Studying the Epsitle of Paul the Apostle to Titus

Well, I am in the midst of studying the book of Titus. It will be the third time for me to teach this epistle, teaching it first back in 2002, then again last year and now. It is a short book. Only 46 verses and 921 words in the KJV. I memorized this book word for word and will recite it to the class the first week. My objective for these next 5 weeks is to teach not only the contents of the book and its major themes also how to study this book in order to retain it and make it a part of our heart and soul. One way to do this is to read it repitiously for about a month. It becomes part of our subconsciously thoughts. We can then visualize the contents of the epistle without the bible in front of us. We then can start breaking it down by paragraph and titling them. We then look for key words. These are often repeated by the human author of the book. In this case it would be Paul the Apostle. Then we can look them up in an expository dictionary or concordance and see how that word was used in other contexts of the bible. Most important is how Paul used that word in the book of Titus as well as in his other epistles. We then ask questions of the text. They are, Who, What, Why, When, Where, and How ? This makes us observe the text of Scripture closely,often making lists and charts of the terms as we go along. When we do our observation worksheet thoroughly and properly, then the proper interpretation usually is very evident to us. We seek for the principle that is being taught in the text. We then apply it to our life.
This is not at all very hard but it is painstaking and detailed. We are to mine for the gold of Scripture with patience and the fruit of our study will be produced in our life. In short epistles like Titus, I like to memorize the book during my readings by taking a verse or two a day and verbally reciting it several times until it becomes a part of me. I continue this process until I memorize all 46 verses. Then the book becomes mine forever. Amen.