Crossway Bibles giving away ESV Global Study Bible for free!

You read right... Crossway is giving access to their Global Study Bible away for free! (This is of course digital access only; don't expect them to mail you a physical book for nothing.) Crossway has been so generous over the years in providing digital access to incredible resources like this for minimal or no cost - take advantage of the opportunity to dig deeper into the Word!

The easiest way to jump into the ESV GSB: ESVBible.org (click "Apps" then click "Global Study Bible Online"). You can also purchase access to a number of other study Bibles there, if you are so inclined!

Strong Phone

I can't believe the amount of difficulty I've had finding the Bible app feature I wanted for my Android phone.

Don't get me wrong... there are a BAZILLION Bible apps out there. The #1 app I would recommend to any Android user is the YouVersion app (actually, for pretty much any platform YouVersion has an app, and they are all terrific!) If you don't have a Bible app on your phone, just get YouVersion. Just click over and download it. Now. It's totally a no-brainer. I love YouVersion, but it doesn't really have one of the things I wanted: to be able to look up original-language definitions for individual words. Basically, I wanted to be able to click on something and see the Strong's Concordance definition. YouVersion is focuses on getting people to read devotionally, not really on drilling deeper with Word Studies and such... not a criticism, just an observation. I still have YouVersion on my phone. I still use it quite often. And I still highly recommend it; it's one of the first things I install on any new phone. But it didn't have the one function I wanted.

So I looked further. I have invested some time and money into modules for my Logos desktop software, so I decided to try out their app, figuring that since Logos is designed for serious study, it would probably have by dream feature. The Logos Bible app does link up to most of the modules I've purchased for my desktop version (though not all of them), and it does have some pretty nice study features for a mobile app. It also has a split-screen function so you can view two books (two different translations, a Bible and Study Bible Notes, a Bible and a Bible Dictionary, etc.) and I use that constantly. And it has some Greek/Hebrew language functions, but strangely enough, trying to click an English word and find out what the original-language word means is a little bit hit or miss. I still have it installed, and I use it quite frequently in church, but it didn't have that one key thing I wanted: click the word, read the definition. (By the way, there are some free Logos modules, but you'll get access to a lot more translations for free with YouVersion than with Logos.)

There are mobile versions of a lot of the Bible Web sites out there, too, and quite good ones: Bible Gateway, My Study Bible, and even YouVersion have standout mobile sites, and I bookmarked all of them. The problem with those is that the cell data reception inside my church is pretty awful, and at the time they didn't have WiFi for use by the congregation, so using those in church wasn't going to happen. It needed to be an app with offline versions, like YouVersion or Logos.

So I started trying out apps that were being developed by some of the other Bible Web sites I was familiar with. Bible Gateway released an app which is pretty good. Bible.is has an app which incorporates video clips from "The Jesus Film," which is sort of an unusual feature. eBible.com took an interesting tack with their app: you actually speak the Bible reference you want to look up, and it reads it back to you audibly! I tried all of those, and even installed the plain-vanilla ESV only app, mainly just because I'm a big ESV fan and wanted to take a look at it. They all had good points and bad points, but none of them had what I wanted: direct links from the Bible text to Strong's numbers.

A very recent entry into the fray deserves a mention: the Faithlife Study Bible. This app is actually a whole self-contained Study Bible with several available translations and with study notes that are actually tweaked specifically to match whatever translation you are reading. The notes will actually grow and evolve over time, as readers email in questions and new articles are added. It's a really cool deal, and I like it a lot... but it uses the Logos engine, so still no direct-to-definitions functionality.

Finally I just dug in until I found an app with a screen shot that looked like exactly what I wanted. I installed it, and it works like a charm... not only does it have Strong's definitions, but it also has Thayer's definitions, which are broader in scope than the brief Strong's definitions. The app is called MySword Bible, and the screen shot you see at right shows the KJV translation with the Strong's links inline. It does exactly what I had hoped all those other apps would do, so I use it only for that... I never switch from the KJV+Strong's translation. It's very easy to find a verse (some of the apps listed above are surprisingly hard or slow to navigate, particularly Logos), and if I want to read Strong's/Thayer's definitions, I just click on the Strong's number.

