(If you are reading this in your email inbox, you’ll need to click over to the blog to see the videos. I really hope you do. The first one is a short introduction to these fabulous Bible study labs.)

I LOVE these little labs. They are each about 8-10 minutes long and perfect for a family devotion or for a sweet quiet time all by yourself. They teach us how to study God’s Word in this way for ourselves. It’s exciting!

If you want access to the very last Desiring God conference (held two weeks ago in Minneapolis), all the session are free. John Piper did every plenary session, but there are some break out sessions for women you’ll want to check out as well. Go HERE for a complete listing.

My 14-year-old daughter went this year and loved it. When she came home she said, “NOW I know why reading the Bible is so critical!” Amen.

Piper is going to be posting two labs each week. You can see all the labs he’s already taught by going to this link HERE. I’m probably going to post each video here on my own blog as well. When I post links, videos, and quotes, they do not get sent out to your email inbox. You have to catch them directly on my blog. So be sure to click over once in a while. I try to post several of my favorite things every week.

Here’s what John Piper said in an interview about the Look at the Book Labs:

Look at the book is rooted in my sense of calling to take people from the banquet to the kitchen.

I spent the last 30, 40 years of my life mainly serving meals to people in sermons, meaning I have spent hours in the kitchen cooking. And then I set the table in a manuscript and I stand in the pulpit and I feed the people a finished meal. And I believe in that with all my heart. I think that is what preaching is.

But what will happen when I am gone if people haven’t learned to make meals for themselves? Now there will always be preachers, praise God, amen. But as I come to the end of my life: I am thinking, you know, I would like in addition to serving meals take people into the kitchen and show them how I cook, how I get food, how I get meaning from biblical texts.

People ask me all the time: How did you see that? Or where did you get that? Or how do you study or how do you prepare a sermon? Or how do you reads the Bible? And people are hungry to read the Bible for themselves and find meaning. And I am hungry to help people gain confidence in reading the Bible for themselves. That is the idea that the kitchen is where the meals are made and where spiritual culinary arts are taught. Crowds aren’t as big. It is messy in the kitchen. It is less finished, less refined, you spill things, you have to start over. So the kitchen is not as, you know, it is not as public and not as many, maybe kudos that come with the small group that meets in the kitchen. And I want to go there.

I want to go deep and I want to go wide. So this is Bethlehem college and seminary. I get to go deep because we are in Greek and I am going to take, you know, 16 guys and go to the kitchen with them for a year. But I want to go wide. I want to help lay people who don’t have any Greek get as much as they can out of their English Bibles and they can get infinitely more than they think they can get out of their reliable English translations. And there are reliable translations that they can work with with confidence. So look at the book is part of the deep and it is part of the wide.

I was inspired by Khan Academy online and Salman Khan when he teaches algebra, for example. What you see online is a black screen and then numbers appear as he writes them. I looked at that and I said: Oh, I would love to do that with the Bible. So that is what we are going to do. People aren’t going to see me on these little videos. These are five to eight minute videos online. They will see a screen black with white print and there will be a text of the Bible — two to five verses. And then they will hear me talking. They will see me circle and draw arrows and underline and make connections and write notes all to show answer: what do you do with this text? And that is my goal. My goal is to lead people through text after text after text, hundreds of them, to form habits of mind, habits of reading, habits of analysis that will give people confidence with their own Bibles.

Here’s the first lab (again – click over to the blog to see it if you can’t see it in your email inbox.)