Scripture Journaling: Simple Methods That Work

I used to read my scriptures, close the book, and forget most of it by lunch. Keeping a journal alongside my study changed that. Here are the methods I’ve actually tried — including the two that failed — and the simple ones that stuck.

Updated August 2026 · 14 min read

A few years ago I had a quiet, uncomfortable realization after a Sunday School lesson on 1 Nephi. The teacher asked a simple question — what had we noticed in our own reading that week — and I couldn’t remember a single specific thing from mine. I had read every day. I was sure of that much. But the words had washed over me and drained away, the way water slides off a windshield. That evening I pulled an old college notebook off the shelf, opened my scriptures again, and wrote down one sentence about one verse. It took maybe ninety seconds. It wasn’t profound. But the next morning, I remembered it — verse, thought, and all. That was the beginning of what I’d now call my scripture journal, and this article is everything I wish someone had told me before I started.

Before I get into methods, one thing matters more than any of them: a scripture journal is not a performance. Nobody is grading it. Mine is full of half-finished thoughts, misspelled names of Book of Mormon cities, arrows pointing at nothing, and the occasional coffee ring. It is a tool for thinking, not a record for posterity. The moment I treated it like something my grandchildren might someday treasure, I froze up and stopped writing. The moment I let it be messy, it became the most valuable study habit I’ve ever kept.

Why writing anything down beats reading alone

There’s nothing magical about ink. The reason journaling works is embarrassingly simple: writing forces a decision. When I read a chapter, I can nod along passively, letting one verse blur into the next. But the second I tell myself, “You have to write one sentence about this,” my brain has to actually process what it just saw. Which verse would I pick? What did it mean? Do I even agree with my first interpretation? That tiny act of choosing is where the learning happens.

President Russell M. Nelson once described sitting with the Book of Mormon and asking what it would mean for his life — listing what he would know and not know without it. His October 2017 general conference talk is, in a way, a model scripture-journal entry: a question, a list, and a testimony written down. I remember watching that talk and thinking, “He’s showing us his notebook.” Not literally, of course — but the shape of it was exactly what a good journal entry looks like.

There’s a second benefit I didn’t expect: a journal gives your past self a voice. Flipping back through entries from two or three years ago, I can see questions I was wrestling with then that have since been answered. During a hard stretch a while back, I reread a page where I’d written about Moroni 7 and the promise that charity “endureth forever.” I’d forgotten I ever wrote it. It felt like a letter from someone who knew exactly what I needed to hear — because, in a sense, it was.

The four methods I’ve actually tried

Over the past several years I’ve rotated through four basic setups. None of them is “the right one.” They fit different seasons, different budgets, and different personalities, and I’ve landed on a hybrid of two. Here’s the honest rundown, including the failures.

1. The wide-margin journal scriptures

This was my first attempt: a set of scriptures with extra-wide margins, a good pen, and the intention to write my notes right beside the verses. It lasted about three weeks. The problem was me — I treated those margins like a museum. Every note had to be worthy. I’d draft a comment on scratch paper before committing it to the margin, which turned a ten-minute habit into a forty-minute chore. When I finally wrote something I later disagreed with, I actually felt irritated at the page. I sold the set to a friend who loves it and fills every margin beautifully. It wasn’t a bad method; it was a bad match for someone as fussy as I am about permanent ink.

2. The dedicated notebook

A plain, inexpensive notebook that lives next to my scriptures. This is my workhorse and the method I still use most. The cheapness is a feature, not a bug — because the notebook cost a few dollars, I feel complete freedom to fill it with garbage, and the garbage is where the good thoughts hide. I write the date and the chapters I read at the top, then one to three short entries underneath. Some entries are a single line. Some run two pages when something grabs me. The notebook doesn’t judge.

3. Gospel Library app notes

The Gospel Library app has a genuinely good built-in note system: you can highlight verses, attach notes, and collect everything into custom notebooks that sync across devices. For about six months I did all my journaling here. The strengths are real — it’s searchable, it’s always in my pocket, and I can tag a note “faith” and pull up every thought I’ve ever had on faith in seconds. The weakness, for me, was friction of a different kind: typing on a phone keyboard made my thoughts shorter and shallower, and I’d catch myself checking notifications mid-entry. I still use app notes constantly for quick captures — a thought in a waiting room, a cross-reference during a talk — but my deeper entries happen on paper.