But I didn't get rid of the other apps, no sir! I have MySword installed, but I also have YouVersion, Logos Bible, and Faithlife Study Bible installed. Some church services I'll actually run all of them concurrently, with different translations open in each! That way I can switch between five or six translations very quickly and never lose my place in any of them. (The danger is that you can get so distracted by driving your phone that you forget to listen to the minister... but I digress.) It's incredible the sheer volume of information about the Bible that is accessible from my little $200 cell phone. Sitting in church, I have in my hands the equivalent of a whole bookshelf full of Bible translations and study works. It's funny, though, that it took me over a year to find an app with the one single feature I was looking for!

YouVersion - you should have it on your phone

A few days ago I did something I haven't done often. I wrote a "User Review" of an app on the Android Market:

This is the Cadillac of Bible apps. It's designed simply to get you reading the Bible; it has very little in the way of study tools such as cross-references or Greek/Hebrew lexicons. What it does have is just about every Bible translation that the layman has ever heard of, even in audio in some cases, and scads of "reading plans" to help you get engaged with the translation of your choice. It eliminates any excuse you might have for not reading the Bible regularly. The icing on the cake is that it's free!

The app I was talking about is of course YouVersion, which I have mentioned here in the blog several times before. If you have it on your phone, it's probably just called "Bible". If you don't have it on your phone, right away you should visit http://youversion.com/download with your phone and download it! Here's a QR code you can scan to take you there if that's the way you roll:

 
Scan to download the Bible to your phone

YouVersion's Bible app really is the cream of the crop for mobile device Bible reading. Well, I'll temper that statement a little bit: the YouVersion app is free, and there may be paid apps out there that rival it in one way or another. In fact, since I use the Logos software on my home computer, I also have the Logos Android app installed, and it gives me a bunch of study materials that YouVersion doesn't have (the ESV Study Bible notes, for example), and on top of that it lets me split my screen in half and view two translations at once! But I use YouVersion far more often, and here's why:

1. YouVersion has probably every Bible translation you've ever heard of. It certainly has my favorites... the ESV, NAS, HCSB, NIV, NLT. There are scads of English versions, and a bunch of non-English translations as well.

2. 

   This is what it looks like when you're reading on
   Android... how simple is THAT?

   It's easy to use. You open it up, tap the icon that says "Bible", and you're reading the Bible! Changing the passage you're looking at or changing the translation you're reading are intuitive processes (which is something I can NOT say about the Logos app... changing translations or passages in that app is pretty convoluted until you get used to it).
3. Audio. Not a recreational reader? Staring at a page of text makes your eyes roll back in your head? The YouVersion app has audio files for many of their translations, which means that after you point and click your way to a passage, you can listen to it instead of (or in addition to) reading it. This means that you could listen to the Bible in your car on a daily commute (I've done it), while you're going to sleep at night (done that too), or wherever you are.
4. Reading plans. YouVersion has tons of daily reading plans that you can choose from. Some of them are only a couple of days or a week long and cover specific topics or books; others range up to long-term plans to read through the entire Bible. And you can use the audio in conjunction with your reading plan, so instead of reading passages from sometimes several different books/locations, you can have them read to you. I'm working on a reading plan that has a two chapters assigned each day from two different books. If I start the audio running on the first chapter, when it reaches the end it proceeds to the second chapter automatically! How cool is THAT? If you sign up for a free YouVersion account, you can track your reading over time, and you can actually read through an app or their Web version and you "get credit" from whichever you use (so you could read from your phone one day, listen to audio on your phone the next day, and read on your computer the next day, and the system tracks your progress from all three). It can also be set up to fire an alert on your phone every day to remind you to read your passage, and if you miss a day or two you can shift your reading program's dates so that today's reading is the only one you have to complete to be caught up. No guilt trip and no scrambling to catch up by reading multiple days... nice! It's the least stressful Bible reading plan system I've ever tried.
5. Downloadable translations. Some, but not all, of the Bible translations in YouVersion can be downloaded to your mobile device so that you can access them even from places where you do not have data access; other translations (because of restrictions set by the publishers) are not downloadable.

