Going Deeper in our Bible Teaching—Part One

This may sound strange to you, but I have not always a big fan of “going deeper” in the Sunday School class. I have always felt that we have a tendency to teach over the heads of most of our people as it is. People are not as deep in the Word as we imagine them to be. And if we are reaching new people in the classroom on a regular basis, we need to “keep some of the cookies on the lower shelf” for people newer to the faith. I am also a little suspicious of what people mean by “going deeper.” I’d like to write a couple of articles about this so stay tuned for part two, but let me begin today by looking at what we do not mean by going deeper in our teaching.

Going deeper is not using bigger words and providing more information. I have heard it said that a scholar can make a simple idea sound complex, but a good communicator can make a complex idea sound simple. I’d rather be a good communicator than to try to impress people with my 50-cent words and my profound vocabulary. And do we really need to spend more than two-thirds of the class time talking about all the details of the Egyptian religious belief system in order to teach how God demonstrated His great power over the Egyptians during the exodus in the days of Moses? We may learn a lot of interesting things in our preparation of the lesson, but not all of it will be useful in the classroom. A few interesting facts can go a long way to improve your lesson and avoid boredom, and at times we do need to use important theological words to communicate spiritual truths, but information overload is not going deeper.

Going deeper is not becoming a biblical guidance counselor. I have been to seminars and conferences where the teacher doesn’t really teach the Bible, but rather sprinkles in a few verses here and there to back up their opinions and advice on how Christians ought to think, feel or live. Don’t get me wrong. I do believe every Bible lesson needs to have clear points of application to our lives, but these practical applications should come out of the Bible text. The difference is our starting point. If we start with a point of advice and then look for a way to make the Bible fit our preconceived insight, we have done a disservice to God’s Word and to our students. It is not our goal to merely help people to have strong self-esteem and to be nice to others. The goal of spiritual maturity is to become like Christ and to become biblical Christians.

Going deeper is not making the Bible or spiritual truth sound mystical. A person in our church recently shared with me how a relative gave her a special stone that had been prayed over and that holding on to this stone was supposed to bring blessings. She kindly replied that she didn’t need a prayer stone, because she could go straight to the solid rock of Jesus Christ! I have also heard people doing something similar with prayer cloths and “blessed” oil or water. This is more like superstition than something deeply spiritual. People who make the Bible sound like an episode of the Twilight Zone are not going deeper—they are just being weird.

Going deeper is not spiritualizing a passage or turning it into a metaphor. One example of spiritualizing I have heard was when a preacher used Acts 27:29 as his text. It says there that the sailors dropped four anchors to avoid some rocky places. And so the rocky places became the trials of life and the dangers of sin and he turned the four anchors into the anchor of prayer, the anchor of church attendance, etc. Some may think this is deeper teaching, but it is not. In fact if we are true to the text, the sailors later are seen casting off the anchors (vs. 40)—that really causes problems with a lesson that turns biblical details into metaphors for life.