SFE Logos Training Lesson 1 | Striving for Eternity Andrew Rappaport

Logos Training Overview and Why Bible Software Matters

All right, well, welcome. This is a, well, I don't know what we're going to call it. We're going to call this a Striving for Eternity Lagos Training. I labeled it as Lagos Training 1, which kind of hints to that that we might have a second.

I'm Andrew Rappaport. I'm the president and founder of Striving for Eternity, a discipleship ministry. Striving for Eternity is where discipleship happens. And so if you want more information about us, you could go to www .strivingforeternity .org.

You can find out all the things that we have there. We offer seminars on how to interpret the Bible. We offer an academy where you can learn classes, a 20-week class on, or 20 lesson classes, take it at your own pace.

But on how to interpret the Bible, we have over 80 lessons, I think, on our systematic introduction and systematic theology. We have 20 plus classes on Introduction to World Religions, and more than 20 classes on Intro to Discipling.

And we have more coming. Working on a class on logic is probably going to be our next class of that, or a Bible survey. We're working on a couple different things. So that's our academy. We also have conferences that we do where we do some trainings, encourage people to go out and evangelize, things like that.

So we have a lot of different things that we do at Striving for Eternity. And we would encourage you to go to the website and check that out. Now, what we're doing tonight is actually came about, let me give a little history.

Many of us were at a conference, it was a G3 conference. And at the G3 conference, there was supposed to be a Lagos training. And Lagos, there was some confusion and the training never occurred. And so a lot of people who know that I am a large and heavy Lagos user, contacted me and said, hey, would you be able to give us some training?

Give us some of what you do and teach us? Because what we discovered is there are a lot, a lot of people who use the Lagos Bible software. And does that help? Someone said, I don't look that large. I don't know if that was, should I move closer?

I look large. If you see below the chest, I'm very large. If you haven't guessed, we're going to have some fun. We have some folks who are in here and are going to be here. So we can get some questions and make sure we do this to help folks.

So if you want to join, actually, and you're watching on YouTube, and you're watching live, that is, there is a link to join in the description of the Hangout. So if you go to the Hangout and click the link, you can actually join in.

That way you can ask questions. And for folks who join live, we're just going to ask, mute your mic as you come in. But so here's how this came about. I used Lagos quite a bit. Let me do a quick look just to see.

I've been told that I have more books in Lagos than anybody outside the company. But I've also been working on it for like 24 years, about 23 and a half about. And I now have, as I look, 48 ,000 volumes in my Lagos library, which is a lot, which means it kind of gets a little slow.

Kofi's eyes just went like this. And so, Kofi, you're still young. In 25 years, you have that to look forward to. If you can convince your wife to let you keep buying books, that's the harder part. I can't, I can't vouch for that.

But over a long period of time, I've been buying books. I buy them in bulk primarily so that I can get the best discounts. It is not a cheap software, I understand. But when people ask me, what packages should I get in Lagos?

My answer is always whatever gives you the most books. Anything that gives you the most books, get that. Whatever you can afford with the most books. But the thing is, is that I can honestly say now, I'm going to say this as someone with, I don't know, I think I have over almost 30 years of software development background.

My background, I went to college, I got a degree in computer science. So that's my background. In all the software that I've worked on, in all the software that I've used, I can honestly say that I've never been more impressed with any software, Christian, secular, whatever, than Lagos Bible Software.

And when you really learn how to use it well, it opens up so much that you can do to study the Bible. And what we're going to hope, and those who are in the channel are going to pray, and some of you guys will understand this right away, is I'm going to be pushing my computer to its limits.

For folks who don't know, I'm on a nine-year-old Windows machine that I have maxed out and cannot add anything more to it to get this to work. And so doing Lagos and Hangout can be dangerous. But we're going to see, we're going to assume that it's going to work just fine.

And we'll see if that actually is true. So I'm going to share my screen right now. And we're going to go through some basics. And folks who are watching on YouTube, I do have that chat open, so you can pop in a question if you have questions.

If anyone in here has a question, you can pop it in. And I'll try to answer that. If you want to unmute yourself, you can do that as well. And so we'll probably go, I'm going to try to go for a minute.

I'm going to go for about two hours so that this isn't too much at any one time. And then we'll also look to possibly do more of these in the future. So one of the things that you see here is this is actually what's the homepage.

