Lesson 4 | Conveying the Message
How to arrive
Leading your people to the point
How you come at your teaching should not necessarily be how you arrived at your understanding.
There are two big steps in preparing a teaching. The first is to get at what God is saying in the passage at hand. For this, you will do things like reading through the text a dozen times, brushing up on the context, creating an arc, bracket or phrase of the text, looking up cross references, thinking, praying, discussing it with others, referencing commentaries, etc. Through these means and the help of the Spirit of God you arrive at an understanding of the message of the passage. This is an invigorating process, and often leaves us surprised and full of worship over how God led us along and spoke into our own hearts.
But there is also a second step, and that is contemplating how to best communicate that message to others. How would the Spirit now use you to lead your hearers to the grand point of the text? At times, this may include giving your hearers a window into how God made things clear to you, but oftentimes it will not. For the goal of your teaching is not to share your experience of Bible study, but to disciple your hearers with the message of the text.
Therefore, you might consider the following principles in deciding how to arrive at the message of the text in your teaching.
- Arrive in a way that promotes clarity. Explaining how you came upon your understanding often will not do this!
- Arrive in a way that maintains attention and interest. For clarity is only of value if people are still paying attention.
- Arrive in a way that leaves impact. If people have truly met God and been changed, then you have taught God's word.
Note: there is much more to say on these points that will be taken up at length in a future lesson step focussed on structure and power.
A message prepared without thought to audience is likely to impact me alone.
Unknown
Are you feeding people or teaching them to cook?
That is, is your teaching meant to simply deliver God's truth from the passage at hand, or also demonstrate how to get at that truth so as to help your hearers learn to feed themselves spiritually? Your answer to this question will greatly affect how you choose to arrive at the point of the text. Both aims are incredibly valuable, and certainly they should both be our aim to one degree or another. But different teaching contexts do demand different emphases.
We must also understand that the first must come before the second. While you might be passionate to teach people how to study the Bible for themselves, most will not have the patience to learn from you until after they have seen the fruit of your own study in action through the solid, powerful teaching of texts. In other words, not many will come to you for cooking lessons until they taste what you yourself have prepared.
Image from Maria Eklind. Link