How Mike Chu Uses Logos for Custom Layouts, Clippings, and Language Study
A practical, pastoral look at how one Logos user keeps sermon prep organized, searchable, and spiritually grounded.
If you’ve ever opened Logos, stared at all the panels, and quietly thought, “I should be better at this by now,” you’re in good company.
In my interview with Mike Chu—Academic Director at the AWKNG School of Theology and teaching pastor in Quincy, Massachusetts—I met a man who loves Scripture, carries real ministry weight, and still chooses a simple, repeatable Logos workflow over anything flashy. His habits around layouts, language tools, and Clippings are both accessible and deeply freeing for “normal” pastors and teachers.
This article is my attempt to bottle that conversation and hand it to you in a form you can actually use in your next week of prep.
A layout that calms the chaos
When Mike sits down to prepare a sermon, he doesn’t start with a blank screen. He starts by loading a saved layout—a workspace he’s already thought through and named.
His main sermon layout has four quadrants:
Top left: Hebrew / Greek (Biblia Hebraica, NA28, and related tools).
Bottom left: English translations (NIV, ESV, Lexham English Bible, plus an interlinear).
Top right: Language Tools (BDAG, HALOT, apparatus notes).
Bottom right: Commentaries—a small set of “go‑to” commentaries (Word Biblical Commentary, NICOT, Anchor Yale).
All of these are linked together, so when he moves to James 4 or Jonah 3, every pane follows.
If layouts are new to you, Logos’ Layouts feature exists precisely for this kind of peace. You can arrange Bibles, guides, and tools the way you like, then save that snapshot as a named layout and reload it anytime from the Layouts menu or your Home Page. Instead of rebuilding your workspace every Monday, you click once and step straight into familiar territory.
You don’t need Mike’s exact four‑pane setup. But you might need a setup that keeps you from bouncing between windows and losing your train of thought.
When you don’t know the languages
One of my favorite moments in the conversation was when I pushed Mike on this:
“What would you say to the pastor who never had Hebrew or Greek, and now feels intimidated by screens full of original text?”
His answer was gentle: Logos can serve you long before you feel like a language person.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Start in your English Bible (NIV, ESV, or the free Lexham English Bible).
Hover over a word and let Logos show you the underlying Greek or Hebrew in a small popup—lemma, morphology, and gloss—without leaving your passage.
When a word really matters, right‑click it and run a Bible Word Study. Logos pulls together lexicons, usage, and translation patterns into one guide so you can see the word in context across Scripture.
That’s exactly how Mike works. When he preaches a series on anxiety from James 4, he starts by translating the passage himself (to keep his language skills alive), but then he compares his draft to multiple English translations and uses Bible Word Study to confirm or correct his instincts.
You don’t have to translate the passage yourself. You can still:
Compare several English translations side‑by‑side.
Use Bible Word Study to see where a word shows up, how it’s rendered, and which lexicon entries are worth a peek.
The goal isn’t to become a scholar overnight. The goal is to be just curious enough to let Logos flag places where the text might be doing more than your first reading suggests.
Why Clippings became Mike’s second brain
The place where Mike really lit up was Clippings.
For every sermon, class, or research project, he creates a dedicated Clippings document. As he reads commentaries, dictionaries, and monographs, he:
Highlights a sentence or paragraph.
Adds it to the current Clippings document.
Often types a short note like “use this in the sermon” or “come back to this later.”
Later in the process, when he’s trying to remember that one perfect quote about anxiety or that one line from a Jonah article, he doesn’t hunt through 20 books. He searches inside his Clippings, by keyword or tag, and lets Logos bring up every clipped excerpt that mentions “future” or “Nineveh” or “shadow of death.”
If you’ve never used Clippings, think of them as an organized, searchable scrapbook for your study:
You can create a Clippings document from the Docs menu.
You can send highlights and selections there from any device—desktop, web, or mobile—and they stay in sync.
Each clipping keeps the citation and a link back to the original resource, so you’re never guessing where you found it.
For pastors and teachers who feel like their best insights “disappear into the ether,” this one habit can change a lot. You’re not just reading anymore; you’re slowly building an external memory of your study life.
A Jonah‑sized “aha” moment
One story from Mike’s study really stuck with me.
While preparing a sermon in Jonah, he noticed a small but striking detail in Jonah 3:3. In Hebrew, the phrase normally translated “a very great city” includes the word Elohim (אֱלֹהִים)—the standard word for “God” or “gods.”
Almost everywhere else in the Old Testament, that construction is translated “to God” or “belonging to God.” Yet in this one verse, nearly every English translation smooths it into a superlative: “very large city.”
Using Logos, Mike:
Clicked into his Hebrew text.
Ran Bible Word Study on the phrase.
Traced how it’s translated across the Old Testament.
Opened his lexicons and Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament to read how scholars understand the word and its history.
What emerged was a compelling case that Jonah 3:3 may very well mean “a large city belonging to God.”
Suddenly, the story of Jonah isn’t just about a prophet reluctantly going to a big pagan city. It’s about God sending his prophet to a city that already, in some mysterious way, belongs to him—a city he refuses to write off.
That kind of insight doesn’t come from cleverness. It comes from patiently using the tools to listen more carefully to the text.
Three Logos tools that quietly do a lot
If you’d like to try the same kind of work Mike is doing, here are three resources that show up in his workflow again and again:
BDAG / HALOT Bundle
When Mike clicks into Greek or Hebrew, he leans on standard lexicons. The BDAG/HALOT Bundle gives you the flagship Greek and Hebrew dictionaries that integrate directly with Bible Word Study and your original‑language texts.Word Biblical Commentary (Old & New Testament)
In his main layout, Mike keeps a small, trusted commentary stack. Word Biblical Commentary is one of them, and the full WBC Old and New Testament set pairs especially well with serious language and structural work.Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT)
When he wants to dig into the history and theological weight of an Old Testament word—like that Jonah example—Mike turns to TDOT, which offers rich essays on key Hebrew terms. You can find it here: Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT).
You don’t need all of these to begin. But if you already own some of them and they’ve been sitting underused, this might be your nudge to bring them into a more intentional workflow.
A simple challenge for this week
If Logos has ever made you feel “behind,” I’d love to invite you into a gentle experiment.
This week, pick one passage you’re already preaching or teaching and try the following:
Create or load one layout
Open your main Bible, one other translation, and a commentary.
Arrange them in a way that feels calm, then save it as a named layout so you can return to it next time.
Start one Clippings document
Create a Clippings doc named after your passage or series.
As you read, send three helpful quotes or insights there, and add a short note to each about why it matters.
Run one Bible Word Study
Choose one key word in your passage.
Right‑click it, open Bible Word Study, and read just one lexicon article and the translation ring.
That’s it. Not a full overhaul. Just three small steps.
My hope is that, like Mike, you’ll begin to feel Logos less as a noisy pressure and more as a quiet partner: a tool that holds your research, steadies your rhythm, and helps you see just a bit more of what God has already said.
You don’t need to master Logos to be faithful. You simply need a few trusted habits that keep you close to the text and available to the people you serve.