And you can always get to the homepage. Let me ask this, you guys who are here, do you see my mouse as well? Give me a head nod if you see my mouse. Good, good. So that way I know that. So this is the homepage.

You can always click home. Now, we're going to show this later. But the thing about home is that if you ever go to the homepage, it really doesn't undo your layouts. And we're going to talk about layouts in a bit, but it doesn't undo your layouts.

It just kind of pops up your homepage or pops it away. It'll toggle that. The nice thing about the homepage, and I'm not saying this just because. So when I started using Logos, Logos one or two, I actually sent to Bob Pritchett, the president of Logos over 100, I think it was like 120 features that I wanted to see in Logos.

And I think all of them have made it in by Logos four. One of them was that my pastor, when I first, when I was basically in church and he was training me to be a pastor in the church. One of the things he taught me to do was to always every morning in my devotions was to open up my Bible dictionary or Bible encyclopedia to a random place in the encyclopedia and just read an article.

And people have asked me how I know so much of the background or the culture and things like that. When I, when I taught, when I teach the Bible and a lot of it is because of that behavior, because every day I would look to read just one new article that I hadn't read before and learn something new.

And what you actually see over here in this left is a bunch of different things that you can, you can customize what you see. But a lot of what I have is different excerpts. You see this word excerpt right here and here.

What it's doing is going through my library and randomly pulling something out, just random. And that random article is something I'll sit and read. And if I want to dig in more, I start to read that a little bit more.

But I, I've kind of made that a habit. They've, they've tried to make your homepage to be something that you would start your day with. Um, as you see, I'm a little bit behind on my, I was trying to do the, uh, reading through Jonah, um, in the month.

And, uh, I'm a little bit behind cause I didn't do it since January 31st, but, but I, I gotta get back onto that plan. That's one of the things also, uh, Logos, uh, I, I should say there's a, you could go to Logos .com.

They have videos there. They have the Logos pro videos to walk you through. Um, and that's really a good way to do it. They have them in small segments. And that's what you see right up here is I, I keep those because when they do a new video, I'll click on this and, and watch it and play the new videos.

So that's one of the things that I like in my homepage. One of the things they have this reading through Jonah is actually a, a thing that they have, which you can see right here is the Logos pro plan is, um, this is a, uh, something that they developed to help you learn Logos and learn how to study the Bible at the same time.

They did this last year in, in January 1st and they started it then. And it was really good. It was going through Matthew four on the section of Matthew four, really, really good stuff. Um, and so a question that Steve is asking is what's the difference between this and Logos now.

And so Logos, there's three different things you could do. You can get Logos cloud. You can buy Logos. And then if you have Logos, you could get Logos now. Let me explain those three. Cause it's, it was confusing to me for a bit.

Logos cloud is really for the next generation. Um, people who want Logos, they, um, they're looking to, to buy Logos, but as we see with software nowadays, um, it's kind of a, you know, people do everything by, um, you know, by leasing.

That's the new, the new model. And so what you end up with, with that is that Logos cloud is a way to, um, to kind of rent Logos. They, you get at a certain level and they choose the books that you're going to have.

Um, so that's Logos cloud. If you already own Logos, you're not going to want Logos cloud. Um, if you don't have Logos at all, Logos cloud might be an option, but you're going to be limited on how many books you can get.

So you're going to have to decide how many books you want to have, um, in your, in your library. So if you want to expand your library, like I have, you're going to want to own it. Now, once you own it, Logos now is a really good thing.

What Logos now does is Logos now will let you get the new features of Logos. Well, now it lets you get Logos features. They come out like every six weeks, they give you a couple new features. So I was doing that in Logos seven when Logos, sorry, Logos six.

And when Logos seven came out, the majority of those features I already had, I think actually I had all of the features. The only thing I didn't have was the new books. So I had to buy Logos seven to get the new books.

Um, so, um, that's, that's what Logos now is. So I hope, I hope that answered that question. Um, just so we, we have those. So when you come in here, uh, what I was saying was you could get the Logos pro pro plan and they have a, a thing of going through Jonah and it's really, I really encourage doing that, uh, even though I'm behind, because I, like I said, I mean, here you could see, I technically started it the January 31st and it's been a very busy month for me, uh, or month and a half.