4. The journaling edition

A journaling edition of the Book of Mormon or the Bible prints the text with wide spacing — sometimes an entire blank page facing each page of scripture. I bought one for a serious study of the Book of Mormon and used it for a full year. It’s the Cadillac option: gorgeous, roomy, wonderful for verse-by-verse work. It’s also heavy, expensive relative to a notebook, and only covers one book at a time. I’d recommend it for a specific focused project — say, walking through the Book of Mormon in a year — rather than as an everyday catch-all.

The best scripture journal is not the prettiest one or the most expensive one. It’s the one you’ll still be writing in next January.

What to write when you don’t know what to write

This is the question that kills most scripture journals in their first week, so let me give it real space. You read a chapter. Nothing leaps out. You stare at the blank page. The blank page stares back. You close the notebook and feel vaguely like you failed. I’ve been there dozens of times. Here’s what I’ve learned: “nothing leapt out” is not a dead end. It’s the normal starting point, and you only need a few reliable prompts to get past it. I keep these five written inside the front cover of my notebook:

• Write the verse you’d underline, then explain why in one sentence. Not three sentences. One. “Alma 32:21 — because I keep treating faith like it should feel certain, and it doesn’t say certainty anywhere.” That’s a complete entry.
• Write the question the chapter raises, even without an answer. Some of my best entries end in a question mark. “Why did the Lord wait until 1 Nephi 4 to tell Nephi why Laban had to die?” Unanswered questions keep the scripture open in your head all day.
• Rewrite one verse in your own words, as if explaining it to a friend. Paraphrasing is secretly one of the deepest forms of study. You cannot paraphrase what you haven’t understood, and the gaps in your paraphrase show you exactly where to dig.
• Write one way the chapter connects to your actual life this week. Be specific and ordinary. Not “I should be more patient,” but “Mosiah 4:27 — ‘not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength’ — I have said yes to three things this month I should have declined.”
• Write down what you’d ask the author if he walked into the room. This one feels playful, but it produces startlingly good entries. What would you ask Alma about his years with the sons of Mosiah? Whatever you’d ask is what you haven’t understood yet.

One more trick: when a chapter feels completely dry — a list of names, a stretch of Isaiah, a war chapter — I write about the dryness itself. “I found this chapter tedious, and I think it’s because…” sounds like a non-entry, but it has led me to some genuine insights about why scripture includes the slow parts. Honesty on the page beats polished nothing every time.

Verse mapping: when one verse deserves a whole page

Verse mapping is the method I reach for when a single verse won’t leave me alone. Instead of reading forward, you stop completely and map everything about one verse onto a page. It’s slower, deeper study — I might do it once a week, not daily — and it’s the method that most often produces entries I come back to for years.

Here’s my actual process, using Mosiah 18:9 as the example, since it was my most recent map:

Step one: copy the verse out by hand, word for word. Don’t skip this. Hand-copying forces you to notice every word, and I almost always catch something I’d skimmed past a dozen times. This time it was the word “willing” — not “commanded,” not “expected.” Willing. That single word changed the flavor of the whole verse for me.

Step two: circle three or four load-bearing words and write what they mean. I circled “mourn,” “comfort,” and “stand as witnesses.” For “mourn with those that mourn,” I wrote down what mourning actually looks like in practice — sitting with someone, not fixing them. For “stand as witnesses,” I noted that a witness testifies to what they’ve seen, which means this covenant assumes I’ve seen something of God in my life. That led to a sidebar list of moments when I had.

Step three: find two cross-references and write how they connect. I went to Alma’s own later teachings and to the sacrament prayers in Moroni 4 and 5, and wrote a few lines on how the baptismal covenant at the waters of Mormon echoes forward every Sunday. Cross-references are where a verse stops being an island.

Step four: write one sentence that starts with “So for me, this means…” The whole point of the map. Mine was unglamorous: “So for me, this means when Sister Davies calls, I go, even when I don’t know what to say.” A verse map that doesn’t land in real life is just a diagram.

Marking systems that don’t fall apart

If you’ve ever owned a set of scriptures with a color code — red for Christ, blue for promises, green for commandments — you already know how this story usually ends: by February you can’t remember what purple meant, and half the chapters look like a highlighter accident. I’ve built and abandoned three color systems. The one that survived has exactly four marks and took me five minutes to learn:

A straight underline means “this matters to me personally.” No category, no sub-meaning. Just: this one landed. A box around a verse means “promises or doctrine I want to be able to find again fast” — these are the verses I flip to when someone asks me a question or when I need one myself. A question mark in the margin means “I don’t understand this yet,” and the word “yet” is doing important work there; when I finally understand it, I write the date next to the mark, which has become a quiet record of growth. An asterisk means “this connects to something in my notebook,” and I jot the notebook’s page number beside it so the paper and the scriptures talk to each other.

