I've had the privilege of teaching Bible classes at Southwest church of Christ over the last few years. Recently, I've been regularly teaching the High School class and periodically teaching the young adult class. Teaching the High School class has really challenged how I study the Bible and prepare for a class.
When I first started teaching, I decided to do everything I could every week to make the class as applicable to a teenager as possible. Every word of the Bible is rich in wisdom and every time we study, we pickup different things that we might not even realize. An example would be reading a passage and not quite knowing how it applies and then remembering during a conversation later in life and making application at that time. Basic reading and study are invaluable and cannot be understated. But I wanted to give the teenagers more. I wanted to give them something that they could apply immediately and that would help them at school on Monday.
That idea of wanting to apply immediately has lead me to a simple fact: every word in the Bible was written specifically for me. That fact seems pretty simple and basic at first glance, but when you really think about how Leviticus and 1 Kings were written for me, it can get complicated. It's fairly easy to read through the Old Testament and understand the contextual audience and the immediate meaning. The difficult part is understanding that I am the immediate audience as well. This applies to the rules of circumcision given to the Jews, the ideas on work from Paul to the Thessalonians and the miraculous gifts given to 1st century Christians by the Apostles. God didn't put anything in the Bible accidentally and no part should be discounted because of audience. Everything was written with me in mind.
As I prepare for classes, I take notes on what I'm preparing. Using this blog, I want to start posting my notes informally with the idea in mind of "How does it apply to me?"
