Classroom: Bible Study Intro 03-12-07

03-12-07 Larry (He's from Texas, USA)

Bible Study Intro

God chooses to work with our choices. So it does make a difference what we choose. Our attitudes do make a difference. Look at King Solomon. He started very well, didn’t he? He was making all the right choices. Instead of choosing selfishly and greedily, he chose to have wisdom. But wisdom, the fear of the Lord, is only the foundation. It’s only the starting point. It’s where you begin to build. There is still something to be built on the foundation, and what that is depends upon your choices. You have a say in whether your dream will come true.

Your choices will determine your destiny in some measure. God permits this and will not override it. Therefore, you are truly accountable for the choices you make. Today you can choose to ignore God, and that choice will have a consequence in your life, in your personal life. Or you can choose to embrace God and seize Him today, and that choice will certainly have a consequence; a positive, powerful consequence.

So we want, from the very beginning of this week, to raise our expectation levels and choose to see God. We want to seize Him. I think learning is best done by discovery, so this method of teaching is limited. You see a child learning, and mostly their learning is through discovery.

My son Brian, when he was 3 years old, was playing with a brick. And he said, “I want ot see what happens when I throw this brick in the air.” So he threw the brick up as high as he could, and watched it as it came down right on his face – and he cried and he was bleeding… but he discovered something in the process. This is the way we sometimes learn. Some of us learn by jumping out of the way, others of us learn by getting hit in the head – but this is the way we learn.

But I think that God, as a good Father, conceals things. He hides things in the areas around us and hides things from our understanding – he hides things from us, not because He’s trying to keep things from us, but because, like a good Father, He knows how we learn. He knows that if we discover it, we’ll remember it! And God’s been doing this from the beginning.

[at this point, Larry hands out concordances and asks people to find the Proverb listed below]

Proverbs 25:2
It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.

Who are the kings?

1 Peter 2:9
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

You are the kings. It is your job to uncover things.

Like it or not, when we read the Bible, we see things through our own individual “glasses.” As much as we can, we need to get away from these glasses and see things the way God sees them. Often times we have a distorted perspective, that God is not good for something He does or says. In God there is no evil, there is no doubt. God is good. And we must read the Bible through this perspective. I’m not saying that here aren’t difficult passages in the Bible, there aren’t things to question – of course there are! We need to wrestle with these things and dig and find out as much as we can. But this can never shake your confidence in God, and your knowledge that God is good. This was the original temptation – shake the confidence in God. “God is keeping things from you! He’s keeping the fruit from you! And this fruit is good! So that must mean that God is not completely good! Take it from me, there’s something not quite right about God. He acts like He’s good, but really He’s keeping something from you that’s good.” You see? This is the type of temptation that happens all the time. And do you know what this tempts us to do? It tempts us to keep something good from God.

This is what I was tempted with, coming into this week. This was a very real temptation for me. I had the temptation to hold something back from this teaching time – not to give completely. Why? Because I was protecting myself. I’m going to protect myself so I’m going to keep something back. This is a very real temptation and we have to fight against it!

So how do we do that? We fight against it primarily through something called “self-denial.” This has always been a very important thing in Christianity – until about the last 50 or 60 years. Until then, self-denial has been thought of as unnecessary. My suspicion is that in the last 50 or 60 years, we’ve dropped something that we really need. So this week, we want to practice a little self-denial.

This week, I know you’ll come up with lots of questions. Write your questions down, and we’ll handle them another time – outside of the classroom. Instead, I’m going to turn the tables on you and I’m going to ask the questions and you’re going to have the answers. And you’re going to learn to dig and find things for yourself. This is what God does with us. He teaches us to be discoverers.

If you don’t have the fear of God, you won’t do the hard things like study the Bible. I can give you all the Bible study techniques and all the rules and everything – but if you don’t have the Fear of God you won’t do it because it’s hard. So you have to have that fear of God that motivates you to do those hard things. It’s not that life is supposed to be hard and we’re supposed to be sad or anything like that, it just means that we have to have respect for the things God respects or we’re not going to make it.

If you’re climbing a cliff and you almost fall, you get very scared. That’s a safety precaution. That’s supposed to be there, and that’s how it’s supposed to be with God. It’s telling you, “be careful! Slow down! Take your time and hold on tight.” Now, we don’t always have this with God. Sometimes we fall.

The righteous falls many times, but God picks him up every time.

Proverb 24:16
For the righteous falls seven times and rises again, but the wicked stumble in times of calamity.

The fear of God is not tested in the big things – it’s tested in the LITTLE things.

We fail to pass these tests when we listen to our fear of man. We do things OUR way, when sometimes God has another way. This is how we practice denial of self.

The Lord said to me, “you know, you’re teaching these things in the DTS. You’re teaching young people to deny themselves in the small ways. It’s not GOOD enough to teach it! You must LIVE it!”