fbpx
How can preachers us the Important Passages Guide in Logos 8 to help them craft exciting sermon series on a given topic in the Bible? We'll show you how.

Would you like to preach a sermon series on a topic in the Bible but also want to preach expositorially? You can use Logos Bible Software and the Important Passages Guide to select passages to study and preach for a sermon series on a topic. Each sermon will cover one passage, but the series serves as a topical sermon series instead of preaching through a book of the Bible as many Expository preachers prefer.

using the logos 8 important passages guide to craft a sermon series on a topic

I was going over the new features in Logos 8 recently and forgot about the Important Passages Guide. As I looked over this new tool in Logos 8, it hit me – this would work great for picking passages to study and preach while crafting a sermon series on a particular topic.

Most expository preachers like to preach through books of the Bible. I am one of those. But I also like to choose passages that cover a topic and then study the passage covering that topic to preach expository messages on them. We’ll show you how to put together a sermon series on passages found using the Important Passages Guide in Logos 8.

What is the Important Passages Guide in Logos?

open the important passages guides by typing into the search box
Open the Important Passages Guide from the Guides Menu: Method 1: Type the first part of the name “Important” into the Guides Menu search box.

Logos added the Important Passages Guide when it released Logos 8 back in 2018. Users will see it from the Guides Menu on the Logos toolbar. Find it quickly by typing in the Guides search box the first part of the guide’s name “Important” and it will show up as the first item in the Bible Reference Guides section. You can also scroll down to the Bible Reference Guides section.

open the important passages guides by scrolling down to the bible references guide
Open the Important Passages Guide from the Guides Menu: Method 2: Scroll down to the Bible Reference Guides section and click on it.

When it opens, it looks totally blank. Type a passage into the box at the top of the new window like John 3:16. It will search the index and find passages related to the topics in that verse.

important passages guides sections
See the various parts of the Important Passages Guide explained below.

After searching for a passage, you’ll see the results that will like the image above. You see a few things.

  1. The top line says “References of All Types To all passage” – these help you choose what will show up in the list of passages. Click on All Types to change the types of passages. Click on To to change whether the passages will go out from the selections below or to the selections below. More on these options below.
  2. The Add menu lets users add types of datasets. Click it to see what you can add.
  3. Under each passage you see hyperlinks to various kinds of content found in Logos. These links will open the Factbook. For example, the above image shows the Factbook entry for God: Love. You’ll see other kinds of links.
  4. The links at the bottom of the window will…
    1. Show more passages found
    2. Save the list as a Passage List
    3. Open all of the found passages in your top Bible translation

The To and From links in part 1 above will change the list of passages as follows:

  • To – To finds cross references from other passages that link to your passage. So if a passage links to John 3:16 it will show up in this list.
  • From – All cross references in your various translations that go out from John 3:16 will show up when you select From.

How to Use The Important Passages Guide to Choose Sermon Topics

I often read a passage in my quite time or while I’m listening to another Bible teacher or preacher and think, “That passage make a great sermon.” Then as I look at the passage it leads me to look up others and inspires me to preach a series of 3-6 sermons or more on that topic.

You can quickly find a lot of passages from the Important Passages Guide by entering the verse that inspired you into the search box of the guide. Then read through the resulting searches.

Take this a step further by adding various kinds of datasets. Click on the Add button and choose something like Topics. This gives you more passages from that dataset. A dataset refers to sets of information that Logos organized around that kind of info. In this case, they collected the Topics together into the Topics dataset.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.