Questions to ask when reading the Bible
This advice comes from the Gospel Coalition, and it’s related to sermon preparation but the simple questions I’ve reformatted below from a paper they published has been enormously helpful to me in studying the Bible and preparing to teach a Sunday School class.
Maybe you’ll learn something from this advice to preachers to help you, in the words of Alistair Begg, “preach first to yourself.”
Here they are …
“The first three questions a preacher should ask are:
- “What does [this section of the Bible] mean?”
- “How do you know?”
- “What concerns caused it to be written?” …
“The final three questions are the three critical questions that turn a lecture into a sermon. They are:
- “What do we share in common with those to whom and about whom it was written?”
- “How should we respond?”
- “How can [I] best communicate these aspects?”
[This second set of] questions help us convert our message from informational to transformational. That is the critical turn, from dispensing information to actually ministering to people.”
I grew up in a church that exercised those first three questions like plows on the same ground week after week. Summarizing. Listing and defining. Cross-referencing. Contextualizing. Their exhausting exercises made us scholars and not much more.
Later, I discovered Christians who spent time digging the vegetables and preparing a meal. That is, they spent the hard work of seeking the original intent of the passage and bringing it to bear on contemporary lives.
More to come in future posts but this discovery has been revolutionary for me. Hope it helps you.