And so I haven't really gotten to, I got to day one of that training. So, uh, but it, it's a thing where you, you know, that shows up right here. And, and so that becomes something, if you want to take further courses and I have mine, as I scroll down here, you see, I'll have my courses right here.

Okay. And so these are courses you could take that, that are offered from Logos. The other thing you see here in this left is my prayer list. And you're saying, uh, Andrew, those are all attributes of God.

Yes, that's exactly right. Because that's what I pray every day. So what I do is I have my, my prayer list here and all I got to do is click on this. We'll have a hover over it. You could see all the things I, I have in that, in that, uh, you know, each of these different prayers that I have.

And all you have to do is when you're done praying on it, you click the little button here and it'll go away for that day. And it comes up the next day. Um, and so I have a lot of my prayer list here.

So you can set this up where you can have your reading, your Bible reading. If you are someone that likes to be liturgical and you have maybe a, uh, you know, one of the, you like, or you want to do a morning evening devotional, like a Spurgeon's morning evening, that'll be here as well.

And so, um, I'm just trying to make sure I get a sub questions pop up on, on, uh, or other comments on YouTube. So, sorry, squirrel distraction. Um, Joe, I don't know what you mean by your name is on the list 29, but, um, but, um, oh, you're saying 29 is the, uh, is, is the prayer list.

Okay. Well, I have, I, I, I'm trying not to go all the way down because I don't want, um, I do have people's names on there. And sometimes some people don't want to know, don't want everyone to know that they're being prayed for now.

Uh, I, I did have a, uh, and Joe, Joe will know who that is, but I have a guy who in union square in New York that I pray for him weekly. Uh, he's an unbeliever and, uh, he always hates the Christians and my prayer list, actually my primary prayer list is on my phone.

And, uh, one of the reasons I have it that way is when I evangelize, I can just add someone right away. Um, and so the Logos is kind of my backup one, but, um, yeah, what ended up happening was I showed him my prayer list.

I showed him that I pray for him, uh, you know, every, every, uh, every week. And he was so surprised by that. It was, it was the first time in, in like six years, he actually shook my hand when I left.

But one of the things I want to show you, and I actually was glad that I had some sources resources to update what you see up in this corner up here, a couple things. One is you see that Logos installed seven dot four.

And so if I click on this, it brings me to where I have a link and I can find out what things are in Logos seven, four, what new features they put in there. Okay. The other thing is I have is I can click on this and they have updated.

As you see here, they tell me the things they've updated. Now for many people, you're not going to maybe care what that is. And if you don't, you could just click the X and it goes away. You may want to see the different books, the new books that you've, that were added.

So since the last time I came in, these are all the new books that I have or updates to books. Okay. And so when I'm done, I just can click that and close that away. Click that, close that away. You see my name up here.

That's actually a hyperlink. If I click on that, that brings me right to my Logos account. That'll bring up in my browser, a Logos account. So that's really convenient to have. Uh, and I guess I didn't give it kind of an agenda.

What I want to do today at least is I want to go through the homepage, kind of get everyone familiar with it and get you using it because it really can be helpful. But then I want to go through just a couple of quick things.

Um, and like I said, we'll probably do more of these, but I want to go over some of the basic things that'll get everybody started no matter where they are. And we're going to keep doing this and get more and more advanced.

And I'll say this, um, the best thing you could do, if you really want to know Logos, you really want to be a good user in Logos is to go to the Logos camps by, uh, that are put on by, uh, uh, Morris Proctor.

I would say like I, and this, and I'm not, people have called me a Logos evangelist, um, because I talk about it a lot. Cause I just love their software. I love the Logos camp that, uh, Morris does. He is probably the best instructor I've seen in any subject on any software on any topic.

Um, I really was concerned that we'd get it stifled with so many people of different backgrounds into theology debates. He avoids all that guys, super knowledgeable on every version of Logos guys. Great.

I mean, you go into one of the hangouts with one of the classes with him and he sits there and just right from the get go remembers what version everybody's on. Oh, you're on five. Okay. What about your five gold?

Okay. You're on six silver. Okay. And he will then explain what everybody's seeing in all the different Logos versions and packages. It's, it's amazing, but he doesn't waste a second. The guy uses a lot of repetition to explain things over and over a lot of different ways.