That’s the whole system. Four marks. The principle I finally absorbed is that a marking system is an index, not an artwork — it exists so that future-you can find things, and future-you will not remember an eleven-color legend. Keep it small enough to memorize in one sitting.

For app users, the same principle applies. Gospel Library lets you create custom highlight styles and tags, and the temptation is to build a taxonomy worthy of a research library. Resist it. I use three tags — “answered prayer,” “to study more,” and “share” — and they cover nearly everything I’ve ever wanted to mark. The Church’s own Gospel Topics page on scripture study puts the emphasis exactly where I’d put it: regularity and pondering, not elaborate apparatus.

Digital, paper, or both?

After years of going back and forth, my settled answer is: both, on purpose, for different jobs. Paper is for thinking; digital is for finding. When I’m working through a chapter in the morning, pen and notebook win every time — writing by hand slows me to the speed of actual thought, there are no notifications on a paper page, and I can draw arrows, boxes, and terrible little maps of the promised land without any software getting in my way. When I need to remember “that thing I wrote about grace sometime last year,” digital wins — five seconds of searching in Gospel Library beats twenty minutes of flipping through old notebooks.

My current rhythm looks like this. Morning study: paper notebook, paper scriptures, phone in the other room. Any time away from home — waiting rooms, lunch breaks, a quiet moment before a meeting — Gospel Library notes, tagged loosely. Once a month or so, I sit down and copy the best digital notes into the paper notebook, which sounds redundant but turns out to be a built-in review session; rereading a month of thoughts and rewriting the keepers is where connections surface. You don’t have to copy my exact split. The only real rule is to decide which tool is for thinking and which is for storage, and stop asking either one to do both jobs.

Making the habit stick: a starter checklist

Everything above is useless if the habit dies in week two — and mine did, twice, before it took. What finally worked was shrinking the commitment until it was almost too small to fail. If you’re starting from zero, here’s the checklist I’d hand you:

• Attach it to your reading, not your schedule. “After I read, I write one sentence” survives a chaotic week far better than “at 6:15 a.m. I journal.” Anchoring the habit to the study session means it happens whenever the study happens.
• Set the floor at one sentence. Not one page, not one paragraph. One honest sentence counts as a win, and on the many days when more comes, that’s a bonus, not the standard. My average entry is three lines.
• Keep the notebook with the scriptures. Physical friction is the silent killer of habits. My notebook sits on top of my scriptures, so opening one means seeing the other. Digital-only folks: put the app where your thumb lands first.
• Never catch up. Missed three days? Write today’s date and today’s entry. The moment a journal becomes a debt you owe, it’s doomed. Blank days are just blank days.
• Reread old entries on a schedule. I flip back through the current notebook on Fast Sundays. The rereading is the reward loop — it’s when you see growth, answered questions, and patterns you couldn’t see while writing.
• Let the method change as you change. Notebook this year, verse maps during a Book of Mormon year, app notes during a newborn’s first months. A journal that flexes with your life is one that lasts decades.

What the journal has quietly become

I started scripture journaling to fix a memory problem. What it became, without my planning it, is something closer to a personal record of how the Lord has dealt with me — questions asked, answers received, sometimes years apart, all in my own handwriting. There are entries from the year my father was sick that I can barely reread, and entries from ordinary Tuesdays that make me smile because some small worry I wrote down got resolved so completely I’d forgotten it ever existed. Joseph Smith wrote that after his vision he “had seen a vision” and “knew it, and… could not deny it.” My journal is nothing so grand, but the principle rhymes: when it’s written down, in your own words, it becomes harder to forget and harder to talk yourself out of.

If you take one thing from all of this, take the smallest version: tonight, after you read, write one sentence about one verse. Date it. Do it again tomorrow. The methods — the maps, the marks, the systems — are all just scaffolding around that one small act. The scaffolding is useful. But the act is everything.

This article reflects my personal experience and study, not an official statement of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Methods described here are simply what has worked in one ward member’s home; adapt freely. Sources and further reading: President Russell M. Nelson, “The Book of Mormon: What Would Your Life Be Like without It?”; Gospel Library app; Gospel Topics: Scripture Study. All links verified August 2026.