Get­ting Peo­ple to Under­stand the Bible
and Study the Scriptures

by Mis­sion­ary David R. Cox

Out­line of this document:

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A. Gen­eral Issues in Study and Learning

Spir­i­tual change only comes by under­stand­ing and obey­ing Scripture

Let us be very clear, that there can be no improve­ment spir­i­tu­ally speak­ing with cer­tain ele­ments present. These ele­ments take the form of (1) the Word of God (actual words read or heard), (2) under­stand­ing through study, med­i­ta­tion, expla­na­tion, AND through the Holy Spirit open­ing their mean­ing, (3) a means, place, and occa­sion for the above to happen.

(1) the Word of God (actual words read or heard),

Nehemiah 8:8 So they read in the book in the law of God dis­tinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to under­stand the reading.

This is the pat­tern for preach­ing. This also focuses on the expos­i­tory nature of preach­ing. The three parts of any expos­i­tory preach­ing are (1) actu­ally deal with a Scrip­tural text, read­ing aloud the words of God. (2 Explain what it means, and (3) make the peo­ple under­stand this mean­ing by illus­tra­tion and application.

The first point is that with­out actu­ally deal­ing with the very words of God (the Scrip­tural text) there exists no spir­i­tual power nor spir­i­tual author­ity from God to make any change of con­se­quence. We do not change peo­ple. Preach­ing does not change peo­ple. Con­vinc­ing, argu­ing, nor any other type of thing changes peo­ple. Only the Word of God changes peo­ple. With­out using the for­mula for spir­i­tual change that God has pre­scribed, noth­ing of eter­nal spir­i­tual value will happen.

1 Corinthi­ans 1:21 For after that in the wis­dom of God the world by wis­dom knew not God, it pleased God by the fool­ish­ness of preach­ing to save them that believe.

The power of change exists in preach­ing THE WORD OF GOD. The effi­ca­cious power of God is only in His word, not in any­thing else. Here we would attack phi­los­o­phy, psy­chol­ogy, psy­chi­a­try, the 12 steps of Alco­holics Anony­mous, and any­thing else that promises last­ing change and ben­e­fit with­out using God’s word as God has directed.

(2) under­stand­ing through study, med­i­ta­tion, expla­na­tion, AND through the Holy Spirit open­ing their meaning,

The word of God is not com­plete as a change agent with­out another impor­tant ele­ment or two. Here we see that God’s plan is not to write the word of God in the clouds for all to see, and then let it take effect from that point. God uses men and women. It is only through instru­ments or means that God does His word. This is impor­tant for the recip­i­ent of God’s bless­ing (the unsaved or unprin­ci­pled Chris­t­ian) and also for the per­son who acts as that means. God has blessed us by allow­ing us to enter into the process of the work of God.

The ram­i­fi­ca­tions for this are many, but the most impor­tant are: (1) we will receive bless­ings in eter­nity for what and how we do God’s work. (2) God demands that the means that He uses be pure and holy. (3) God also demands that the means that He uses be ordered accord­ing to His way of doing things.

Another impor­tant aspect of the means of God doing His will is the ele­ment of the Holy Spirit. This is more elu­sive than one might first think. Man can­not under­stand (and thus be ben­e­fited) sim­ply by hear­ing the Word of God, but there is a spir­i­tual ele­ment that is also necessary.

1 Corinthi­ans 2:14 But the nat­ural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are fool­ish­ness unto him: nei­ther can he know them, because they are spir­i­tu­ally discerned.

1 Corinthi­ans 3:19 For the wis­dom of this world is fool­ish­ness with God. For it is writ­ten, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.

Wise men do not seek God, only men who wish to please God seek God. Wis­dom in this world is of Satan and leads men away from God not to Him. This is in spite of the fact that cre­ation as a whole and as indi­vid­ual parts are scream­ing out the exis­tence of God and the judg­ment of God.

How do we get the Spirit of God in what we do? This only hap­pens by our seek­ing holi­ness and to walk and live in God’s will all the time. It only comes through sub­mis­sion to God.

Per­sonal devo­tions and med­i­ta­tion — Every Chris­t­ian should daily study and med­i­tate on the Word of God. This is the avenue through which we can learn of God’s will. With­out know­ing what is the will of God, there can be no planned, know­ing sub­mis­sion to that will. Any­thing we do would be “right” would be by shear chance or acci­dent. (Of course God does guide us through the Holy Spirit act­ing on our con­science, but the con­science by its is very imper­fect, and only by a dis­ci­plined life of Bible study can the con­science be trusted even a lit­tle bit.)