So you really get through it. He walks you through the steps. I would say if you really want to be proficient in Logos taking camp one and two is almost essential. Um, they also have the videos that I mentioned earlier.

Those are very helpful. If any of you have an Apple TV, the new Apple TV, you can get the faith life app on an Apple TV and get the videos on your TV. So if you want to sit and feel like you're watching it on TV on a big screen, you could do that.

They, they actually, all those courses, you saw these courses that I had here, all of these are available on my Apple TV app. So I can watch them there as well. Besides the fact that they have 24 hour TV.

Customizing the Homepage, Sidebar, and Daily Reading Plans

Um, so one of the things I could do is if you see this little gear up here and I hover over it, it says customize. Um, and if I click on that, you're going to see, I have here that sidebar. Remember the sidebar I was telling you where I have my prayer list and everything else.

Well, I could add a thing to start a new prayer list to start a new reading plan on there. I can choose these different lectionaries if I want them. Okay. Um, I have, you know, the different reading plans that I might want to do.

Um, and so then you have all these different, you know, readings that you could do. You could do, um, Lutheran ones, you know, for any Lutheran, you have the common book of prayer. So you have all these things that you could add to your daily sidebar.

And then this, where it says content is this, is this whole big center area. So you could choose, you know, if you want to change your, your Bible preference, you know, which one you want to use. If I just, if I click on this and then I click anywhere else.

Okay. What you're going to see is this page is going to redraw. And as it's going to redraw, it's now going to have something new. And that something new, um, is going to be a choice where I can now choose which Bible I want as my default.

Um, now you notice that all of a sudden some things changed, right? There's some different things here that were, are different. It's, it went out and grabbed a whole bunch of new articles from my, my library.

And so I have different articles now that I could click on and read, excuse me. And so when I, when you go with the gear, you have a lot of things you could choose from. You could choose your daily devotionals.

You can choose faith life, which by the way, is the company that now is, it used to be called Logos Bible software. They now have the bigger company called faith life, which is much bigger than just the Logos Bible software.

They have their own social media site, uh, which we're going to start moving some of our Bible study that we do on Monday nights over there for discussion. And the faith life group is kind of like a, a social media site that you can use really good for churches and groups that want us to study together because it's like social media, but it's on specific topics.

And so, you know, I ended up wanting to keep in touch with like the faith life blog and faith life today. Um, I don't have a concern for faith life woman because I don't care about women. No, no, it's just that stuff for, for me, really.

Um, I, I don't, um, I don't need the, the notification stuff, the Logos blog. Well, I get that in my email, so I didn't want it cluttering this up. So I unchecked that. And then I have media where it's going to go through my media and pull different things like this.

The maidens chosen is, is from a media. Um, and, and the one that I really want to make sure that you click is this one that says excerpt. That's the one that goes through your library and grabs the random things to pull out.

But you can have a verse of the day you can, you can do all these different things. And so I'll just unclick the choose your, your, my Bible preference, and it'll redraw this again. And while it's redrawing, you notice up here, this number two, you're sometimes going to see that.

And if you hover over it, in my case, it's going to tell me, Oh no, it started indexing all over again. That'll slow down my computer a little. Um, one of the drawbacks to having a really large library is that you can, you, you end up, um, you end up having to do more indexing and the indexing can take a while.

But what I just did is I ended up going over and let me, let me resume it just so I could show you from here. Um, when the indexing is, is there, you can actually just click on this and you can, you can pause the indexing if you want.

So as it comes up here, it's telling me it's indexing. It's 1%. Well, I'm doing this hangout. I don't want the CPUs being used for that. So I just click on this and it's now going to resume in four hours to indexing.

Let it index at a time when your computer, when you know, just downtime, when you're not having to, uh, to do that. Um, and so, um, I guess some, some Steve and John were saying that, uh, they believe that Faithlife app is on Roku and Chromecast as well.

I wouldn't know. I, I, I wouldn't use those things. I'm an Apple boy. Um, I've become an Apple boy. I'll put it that way with, with, with, you know, a great amount of resistance. Uh, but, uh, I have, I have kind of switched over at some point during this, I'm sure the computer is not going to, we're going to be complaining about the technology with this, but what you end up seeing is, excuse me, and just drink a little sun here.

Now you guys may not have what these icons, you see these icons up here. You may not have those because those are something that I dragged and put there. And what you have up here is you're going to have a command window.

