The Highlight step of HEAR asks you to write out the one or two verses that actually stopped you when you read. Write the book, chapter and verse beside it, and give it a short title so you can find it again next year. The verse doesn’t have to be the famous one or the important one. It has to be the one you couldn’t get past.
That’s the whole step.
It’s also the one most of us quietly fake.
Why do I keep highlighting the verse I’m supposed to?
I know this one from the inside. In the overview I admitted I spent years chasing the perfect lesson instead of the people actually in the room. What I didn’t say is where that habit started. It started at Highlight. I read Scripture like a teacher hunting for material… scanning for the line that would preach, the one a room would nod at. I wasn’t reading to be stopped. I was reading to be useful.
And a useful reader highlights the expected verse every single time.
You can feel it happen. You hit the line everybody knows, the one on the coffee mug and the church sign, and something in you says that’s the one. Meanwhile, three verses later, a small phrase snagged on you. You read past it, because it didn’t seem important enough to write down.
That snag is your Highlight.
Robby and Kandi Gallaty built HEAR as a journaling method for ordinary people, and the instruction for this step is personal on purpose. It’s the verses that speak to you. Not the verses a commentary would pick. Not the verses that would make a good title slide. If you highlight what you think a mature Christian ought to highlight, you’ve skipped the step while looking like you did it.
What does “stopped you” actually feel like?
It isn’t always comfort. Sometimes it is. Sometimes a verse lands like a hand on your shoulder and you want to sit there for a minute.
But sometimes the verse that stops you is the one that irritates you. A promise you don’t believe yet. A command you’re quietly ignoring. A word that describes your week a little too accurately. A question you can’t answer. All of those count. Your reaction is the signal, and the reaction doesn’t have to be pleasant.
Try it on 1 Peter. The whole letter is 105 verses. You’re writing down one or two.
Read the first twelve and most people will stop at verse 3, the new birth into a living hope. Great verse. Write it down if it got you. But keep reading, because a few lines later Peter says this:
“Though you have not seen Him, you love Him; and though you do not see Him now, you believe in Him and rejoice with an inexpressible and glorious joy,” 1 Peter 1:8 (BSB).
If you do ministry through a screen, that one might stop you cold. Peter is writing to people who never once saw Jesus in the flesh, and he tells them their love is real anyway. No asterisk. No “once you get to the real thing.” Distance didn’t make their faith lesser.
So the entry might look like this. 1 Peter 1:8. Love without seeing. Three words of title. That’s a Highlight.
Isn’t that just picking the verse I like?
Fair question. Doesn’t this turn Scripture into a mirror? Don’t I just end up writing down whatever already agrees with me?
No, and the reason is the other three letters.
Highlight is not the whole method. It’s the door. Explain is where you ask why the text was written and to whom, and that’s where your first reaction gets checked. Apply is where you ask what it teaches about God. If you highlighted a verse for the wrong reason, the next fifteen minutes will show you. That’s the beauty of the order. Highlight gets to be honest because it doesn’t have to be right yet.
And in my experience the verse that stops you is rarely the one you’d have picked to like. The verses we like, we already know. The ones that stop us are usually the ones we’ve been walking past.
Why write it out instead of just underlining it?
Because HEAR is a journaling method. The writing isn’t decoration on top of the reading. The writing is the method.
Copying a verse out word by word slows you down to the speed of the text. You notice the and and the though. You notice what Peter put first. A highlighter swipe takes half a second. Writing it takes a minute, and the minute is where it gets into you.
If your Bible lives on your phone, that’s fine. Open a note and type it. One rule, though… don’t paste it. Pasting is a highlighter swipe with extra steps. Type the words, then the reference, then the title.
The title matters more than it looks. A year from now you’ll have a page of entries, and the titles are how you find what God was saying to you in October. Love without seeing is findable. 1 Peter notes is not.
What happens when a whole group compares Highlights?
This is where it gets good for anyone leading at a distance.
Church, we have trained people to answer the question we wanted to ask. “What did you learn?” invites the correct answer. “What stopped you?” invites the true one.
Post a passage in a group thread on Monday and ask everybody to drop their Highlight by Wednesday. Just the verse and the title. Five people read the same twelve verses and you’ll often get several different Highlights back. That isn’t a mess to tidy up. That’s the most useful piece of information a leader at a distance ever gets, because you can’t see faces in a thread. You can’t watch someone shift in their chair. But you can see that somebody stopped at the verse about grief in trials, and now you know something about their week you’d never have found out from a lesson.
Pastor, the quiet ones will type. People who would never speak up in a circle of chairs will post a verse and three words. Some weeks that’s the only window you’ll get.
If you want the full list of questions for this step and the other three, it’s all in one reference page. The bigger case for forming people when nobody’s in the room is in the guide on digital discipleship for churches.
Try it this week
Read 1 Peter 1:1-12 twice. Pray first, even if it’s one sentence. Then write down one verse that stopped you, and make it the one you almost read past. Reference, then the verse typed out, then a title of three or four words.
If you lead anyone, in a room or a thread or a group chat, ask them the same thing before you teach anything: what stopped you?
So here’s my question for you. How long have you been highlighting the verse you were supposed to notice? Give it one week of writing down the one that actually got you, and see what you hear.
Part of the HEAR series. Start with the overview.
