Have you ever been confused by how to navigate the bible? Well, you are not alone! We were all once in a place of not knowing how to get from place of the bible to the next. I am hopeful that this step-by-step guide will help you learn how to find your way around your bible.

First let’s look at a verse and break down what it is telling us.
John 3:16

John- is the book we are looking for

3- is the chapter we will find in the book of John

: -This semicolon is used to separate the chapter from the verse so we can clear see where the chapter number ends and the verse number begins

16- is the verse that we will find in chapter 3 of the book of John

Now let’s use the information we get from this verse to find it in our bible!

Step 1: Find your table of contents. It should look like this:

Step 2: What book are we looking for? John. All those names like Exodus, Numbers, John, Corinthians, etc. Are considered books of the bible. Before the bible was created these books were on their own, separate from each other. For our convenience, the bible was created by putting all those individual books together into one. What page number does the book of John start on?
Page 2015 as you can see, I circled the book and the page number below.

Step 3: Now that we know the page our book starts on, let's go there!

Step 4: Now that we are at the beginning of the book of John, let’s search for chapter 3. The chapters are marked by the large bold numbers that go in order throughout the book. They look like this; I circled the chapter number in green below:

Step 5: Once we have found chapter 3 of the book of John, it is time to find verse 16. The verse can be found by looking at the little numbers that go in order throughout the text. Every time a chapter ends, the verses are numbered starting back at number 1. I have circled the number of the verse we are looking for in red below:

Step 6: We did it! We found the 16th verse of the 3rd chapter of the book of John. Otherwise known as John 3:16.