Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Thoughts on Preaching and Logos5

I use Logos 5 quite a bit these days.  I highly recommend it.  It's great to be able to have thousands of top of the line recourses accessible on my laptop no matter where I want to study and prepare.

We are currently preaching through the book of Acts and a couple features of Logos are coming in quite handy.

I love how you can organize your favorite resources into groups for quick access.  These are called "collections".  I just recently discovered how to use them and it has proved quite handy as I am preparing to preach on Acts.  I don't have to reorganize all the time.  I can save my preferred organizations and retrieve them quite quickly.

I have a ton of commentaries on Acts now in my Logos digital library, but two resources in particular have stood out to me.  F.F. Bruce's commentary on Acts (check out this video concerning the entire collection) and Darrell Bock's commentary on Acts.  Both are concise and quite readable yet not shallow.  I like having a commentary that gives you more than you can use by way of information but doesn't make you wade through endless sentences of overly academic material that your people would never be interested in.  Both of these commentaries accomplish the former well.

I also love that with many commentary sets they are making the individual commentaries available so that you don't have to buy the whole set just to get the one commentary that you need.  We plan to preach through books of the Bible at The Vine and so as we preach a book I plan to grow my library through single volumes that relate to what we are preaching.  

One minor complaint I have with Logos 5 is the constant need to download updates and restart the software.  Seems like each time I open it up I have to wait at least five minutes or so before I can actually get some work done.  This is a minor annoyance and really not a big deal, but mentionable nonetheless.

My sermon prep would be much more arduous without Logos 5 and I'm sure I'll continue to grow my library into the future.

2 comments:

Jon Stallings said...

Thanks Zach for the helpful tips. I have been using Logos for a few years now and recently upgraded to 5 - Hopefully as time goes by the updates will not be so frequent.

Pastor Jim said...

My updates would not come nearly as often if I didn't keep buying resources! I've used Logos for years (since before it was called Logos) and I love it!