your own words. Be exact in thought and take care to state the relationships of ideas, principles, and happenings you see within the text, whether the Bible states them explicitly or not. As you write, relate the parts of the passage to your main idea. Always change the statement of your main idea to fit the parts of a passage. Never bend the parts to fit your statement of the idea. The text itself is not an independent reality that wills itself to mean something. The meaning of a text comes from the