And as you start becoming more proficient with logos, you're going to use this a lot more because what you're going to want to do is if you want to open up a Bible, I could just, if I spelled ESV right, I could just do ESV and automatically I have a choice of opening the ESV and it'll, that will open it right away.

So if I know the books, I can, I can do that. And so there's a lot of different commands you could do, but here's the thing you could do. Say I wanted to open the ESV. I could take this little thing. I click my mouse on open ESV.

I could just drag it right up here and let go. And you see the icon showed up. And what happened was in my, the home screen went away. But now if I click on that, that's going to open the ESV. And so that's a nice, easy way to put the things you put that you use regularly.

So let me, I'm just going to delete that. You can give it different icons if you want. They have a whole slew of different icons you could choose. Um, you could show what you want in the image. Now this says ESV too, because I already have an ESV over there.

So I'm going to delete this one. And, you know, what you see here is I have, I bought the Logos six or Logos seven training manuals. So you know what? I put these up here. Why? Cause I go to these manuals quite a bit to try to figure out, you know, these are put together by Morris Proctor.

Great to have. Cause when you, you like, gee, let me get an overview of the homepage. It's one click away. And you can see with his manuals, it walks you through this step by step. Click here, you know, click here.

And it explains every, everything that step by step. So these, these are really good to have. Um, and so I put those right at top. I have my ESV and my beloved Holman Christian standard Bible. Um, those who know me, you guys know that I love this one.

Problem is, is I can't do all the study with the Greek. Like if I click on this word experience here. Um, oh, there they've added it. Oh, maybe I still will start using Holman now. Um, but this was a thing that they didn't have before is where you could do the Greek studies right from the Holman.

So because of that, I did most of my study in ESV. And now, did you notice something by the way, I had James one here. This is what we were studying in our men's Bible study this morning. And so once I opened the ESV, that's the last place that I was.

It opened to James one. When I opened the home and guess what? It opened to the same spot. It's going to do that for you. Assuming that's where you want to be. So, um, someone called me a heretic for loving the Holman Christian standard Bible.

Don't worry. You can't get that anymore. It's now going to be called the Christian standard Bible, but, um, and, and so one of the things you see is, as you saw, so these are constantly Logos is constantly updating these things.

So you saw that I just learned that I could do some of the Greek works from the Holman. They didn't know that before. I also encourage up here is to put a, a Bible commentary, a full Bible. Now I have the MacArthur study Bible because all I, in my personal opinion, I think the MacArthur study Bible is the best study Bible out there.

You could disagree. You'd just be wrong now. Um, and if you're, for those who are watching, please, you got to just understand my humor. I do like to have fun. Um, but I also have this one here. I, I suggest that you have a commentary that is one commentary on the whole Bible that you put on here.

Okay. And I'm going to explain why later on, but there's a, it becomes really important. I put the English dictionary on there because, well, I don't know English so well, computer languages, fine. English language.

Yeah. Not my specialty. Um, I have two books up here that I go to on every text of scripture. Why? Because these deal with textual variances and I like to get into that and study that out. So I put them right up there right away.

Um, this here is something that I created that we'll get to in maybe a much later class of, of this, but it's a guide that I created on my own. We're going to get to some of the different layouts and the guides.

And so that's a, a guide that I use that I tailored. So I put that up there. When you go to the guides here, you're going to see a passage guide and exegetical guide, a word study guide, a sermon starter guide, and a topic guide.

And then you see Andrew's guide. Well, there were things in the passage guide, things in the exegetical guide that I liked some, I didn't. So what did I do? I was able to customize it and make my own.

You can make a whole lot of these. You could actually make this for different types of study, a different guide for doing devotions versus doing, um, doing study. You're going to see when we're, we're going to talk about layouts in a bit.

And what I'm trying to do is just give some real big overviews. And then we're going to get into how to use some of these guides just so that we all can get started with where we're at. And I'm going to hopefully show you some things, even if you've been using Logos for a bit, that'll be new to you.

Search Tools, Collections, and Custom Study Workflows

Uh, so the thing here is that you end up seeing very quickly, uh, you can create the stuff like this. You can also create layouts. And I, I like playing with layouts. We're going to get to the tools in a bit, but so I have my guide here.

