Trying to find a scripture reference in just the contents of a book

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Mark Watson | Forum Activity | Posted: Sat, Mar 26 2011 7:41 PM

I am looking for help in how to search for "romans 5" in just the Contents of a book such as the Nelson Preaching Annuals.

Thanks for your help.

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Mark Watson | Forum Activity | Replied: Sun, Mar 27 2011 8:27 PM

Jerry,

Thanks for the reply.  Evidently this is not a common request due to lack of responses to my post.

I read the link you posted but it did not seem to address my question (or at least I didn't understand it to).

Let me try and explain in another way.  If I am looking for a sermon that uses "Romans 5:1-11" as its major text (not just used within a point of the sermon) from a group of books of sermons such as the Nelson Preaching Annuals, how do I perform that search?

• If I do a basic search for "romans 5:1-11" with a collection which contains only the Nelson Preaching Annuals I get a long list of sermons that mention the passage, but may not be the main passage of the individual sermon.
• Right now I have created a layout with all of the Nelson Preaching Annuals opened up to the "Contents" page and look at the list of sermons that way - because they are listed by date, title, and main scripture reference - but this takes alot of time.
• My reasoning for doing this search in the first place is to read other sermons on the same scripture that I have begun to research to find out if there is a unified outline structure between several sermons on a passage or if everyone is stressing a point that I may be missing entirely.  I am not a Hebrew or Greek scholar and like to see how some of the more educated (and published) pastors have handled a scripture during a sermon.

Any help that anyone knows about this would be greatly appreciated! 

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Rosie Perera | Forum Activity | Replied: Mon, Mar 28 2011 12:25 AM

Thomas Black:

Mark Watson:

If I am looking for a sermon that uses "Romans 5:1-11" as its major text (not just used within a point of the sermon) from a group of books of sermons such as the Nelson Preaching Annuals, how do I perform that search?

Unfortunately there's no way to search for a primary text as opposed to a referenced text in a message.  

Mark, try searching for largetext:"Romans 5:1-11" in your Entire Library. This will find all places where that exact text "Romans 5:1-11" appears in a major section heading. Well, most places. Not all resources are properly formatted with their section headings in a large font size, but most of them should be. Also note that this won't find any places which mention a unit of Scripture that is only part of this or that fully encloses this range of verse, nor will it find places where the name of the book is abbreviated. You could try various combinations to catch some of these by using the list operator (a comma), and parentheses around the list:

largetext:("Romans 5:1-11", "Rom 5:1-11", "Romans 5", "Rom 5")

In this latter search, though, you'll also pick up a lot of hits that you don't want, such as mentions of the next pericope, Romans 5:12-21. In my library, a search for largetext:("Romans 5:1-11", "Rom 5:1-11") found 9 hits in 8 resources:

I don't have the Nelson Preaching Annuals, but you could restrict your search to a collection of just those volumes, and that should find what you're looking for.