Moving From Contemplating the Biblical Navel to Real Application

I am guilty of writing a bunch of thoughts, opinions, and various and sundry other ways of contemplating the biblical navel and end the discussion gaining little more than having thought about something a little more or with a slight nuance. How many of you feel your life has never been the same since reading [...]

Scriptural Repertoires - Gaining an Appreciation for a Broader Range of Scriptures

When I was in high school I had an English teacher who was preparing us for the AP English examination. She would teach us about essay writing and literature and would say, “Put this in your repertoire.” She would constantly give us handouts and I finally got a manila folder and labeled it “Repertoire Incarnate” [...]

Are the Red Letters Any More Important Than the Black Letters?

If scripture is inspired and from God are the words of Jesus any more or less important than all the rest of the Old and New Testament? And for a related brain teaser - who is speaking in John 3:16? Does John the apostle begin to narrate his own commentary about the events or is [...]

Putting God in the Box of Logic

I think we have all figured out by now that you cannot put God in a box. Have you ever thought about the fact that out of the 13 or so billion people who have ever lived over thousands and thousands of years of human history less than 1 billion of them were influenced by [...]

Five Characteristics of a Good Small Group Leader

In line with the last post about five characteristics of a good teacher, here are five characteristics of a good small group leader.
They know the purposes of the group and continually model and teach the group to carry out those purposes. Small group leaders are volunteers and they, like the rest of us, often have [...]

Five Characteristics of a Good Teacher

When people talk about churches one of the things they typically remember most are the people who made the subject come to life for them in a Bible class. They made it real and relevant and like it was the most important thing they could have been doing at the moment. There are a couple [...]

Do You Have Any Curriculum Recommendations?

It is time to review some curriculum for our small groups for next year and for some future Bible classes. What I have in front of me includes small group curriculum from Northpoint, Tommy Nelson’s Song of Solomon series, the marriage material from Focus on the Family and Houston Heflin’s small group lessons - Gifts [...]

Crucifixion of Jesus Christ - The Bigger Picture

The temptation when teaching about the crucifixion is to talk about the Romans, Roman courts, Pilate, Crucifixion, and prisoner release customs when dealing with the first 15 verses. Then in the verses that follow to discuss the suffering of Jesus and how he died for our sin (15:16-47). I want to suggest an alternative approach [...]

Gospel of Mark - Feeding 5000 and Walking on Water (6:31-56)

Jesus Feeds 5000
We go from a Markan sandwich to Jesus feeding 5000. How ironic. The better parallel is pointed out by Witherington (Gospel of Mark, 213) of the two meals - one that led to John’s death and another that shows the miraculous and powerful nature of the kingdom that John preached about and prepared [...]

Gospel of Mark - Common Mission & Message (6:6b-30)

Mark is certainly a delicious book with all of the sandwiches he leaves throughout the narrative. We have another sandwich in Mark 6.
Crust - Jesus Sends out the Twelve (6:6b-13)
Meat - John the Baptist Beheaded (6:14-29)
Crust - The Twelve Return (6:30-30)
The inner part always illuminates the outer part. What does that have to teach us [...]