It has been taught by some groups that per­sonal daily devo­tions are the key to spir­i­tu­al­ity. I doubt that. Spir­i­tu­al­ity comes from walk­ing with God. An impor­tant ele­ment of that walk with God comes from a deep, intense per­sonal Bible study, but in itself, a Bible study will not make a per­sonal spiritual.

Sal­va­tion is a rela­tion­ship with Jesus. That is the foun­da­tion or basis, not spe­cific “works” related to that rela­tion­ship. I have a wife and I buy her things. Buy­ing her things will not estab­lish or bet­ter a rela­tion­ship with her per se, but when I do these things because I love her and show her that love, it does bet­ter our rela­tion­ship. If an old boyfriend does it, that does not mean she will drop me and go back to him. If some­body which she utterly detests does it, it does not mean it will open a new rela­tion­ship with that person.

Even the things that are done don’t trans­fer over from one sit­u­a­tion to another. One girl might like rose, candy, and per­fume. In my per­sonal case, I did give my wife these things before mar­ry­ing her, but she is aller­gic, so the roses and per­fume caused her headaches, and she said that the candy made her gain weight. So once in our rela­tion­ship it was made clear that these things do not please her but dis­please her, I can no longer give her these things with­out offend­ing her rather than pleas­ing her.

Devo­tions should be seen as a study time where we learn of God’s plea­sure through His word. We also pray to God over our per­sonal prob­lems, but there is noth­ing magic about it that would “pro­duce” spir­i­tu­al­ity. The bond and rela­tion­ship one has with God is seen in per­sonal devo­tions, but this is hol­low and vain if it is done to try to pro­duce spir­i­tu­al­ity or to impress oth­ers of your spirituality.

Every teach­ing demands a spir­i­tual response — Part of the great “miss­ing link” in Chris­tian­ity is this ele­ment. When God teaches us some­thing, He demands a spir­i­tual response from us. The pos­si­ble responses are (1) rebel­lion, (2) defer­ment (wait until later), (3) obe­di­ence, or (4) “I don’t under­stand how that affects me or what to do with it, teach me more”. Once we have got­ten a hold of a spir­i­tual prin­ci­ple, God waits to see how we respond before reveal­ing more spir­i­tual prin­ci­ples. Because of this, many peo­ple who have years of train­ing, teach­ing, per­sonal devo­tions, and hear­ing even good preach­ing are spir­i­tual dwarfs because they are slow and unre­spon­sive to what God has already revealed, and God will not reveal more to that kind of person.

(3) a means, place, and occa­sion for the above to happen.

Let’s just insert here that all teach­ing needs a cir­cum­stance and occa­sion for it to hap­pen. With­out a time and place, a cir­cum­stance and a teacher, there can be no edu­ca­tion. In gen­eral the two prin­ci­pal places, means, and occa­sions for spir­i­tual learn­ing are (1) per­sonal wrestling with the Scrip­tures on an indi­vid­ual level (per­sonal devo­tions and med­i­ta­tion) which should be the most pow­er­ful sit­u­a­tion, and (2) preach­ing and teach­ing in the local church dur­ing the nor­mal ser­vices on Sunday.

Search the Scrip­tures and this becomes the main focus of God teach­ing us spir­i­tu­ally what we should do. We do not see spir­i­tual under­stand­ing and teach­ing com­ing from home Bible stud­ies (cell group meet­ings), from sem­i­nar­ies or Chris­t­ian col­lege edu­ca­tional struc­tures, Bible Camps, Chris­t­ian radio sta­tions, or any other typ­i­cal “min­istry” as pre­sented to us today by mod­ern Chris­tian­ity. We must under­stand what God has pre­scribed for our spir­i­tual growth, and how that works in the scheme of things which God has given us. We have to under­stand how mod­ern Chris­tian­ity has per­verted this struc­ture God has imposed, and try to return things to what is biblical.

Place of Teacher in Spir­i­tual Change of Character.

God has placed a prin­ci­ple in effect in this process of spir­i­tual change. This prin­ci­ple is that of a teacher guid­ing a stu­dent into under­stand­ing so that the stu­dent can dom­i­nate the spir­i­tual prin­ci­ple and use it. This is a process that God has demanded (exis­tence of teach­ers), and that in God’s struc­tur­ing of things, the teacher must be a spir­i­tual exam­ple first of a man of God, then sec­ondly of some­body who has mas­tered the prin­ci­ple he is teach­ing. Any­thing else results in hypocrisy.