The issue of downloadable translations does bring up the only major problem I've had with the YouVersion app: if you do not have data access, you may have trouble even getting the app to start. There is no public WiFi at my church and the building makes 3G availability a touch and go proposition, and this has given me trouble a few times. Usually if you have a downloaded translation it will start right up, but sometimes it insists on being able to see the YouVersion server on the Internet and it won't open at all. I haven't seen this happen in quite a while, though, so presumably I've either gotten every translation that I use downloaded, the data accessibility at my church has improved, or YouVersion has fixed it (they are pretty active about updating the Android app, and I understand they're good about new versions on other platforms as well). So I suppose your mileage may vary on that, but the fact is that this is an OUTSTANDING way to get yourself engaged with the Word. And even if you use a different Bible app, this one likely can give you access to translations that you don't have in that app. Scan the QR code above or visit your app store directly and download this thing. Tell yourself you'll keep it in your hip pocket when your regular Bible app fails you... but you may find yourself using YouVersion more often than you thought! And if you struggle with getting yourself to read the Bible regularly, the reading plans and/or audio versions may be the thing that enables you to start engaging more often. That's the goal of the YouVersion apps - to help you get into the Bible, wherever and whenever you can. What a terrific goal to have!

Scripture Menu on your Home Screen

Hopefully if you've been reading this blog for any amount of time, you know that it's actually part of a Web site called ScriptureMenu.com, and that we've actually provided a mobile version of the site to make it easier to access using your cell phone. Here's something you might not know: although we haven't technically built a formal "app" to install on your phone, it is very possible to put a link to the mobile site on your iPhone or Android phone's home screen, and that link will look like an app and behave like an app. When you touch it, you will be opening a browser to the mobile site. Scripture lists at your fingertips! Here are instructions on how to do it (thanks in large part to this post on Phil Wilson's blog; I'm copying the instructions from there to here not to steal Phil's content, but so the instructions will still be here if for some reason one day his blog is not):

iPhone

1. Open http://m.scripturemenu.com/ in Safari
2. Click the icon at the bottom center of the browser. It may look like a square with an arrow in it, or it may simply look like a plus sign.
3. Select "Add to Home Screen."
4. If necessary, give your link a name (I recommend "Scripture Menu").

Android

1. Open http://m.scripturemenu.com/ in the Android browser.
2. Bookmark the page.
3. Open the browser bookmarks screen.
4. Long-press the bookmark you just created.
5. Select "Add to Home Screen."

Alternately on Android, when you get to step 3, instead just go to the home screen where you want to see the bookmark, long-press the space where you want to see it, then select "Shortcuts" and "Bookmark" and select the bookmark you created. Note that this may not work the same way if you use an alternate browser such as Dolphin or Firefox.

Either way, the result is that you've created a link that feels like a Scripture Menu "app" on your phone, but you haven't had to purchase, download or install a thing. The only thing you need is a data connection, and you've got instant access to the Scripture Menu wherever you are!

YouVersion - download NIV and NLT online for free!

Check it out... the NIV and NLT are free to download for offline use with YouVersion for the next 24 hours! From the YouVersion email newsletter:

NIV and NLT Available for Download: 48 Hours Only!

Some of you have let us know that you lost your offline Bible versions after upgrading or replacing your phone without having offline translations backed up. Most versions in the Bible App are available to download anytime. However, a few are not, so we reached out to our friends at Biblica, Zondervan, and Tyndale, and they have graciously allowed us to offer the New International Version (NIV) and the New Living Translation (NLT) for a limited time.

For just 48 hours next weekend—from 12:00 AM October 30 through 11:59 PM Central Time U.S. (GMT -5) October 31—you’ll once again be able to download the NIV and the NLT for offline use. (When you download a version, that means you can read it in the Bible App even when you’re offline—that is, when you can’t connect to your service provider or to the Internet.) Special thanks go to Biblica and Zondervan for making the NIV available, and to Tyndale for the NLT.

Get 'em while you've got the chance! Hey, can you believe that YouVersion's app for Java phones is still in active development. How many mobile apps can say that?

ScriptureMenu.com Mobile Site Launches

Today I've launched a mobile version of ScriptureMenu.com! Just point your cell phone at http://ScriptureMenu.com and you should see the mobile version of the site. It contains the same information as the desktop version, but it is set up for convenient use via smartphones and most other Web-capable mobile phones. Let me know if you have any trouble with it, or if you have any suggestions!

(The direct link, if you prefer to bookmark it that way, is http://m.ScriptureMenu.com)