A wholehearted engagement with God
- Revd Lloyd Etheridge
- 6 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Teaching the Bible can feel daunting, overwhelming, even paralysing. People entrust their lives in our hands, having confidence that we will bring blessing into their daily walk with God as Jesus is unveiled a little more from his word. High expectations indeed, but right ones. The Bible is God’s book about Jesus, living and active, able to judge the thoughts and attitudes of the heart (Heb 4:12). Hearers are right to have such high expectations. Yet, many of us feel inadequate, failing to lead our hearers into a wholehearted engagement with God through his word.
Is this because preachers and Bible teachers primarily rely on 20th Century literary critical reading tools, which engage well technically, but perhaps leave a partial vacuum in the heart? Here is something obvious. If God has given every Christian his Holy Spirit to explain to us his word, to wholeheartedly engage with God through Jesus, then we are not the first Christians to correctly interpret and teach our Bibles. We can learn a lot from those who have gone before us. Like us, they will not have got everything right, but there is a 2,000-year-old treasure trove of attitudes, tools and techniques in how to interpret and teach the Bible, which can strength our own Bible reading and teaching.
That is what this short book intends to do, to briefly survey how the Bible was taught across church history, learning from what is good, reclaiming the attitudes and methods that were used, such as the Rule of Love, the Rule of Faith, and Divine Authorial Intention, so that we can lead our hearers into a wholehearted engagement with God through his word. It is not intended to replace the excellent books which help us to interpret the Bible using literary critical readings tools, but has been written to complement them, so that together the preacher and Bible teacher can help deepen people’s engagement with God.
Why is all this necessary? Because it is my experience that Christians are hungering and thirsting for a deeper engagement with God which entrenches itself deeply into their hearts and deeply enriches their lives, and this is being largely driven by only focusing on modern interpretation methods. Overtime our hearers begin to feel a lack of depth in the Bible, as if the answer is always only Jesus and him crucified. It is like their understanding of exegesis in the Bible increases, but application decreases, as if the Bible becomes monocolour, while what they desire is its multicolour in their lives. It is my prayer that this book fills this vacuum so that those who listen to us will feel like they have wholeheartedly engaged with our God.
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