Logos 6: A Quick Review
/As the listeners of my radio program know, I review the sermons from some of the most popular pastors, sorry that should read vision-casting leaders in Evangelicalism and over and again I demonstrate that these leaders twist God's word and habitually (and I would even argue intentionally) mishandle and misapply the Biblical texts in their quest to be relevant and appeal to as broad an audience as possible (Matt 7:13–14). As a result, I receive countless inquiries from people about where to go in order to properly learn and study God's word. As a pastor, Christian talk radio host and student of the scriptures, I can think of no resource that is as important to have, use and master than Logos 6. Logos is always open on my laptop and at times I feel like I live in this program. Any Christian, regardless of how long they've confessed faith in Christ for the forgiveness of their sins will greatly benefit from Logos.
I had the opportunity to preview Logos 6 before it launched and I was literally blown away by the new features. Particularly helpful for my ministry work was the addition of Propositional Outlines which takes any Biblical passage and breaks it down into a usable and simple outline which then, for me, becomes the bone structure for my sermons. Also, the ability to quickly view what my favorite commentaries say about any particular passage and then store those quotes that I find most useful saves me so much time in preparing my sermons that I almost feel guilty, almost ;-). In addition, the Exegetical Guide now lets me quickly and easily see the textual variants for any passage that I am studying. To put it simply, thanks to Logos 6 I can now study the scriptures with even greater depth in only a fraction of the time that it used to take me.
Here are some screen shots of my Logos work space as I prepared last Sunday's sermon.
But, don't think for a second that Logos 6 is only for pastors and Bible scholars. It isn't!
The tools that Logos offers are every bit as useful for beginning, intermediate and advanced students of the scripture. The maps are amazing and help Bible students understand where the events of the Bible took place and how, in some cases, the geography impacted those events. Logos 6 also has expanded its media library to include before and after photos of archeological sites that help a person see what those sites not only look like today but what they looked like in Biblical history. Below, I've put a before and after screen shot of the city of Jericho.
There are far too many features to discuss in this review and I recommend browsing the videos of the Logos YouTube account to make yourself familiar with all of the tools that Logos 6 has to offer. The reality is that Logos 6 is like the über Google of Biblical studies and no two people will use it the exact same way. Anyone who wants to seriously study God's Word should own and use Logos 6 and anyone who is a pastor or teacher in Christ's church would be foolish to not avail themselves of the powerful tools that Logos has to offer. I am convinced that if more pastors and laypeople took their study of God's word seriously there would be far fewer false teachers and Bible twisters than there are today.
One more thing, the new Visual Copy feature is simply amazing and easy to use. I've been having a lot of fun with it. Here are some samples.
χάρις ἔλεος εἰρήνη σοι,
