Eric Sullenberger's Reviews > ESV Illuminated Scripture Journal: Acts

I first heard of journaling Bibles from Matt Whitman on one of his TMBH videos. Later one of my Pastors purchased Galatians for everyone who went through a summer adult Bible study class on how to study the Bible using Galatians as the example. Although I ended up missing a decent amount of the class, I enjoyed having the journaling Bible. I myself was getting ready to teach an adult Bible study series in the fall on the sermons in the book of Acts, and decided I wanted to have the journaling Bible for myself. When searching for that I stumbled across this Illuminated edition, and since it was the same price (or close to) I went ahead and purchased this. I enjoyed marking up the text and writing notes on the facing pages. I did this as I prepared for my study over the summer and reviewed on Saturdays what I was going to be teaching on Sunday. As I was doing so I had a mug of erasable: highlighters, colored pencils, and pins. My wife would tease me that I was "coloring for Jesus". I found it very relaxing, and that it forced me to really take in the text and contemplate it. As I use this predominantly to focus on the Bible study I was going to be teaching, there are large portions of the text where I read to understand the narrative in-between the sermons, but did not take the time to study more deeply or mark up the text. However there's plenty of room left for me to go back through and make notes again on a future read-through.

My wife looked at mine and told me that she liked it. I then decided to get her a set of the whole Bible for Christmas, which I found a good deal on Amazon's Prime Day. I had also put it on my Christmas list, but didn't really expect to get it. Unbeknownst to me my wife got me the whole New Testament one. We always jokingly compete at Christmas to see who "wins" by getting the best gift of the year. I thought that the Bible said might do it for me. When she opened her NT (I wrapped the two halves separately) she couldn't believe it and had me open mine immediately afterwards. We both thought we had probably won Christmas with that, but if she said we probably won marriage instead. I'm so excited to use my new ones and study the word alongside her. And maybe someday we'll get me a copy of the Old Testament ones as well.

Now that I've told my story I suppose I should review the book itself. I really enjoy the ESV translation. The text is easy to read and accurate to the original. The illuminated editions are gorgeous to look at, and yet the art is not disruptive. The text is easy to read. It's simple to carry around just a single book of the Bible. It feels less permanent marking it up, since they are very affordable individually. The journaling can be used for all sorts of reasons, and I found there is plenty of space for anything that I wanted to note. In addition to that, my wife likes the cream colored paper because she finds it's easier on her eyes. The only thing I'm torn on the dot grid to take notes on. I have fairly sloppy handwriting and I tend to do notes and not pictures, so personally I think I would prefer lines (and if I remember correctly the non-lluminated edition has lined pages instead of dot grid pages for note-taking), that or maybe just a slightly darker dot grid because I found it hard at times to see it with the text of the next page showing through. Nonetheless, as I said already I really enjoyed this and I'm looking forward to using the whole set that I have now.