The average pastor works more than 50 hours a week, with 10 to 18 of those hours going to sermon preparation alone. On top of sermon prep, meetings and email correspondence monopolize huge portions of a pastor's schedule, often taking precedence over crucial tasks like counseling and visitation. Fortunately, there's a simple solution for the modern pastor who needs to free up a few hours in their schedule without sacrificing sermon quality: Bible software.

With Bible software, tasks that typically take hours—like digging through commentaries, lexicons and concordances—take mere seconds. As opposed to an overflowing (and disorganized) library, Bible software serves as a streamlined library organizer, offering fast and simple searching as well as convenient mobility. Instead of lugging around phonebook-sized commentaries, pastors can squeeze a seminary-sized library onto their tablet, mobile phone and laptop.

With a digital library, you can also find the information you need much more quickly than with print books. With advanced library tools, you can search Greek lemmas in your Bible, find every sermon by Charles Spurgeon about grace and instantly access every dictionary and commentary link on prayer. Instead of floundering through mountains of print books, Bible software offers a simple and effective way to find exactly what you're looking for.

The price tag for a lot of these programs, while intimidating at first, offers an impressive deal compared to purchasing print books. For example, a Gold software package from Logos Bible Software costs a little over $1,500, but the product's actual value, when taking into account all the individual resources included, is over $16,000.

Digital libraries also come with advanced tools for Greek and Hebrew study that help you dig into both English and original-language texts while exploring new words and concepts. With one click, you can reveal a word's original meaning and where it's used in other texts and verses.

While there are myriad Bible-software programs to choose from, Logos Bible Software 6 is the most advanced. Logos 6, which was released in October 2014, offers new sermon-preparation tools that help pastors build presentation slides while they study—rescuing them from spending late Saturday nights trudging through PowerPoint. The new software also comes with cultural tools that help pastors explore the biblical world with atlases and infographics, ancient literature and a database of cultural concepts linked to specific Bible verses.

Whichever software a pastor chooses, there's no doubt that Bible software helps pastors save time and money, making it a priceless tool in a pastor's life.

Sherri Huleatt is a freelance writer and marketing specialist at Faithlife Corporation, the worldwide leader of digital Bible study tools and resources, located in Bellingham, Washington.

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