6/30/2016

What Should You Leave Out When You Teach the Bible? | LogosTalk

What Should You Leave Out When

You Teach the Bible?
Mark Ward | Wed, June 29, 2016 | Articles 0

Tw eet

My most influential mentor always told his charges that Bible teachers come to the text with one of two
questions: either 1) What can I say about this? Or 2) What does this say? He saw these questions as
a continental divide, and he urged us to be guided by the latter question. I completely agree.

But what does this say? can be answered at various levels of depth. One fantastic little book on the
Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther, a book in the NSBT series called Five
Festal Garments, lasts 151 pages. This little volume says what those five Bible books say at a level of
depth appropriate for 151 pages. But there are commentaries on every one of those five Bible books
which are 200 pages plus. (Hey, theres even a 500-page commentary on the tiny epistle to Philemon!)
Is Five Festal Garments, then, dumbing down the Bible?

How many times did this mentor of mine finish his own richly expository sermons without getting to the
end of his notes? I sat in his church for 18 years, and I can tell you: it happened a lot. I also took upperlevel seminary courses from him, and I know that he didnt always go into the level of detail he could
have. He is a profoundly gifted Bible teacher, but he decided that, for various reasons, he wasnt going
to say everything the text said. And yet he was still faithfully answering the question, What does this text
say? Im convinced he wasnt dumbing the Bible down.

How can you know what to leave out when youre teaching a given Bible passage? By understanding
the constraints God has placed on any given Bible teaching session, constraints tied to your text,
yoursituation, and yourself. Somehow you have to incorporate all three of these poles, without letting
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What Should You Leave Out When You Teach the Bible? | LogosTalk

one eliminate the others. (I borrow this posts structure from John Frame, whose Theology of Lordship
Seriesis well worth your time.)

1) The text
Its useless to say, as I have been tempted to say, The text is the only important perspective! So just
teach it! Its useless because you cant teach the text without bringing in the other two poles. If theres
no preacher and no people, theres no sermon.

But quite obviously, the text of Scripture is essential to any sermon or Bible lesson. Preach the Word,
Paul says (2 Tim 4:2). The text of Scripture furnishes the message the herald is to proclaim to all (actual
and potential) citizens of the kingdom; it provides the truths which the shepherd is to feed his people. It
is the only ultimate justification preachers or Bible teachers have for what theyre doing. Even the Son
of God himself quoted the Bible repeatedly (Matt 19:4, etc.).

That mentor of mine taught me to 1) explain the text, 2) illustrate it, 3) apply it, 4) argue for those
applications, and 5) exhort people to do them, in basically that order. Ive tried out other homiletical
models, but this is the one I always gravitate back to. There are many complexities in Bible teaching,
and these five rhetorical moves cannot always be kept distinctbut they do help me teach the text.
They rein me in when my rhetorical flights of fancy are fluffing their feathers and getting ready to take off.
I always feel safest when preaching and teaching if my mind has a keen grasp of the main point of the
text.

2) The situation
Its faithless to say, as I have been tempted to say, Ive got to limit the message to what these people
can receive. Its faithless because God hasnt permitted you to let the audience overrule the other two
poles (2 Tim 4:35), and because you dont really know what Gods Spirit is capable of doing inside
those people through his Word (1 Cor 3:6). Asone highly recommended book puts it, God
accompanies his own Word, bringing about the appropriate human response to that Word. (53) God is
part of the situation in which you preach. Youve got a message from him to deliver, and even if that
message sometimes appears to exceed your audiences capacity (or willingness) to hear, God can
grow their capacity and willingness.

On the flip side, its loveless to say, as I have been tempted to say, These people are dull of hearing,
and I give up trying to put things on their level! Its also lovelessand this is more common in my
experiencenever to give any consideration to what level the people might be on. Whether youre a
formal shepherd or not, every time you teach youre a kind of undershepherd. The whole point of being
a shepherd is knowledgeably and lovingly leading your sheepyoursheep, the ones God put in front of
you, with their pasts and presents and futures, and not the sheep you wish you had. You must lead these
sheep as far as possible from ignorance (or error) to knowledge, from apathy (or antipathy) to love, and
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from lethargy (or disobedience) to a truly Christian walk. Ideally, you are pulling them up from a lower
spot to a higher one in every possible way.