There are peo­ple and move­ments to destroy the teacher sym­bol entirely (pro­grammed or com­puter edu­ca­tional mod­els), or to remove the require­ment for being an exam­ple (the false prophet cap­i­tal­izes on this mak­ing a sys­tem that he him­self does not sub­mit to often). Other move­ments seek to carry the teacher beyond what God has dic­tated to make the teacher a dic­ta­tor to con­trol exces­sively the life of the student.

The Bible places squarely in the cen­ter of spir­i­tual change the pas­tor of the local church. Here it is impor­tant to grasp just what the Bible says about the pas­tor. First he is the per­son who gov­erns the local church. This is seen in the OT use of Ra’ah (pas­tor) in con­texts of gov­ern­ing in Israel like Ezekiel 34. In the NT 1 Tim­o­thy 3:4–5 speaks directly to this gov­ern­ing. But 1 Peter 5:3 pro­hibits the pas­tor from being a dic­ta­tor (lord) over his brethren, but he must gov­ern by per­sonal exam­ple. This hinges on a proper under­stand­ing of the rela­tion­ship between Chris­tians in a con­text of a fam­ily with broth­erly love. In such a sit­u­a­tion, the author­ity of the par­ents over­rides the desire or author­ity or even the exam­ple of a brother. What the par­ents have insti­tuted as moral prin­ci­ples is more impor­tant. But we can exhort a brother and show him the way by our own per­sonal exam­ple and life.

Here is the impor­tance of this teach­ing on teach­ers. We teach by doing cor­rectly (per­sonal exam­ple) and then by reveal­ing the eter­nal prin­ci­ples of God of why we do what we do.

The local church is the prin­ci­ple place of learning.

Another issue here is the place of learn­ing. It is always right and cor­rect for a believer to reflect on his life and events sur­round­ing his life to gain spir­i­tual under­stand­ing. I think Daniel in the lions’ den learned a lot about trust­ing God (more agree­able con­fir­ma­tion that learn­ing though), and the three youths in the fiery fur­nace also learned from the experience.

But the prin­ci­ple place of learn­ing apart from a per­sonal type or nature where one is think­ing or med­i­tat­ing on his own is the local church. God has insti­tuted the local church as the place where Chris­tians learn spir­i­tu­ally. I think that many peo­ple do not under­stand this, and many Chris­t­ian “min­istries” have bro­ken away from this struc­ture of God to take a part of it and form some­thing else to replace the church really.

Here we must under­stand that church is a com­mu­nity of believ­ers unit­ing, orga­niz­ing, sac­ri­fic­ing, and work­ing to accom­plish the will and work of God. It is not a build­ing, and it is not just a bunch of saved peo­ple. Get a bunch of believ­ers together in a restau­rant, and it is not church. The orga­ni­za­tion, pur­pose (God’s will and word), and other fac­tors bear heav­ily on decid­ing whether a group of believ­ers is a church or not. Unity on a local level would also dic­tate some­what. A national meet­ing of Chris­tians on the White House lawn for some pur­pose is not a church. A revival where many churches have mem­bers come is not a new church.

What is a church is when these peo­ple orga­nize and come together to ful­fill God’s will in planned and excel­lent way. This is what God planned and struc­tured, but man messes that up by break­ing with the plan and doing things in other ways.

Almost all Chris­t­ian min­istry should be done in “church”. By this I mean that the New Tes­ta­ment reveals the major­ity of Chris­t­ian min­istry, gifts, abil­i­ties, tal­ents, etc. hap­pen­ing in a local church dur­ing a reg­u­lar planned ser­vice. We must insist on this being of utmost impor­tance in our mod­ern ren­der­ing of things. The excep­tions are very impor­tant also. Evan­ge­lism is not for­eign or unwel­comed to the local church ser­vices (it is always right to lead an unsaved per­son to the Lord even in a reg­u­lar church ser­vice), but it is not the prin­ci­ple activ­ity of “church”. Evan­ge­lism demands that we go to where the unsaved live, work, and rest. That is not in a local church nor­mally. Evan­ge­lism has a demand to “go”.