I have my sermon study. This is if you want to, if you want to work, if you're a pastor or you're teaching regularly, they have the sermon study guide that will help you in starting a sermon in developing.

Uh, if you use PowerPoints or, or slides, they have a design where you can very quickly create slides with scripture versus create slides with quotes that you get. So you want to, you get a great quote from Spurgeon.

You can just drop that in there. It's, it's really good. Uh, but that's on, we'll go over today. I use the fact book a lot and I'll get, uh, maybe we'll get a chance to talk about that today. And so I put that up there.

The other thing I use a lot, text comparison. I like to compare all the different Bible translations and, or many of them. So I do that. And then I had this little thing here that it says active update, active layout.

Well, how did I get that? Well, again, remember in our commands that we were looking at, I had typed in here update if I spelled it right, update active. And then there was my, Oh, I can need layout update, active layout.

And what I did was I grabbed this and I just pulled it over here. What that does is when we get to layouts, I'm going to show you that allows me to update the layout with any changes I made, because what I do a lot is I play with things.

And then I have this other command that I liked that just closes all closes my, all my windows. And then I can open a layout and we'll get to that in a bit different layouts. Let me go through these three menus, by the way, you see right now I'm at a blank screen at any time I could click home and that just bring comes right back.

So at the home is the way this is, you click on it, it'll disappear. Click on it again. It shows up. So it's designed that you could just click on it during the day and, you know, once a day and look through it.

So here's my library. I can click on this. And as you see it, it, it tells me I have, uh, 48 ,671 books or resources. That's a lot. You're not going to like, Oh, let me find that book. Let me just scroll down.

No, you're not going to do that. What are you going to do? You're going to start typing. You know, I want, I want MacArthur, uh, on Ephesians. So we're studying Ephesians. Well, here we go. Here's everything from MacArthur.

So I can quickly find things like that. Now I see now notice the number changed. I only have six resources. And what you end up seeing is that the way this is laid out, you notice this ranking. It's, it has this ranking and the ranking is it'll give a ranking number.

Now I've chosen to have this. Well, I just left there. Um, I have this sorted by title, but you can sort this by the series. So if you had, if you, if I just did MacArthur, we're going to have a whole bunch of MacArthur commentary series there.

Um, if I scroll this over, you could see I could, I could sort it by the publisher. I could add my own tags in here. And I have that on some things where I've tagged it myself and I'll have my own tags for books.

You could do it by subject. Now, one of the things you're going to see is that like, I'm going to have a rating here. Um, when Logos first came out with this rating, this was the easiest way to get books to show up in a prioritized list.

Um, but they've added more to that. And so you could prioritize your list over here by just clicking this prioritize. And what I, and we'll get this in later lessons, but just for those who are more advanced and want to learn like how to, how to improve just some simple things is.

You notice here, I have my Bibles. I put these in a, in a specific listing. Well, when I have my top Bibles right here with these, all these are going to show up as my top Bibles. And this is going to be the order of these Bibles.

Now, after this afternoon, King James, it's whatever order Logos chooses for me, and I'm fine with that, but I want these to show up in this order. And that becomes really important later on. And cause that's going to have to do with why I say you want to have a Bible and a commentary up at the top, and it's going to be really helpful for you.

We're going to get to it. But then after that, I have, I'll have Bible dictionaries. I have my Bible encyclopedias ordered in the ways that I want the first several ones to show up. Okay. And you see, some of these are bolded.

See MacArthur commentaries, bolded, and you'll see that that's 30 volumes. The advantage of that is if I'm studying the book of Ephesians, this is the order these will show up in and only the Ephesians commentary out of the MacArthur commentary set is going to be there.

It's going to know that. So if you guys want to prioritize books, what you want to do is get the books you want and just drag them over, do the find, get the books you want, drag it over. Um, if you wanted to, you say, well, gee, I just don't know what I, which ones I want to do.

You could go over here to subject and you can say, well, I want to sort by subject. Now I'm going to get a very different type of library here. Scroll back over. Now I have a library based on subjects.

Okay. And so now it would be a subject. I don't know what we'll have under this. So, so there's only two books under Abrahamic religions, but, you know, you're going to have it based on, on whatever subject you chose.

The other thing you could do, I mean, you could do it based on, um, like here's one where I put a tag of Islam. Um, but you could do it based on your tags. You could do it on subject, but the best one to do is by type.