I dont expect Bible teachers who teach me to tell me everything they see in the Bible text in front of
them. There are elements of discourse analysis or paranomasia or literary theory which simply dont
need to be mentioned in a fifteen-minute devotional on a mission compound in Honduras or in a
Christian school chapel for elementary kids right before the annual field day. I actually hope those who
teach me wont tell me everything they know about a given Bible text but will tell me what will most help
me learn, what will most prepare me to (someday) know everything they know. I dont want every
upward step. I want thenext step.

Sometimes, as often with children, you do teach things you know your hearers cant fully grasp so that in
the future the lightbulb will have a chance to go ding. (Scientific progress goes boink; insight goes
ding.) Youre screwing in bulb after bulb with the hope that, one day, the electricity will be turned on.

But I also think that such an illustration can be an excuse for not trying to communicate in ways
calculated to make the lightbulb go off right now. There are other Bible teaching situations in which I
dont dare talk over the head of my listeners (1 Cor 14:911). Im not going to read Pauls phrase
kinsmen according to the flesh (Rom 9:3) in an evangelistic conversation in the back of the bus with
someone whose mastery of Biblese is clearly non-existent. Im going to translate that on the fly to my
Jewish brothers and sisters (which is precisely what the NLT has).

For the purposes of this conversation in this situation, I am going to gauge how fast or slow I can go,
and Im going to highlight the aspects of the truth that truly need to be communicated in any given
Scripture passage we might turn to.

3) You
Its profitless to say (and this is one I dont think Ive personally been tempted to say), Ive just got to be
authentic, be myself, and say what I really feel. Its profitless because your own holiness or passion or
intelligence or experience are not sufficient justification for you to stand and teach others. They are
important and necessary, because theyre you, but they have no authority without the biblical text and no
impetus without the peoples need of that text. Kings dont commission heralds to deliver messages of
their own choosing (Rom 10:15).

You cant teach the Bible text in any situation if you yourself arent one of the poles, or thered be no one
teaching anything. Preaching is truth through personality, as Philips Brooks famously said, and youre
the personality. Thats why youre supposed to keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching (1
Tim 4:16).

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I have taught the Bible pretty much weekly for quite a number of years, but I have only rarely handled all
of the services on a Sunday (three at my church: Sunday School, morning, and evening). I just did it this
past Lords day, and it was a wonderful, fearful, exhausting privilege to bring the Word to Gods people.
It hit me hard how difficult it is to bear the spiritual weight of standing in front of other Christians who
know you and urging them (in this Sundays case) to be salt and light (Matt 5:1316, morning sermon)
and to adopt the psalmists viewpoint on apparent divine rejection (Psalm 44, evening sermon). It would
tear me up to preach the Bible knowing full well that I was openly unrepentant of some sin. Bible
teachers are sinners, too (as Paul Tripp has pointed out in this needful book), but the Bible does call for
a higher level of sanctity (1 Tim 3:15), knowledge (1 Tim 3:6), and discretion (James 3:1) among
those who teach Scripture to others.

Our levels of sanctification and maturity are, therefore, limits on our own Bible teaching. So, of course,
is our knowledge. But thats the easy one to rectify. No, well never understand everything about a given
Bible passage with perfect clarity. But with the profusion of powerful tools and good books available,
its a relatively simple matter to learn more about what a passage is saying. Weve just got to take the
time. By Gods grace, we should know and love and live what were teaching.

Conclusion
People who teach the Bible in any given setting are always picking and choosing among the various
things a text communicates, highlighting and explaining and illustrating and applying and arguing for
some truths and yet saving others for later, or expecting people to study them on their own. Ive heard
numerous experienced Bible teachers say that the quality of a given sermon depends to a great deal on
how much you left on the cutting room floor in your study. These preachers are actually hoping that God
will give them wisdom to know not just what the text says, but what not to include from a given
passage. What, theyre asking, is the message I absolutely must communicate and what should stay
in the study?

Rather than insisting that all efforts to put the cookies on a lower shelf are dumbing down the Bible, we
might as well acknowledge the limitations God has placed on our teaching times. And we might as well
bring purpose and method to our teaching decisionsa framework like the three poles: the text, the
situation/people, and you.

Mark L. Ward, Jr. received his PhD from Bob Jones University in 2012; he now
serves the church as a Logos Pro. He is the author of multiple high school Bible
textbooks, including Biblical Worldview: Creation, Fall, Redemption.

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