fairly simple.

Conclusion

This is a tremendous Bible study tool from a great company. I’ve been using it in my sermon prep for several weeks, and I love it. If you can, get it. More later.

For some other reviews that highlight some things I missed, see Seek the Holy, Bible Software Review, Go Share Your Faith, Ricoblog, Kevin Purcell, Dan Phillips, and More Than Cake.

Here’s one ministry principle I learned from my parents: take God and His Word and holiness and ministry seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously. As a pastor I spend plenty of time having very serious conversations and preaching serious sermons. It’s good to have some fun with the church family as well. In addition to church picnics and baseball games and other recreation like that, we also have two yearly events when we laugh together. One is the church camping trip each June, when we traditionally sing silly songs on Sunday night. The other is family fun night, which rolls around each October. This year was our third annual camping trip, and tonight we’ll enjoy our fourth annual Family Fun Night. This year I’m sparing anyone else the misery of participating with me in the skits – I’m attempting a monologue. Here’s a flashback to last year:

On Sunday, October 25 we had a congregational meeting to update our church family on the church planting plans. We videotaped the meeting, and excerpts are now available online at sermonaudio.com