“Tell me more.”

Sure you want to know?

“Definitely.”

OK. Here’s how it is: first, you exegete the passage.

“Whoa! What’s that big word mean?”

It means to so interpret the passage that you obtain as the result of your work nothing more than, nothing less than, and nothing other than what the Holy Spirit intended you to obtain from it. In other words, you understand its meaning and purpose and how it applies. You know what the Holy Spirit was up to when he had the writer pen the words.

“Wow! All of that in one word?”

I guess I could have said it briefly, but I wanted to get just about everything into it.

“No wonder it helps to have one word rather than to have to say all of that every time.”

Yep. Technical terms are helpful that way. But there’s a danger in them too. People think they know what the term means when they are only vague about it. Or they use it to disguise what they really mean – which is something else. The liberals will tell you they exegete too. But they can’t (honestly) say that what they do fits my description of exegesis. So it works both ways.

“Yeah. Now what comes next?”

I think that we’ve gone far enough for one shot. I’ll just mention a couple of other things to whet your appetite. Next, you have to find the corresponding situation in your life or the lives of those to whom you will be preaching, so that you don’t force any application that the Spirit didn’t intend. “And then?”

Then, you want to be able to suggest possible implementations of the passage.

“Huh?”

That is to say, some suggested ways that the Spirit’s purpose in the passage may be actually put into effect in life.

“Wow! And you haven’t even begun to put it into form yet?”

Right. That’s for another day.

“Good.”