Christ explained sal­va­tion to those who heard Him, but in the NT epis­tles we are hard put to find one sin­gle church ser­vice or an epis­tle to a local church explain­ing things appar­ently for unsaved sit­ting in a church ser­vice. So the point here is that it is not wrong to teach on sal­va­tion, but we who preach do not plan the major­ity of the ser­mon top­ics to be evan­ge­lis­tic, nor do we twist every Scrip­tural text we preach from to some­how make it evan­ge­lis­tic when it is forc­ing the passage.

The other major excep­tion of a local church ser­vice being where min­istry is done is mis­sions, and even there as soon as con­verts are gained, they are orga­nized into a local church, and again it a local church con­text where mis­sions are done.

If what we see in the NT epis­tles are peo­ple min­is­ter­ing always in local churches (except for evan­ge­lism and mis­sions) then why do we break this trend, exam­ple, and struc­tur­ing of God for drag­ging the major­ity of min­istry out­side of the local church? Spir­i­tual teach­ing and learn­ing must be prin­ci­pally hap­pen­ing in a local church or it will have dras­tic and hor­ri­ble distortions.

B. Spe­cific Issues and Problems

The teacher­less society.

Even though many try to pro­pose a “teacher­less” class sys­tem, they in fact do have author­ity fig­ures in even these sys­tems. What comes to mind is a pro­gram the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion put out some years back called the Mas­ter Plan. The idea was to put an empty chair in the room, and say that Jesus was teach­ing us directly, and that this group had no “teacher” except Christ.

This is ridicu­lous. First of all Christ is in heaven, and if and when He comes back, He will not be lead­ing your Bible study group, but busy in other things. The point he is to take the “heat” off the actual leader of the Mas­ter Plan Bible study group. Take the focus off of the teacher. Why? Because this works best where the teacher has no for­mal prepa­ra­tion and if peo­ple buy the Mas­ter Plan, then you have a very expe­ri­enced Pas­tor sit­ting under a kid of 20 years old teach­ing him. There is not any­thing wrong with a younger man teach­ing an older, but their point was to intro­duce hid­den teach­ers that we are not sup­posed to see their lack of per­sonal exam­ple in their own per­sonal life. Not only are we not to object, we are to remain igno­rant because “they are not the teach­ers, we have no teachers.”

Some Chris­t­ian home­school­ing mate­ri­als also try this approach which is just based in error.

Author­ity and Control.

I have already men­tioned that the key to spir­i­tual learn­ing is the Pastor-Teacher, and that he must be exem­plary in his own life of the prin­ci­ples that he teaches oth­ers. I also men­tioned that he must not be a dic­ta­tor to con­trol oth­ers in an author­i­ta­tive man­ner, but must use a lead­er­ship style of being exemplary.

A thor­ough study of false prophets and teach­ers in the Bible will reveal that this issue of con­trol and author­ity is exactly what all of the NT com­ments on false prophets rotate around. The false prophet always wants influ­ence, con­trol, power, and author­ity based on his per­son, not on his mes­sage. He wants other to ele­vate him to a place of author­ity over them, and usu­ally this can only hap­pen if they deem­pha­size the impor­tance and author­ity of Scrip­tures. It was inter­est­ing to me to find on the Jehovah’s Wit­ness web­site, a page to their King­dom Hall lead­ers, which specif­i­cally stated that they must demand that all their groups use the JW mate­r­ial with the Bible. They made the state­ment that if they allow their peo­ple to use only the Bible to study these things, that in 6 months they will lose the major­ity of those peo­ple. This was stated as a hard and fast rule in their inves­ti­ga­tions of groups that did well and groups that disintegrated.

The judi­az­ers wanted to impose their take on the legal sys­tem of Moses as a require­ment beside believ­ing Christ as Sav­ior. Matthew 23:8–10 speaks the Phar­isees and Scribes and Rab­bis. The Rab­bis were experts among the Phar­isees, and the Phar­isees were basi­cally those legal experts ded­i­cated to under­stand­ing the appli­ca­tions of the OT law. The rabbi was some­one who once he spoke on an issue, it was ille­gal to make fur­ther com­ment on the issue and tak­ing a con­trary or com­pli­men­tary posi­tion to the rabbi’s posi­tion was sim­ple heresy. The Scribes copied the scrip­tural texts and were experts in what is where. They were the liv­ing walk­ing Bible con­cor­dances. The whole thing was to enslave the brethren in human sys­tems devoid of God’s blessing.

Dis­ci­pling: Yes or No