4 ways doctrine impacts every day of my life (and why the church needs it)

THEOLOGY IS MORE PRACTICAL THAN WE OFTEN REALIZE

By Scott Slayton

Recently I was in a restaurant and a Bible study group was meeting at a nearby table. The leader had a voice that carried, so I could have heard a good portion of the study, but the first thing I heard him say so captured my attention that I missed the rest of it. He said, “I love non-denominational churches because doctrine is not life-giving.”

I will set aside the comment about non-denominational churches not having a doctrine for another day. It was the other half of the sentence that knocked me out of my chair. “Doctrine is not life-giving.” I cannot think of anything more life-giving than sound doctrine.

“Doctrine” is a biblical word and the Apostle Paul shows us that sound doctrine is a good thing we should embrace. After all, “doctrine” refers to teaching and “sound” means something is healthy. Sound doctrine is a shorthand way of saying that teaching is healthy and good for us. This means it corresponds to what is true about God, life, and the world.

Sound doctrine is good for followers of Jesus. We need to know the truth, which means we must study the truth.

Here are three reasons you should commit to understanding good theology.

1. STUDY THEOLOGY FOR YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF GOD

Every relationship is based on knowing and understanding each other. Since God knows and understands us perfectly, it is imperative for us to continue learning about who he is. Thankfully, God revealed everything we need to know about him in the Scriptures.

When we read and study theology, we come to a better grasp of God’s personal attributes and how he interacts with the world. We see how God revealed himself in the past through encounters with men and women in Scripture. For example, when he passed by Moses in Exodus 34, he proclaimed about himself, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” You cannot learn that about God by looking at a sunset. Also, think about his interactions with Job in the closing chapters of the book that bears his name. There, we learn that God is all powerful, has no competitors, yet is gracious and restores those who have been broken.

God also reveals his character through the teaching of the apostles and prophets. When we read Jeremiah 2 or Romans 8:28-39, we hear men inspired by the Spirit testifying to the attributes of the God who revealed himself to them. We learn about the justice, mercy, love, providence, sovereignty, righteousness, and grace of God from these letters and speeches.

In addition to reading the Scriptures, studying theology means reading books by solid authors who help us to better understand the Scriptures. While some might object to this as “the teachings of men,” if they shed light on the truth about God, good books are a chance to learn about our Father from brothers or sisters who have been walking with Jesus and studying the Bible longer and in greater depth than we have been.

2. STUDY THEOLOGY FOR YOUR GROWTH IN GRACE

Too often, Christian pit theological teaching against “practical” teaching. We know the problems we face in our lives and think that theology is ivory tower thinking that has little to do with solving real problems. We imagine that we can get the help we need for our lives from the Bible while avoiding the difficult thinking that comes along with theology.

The difficulty we run into is that most of the solutions to our “practical” problems are rooted in theological truths. How do you know how to love difficult people? The Bible tells us that we learn this by walking in love “as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.”(Ephesians 5:2) Paul roots something as practical as love in something as deeply theological as Jesus’ substitutionary death for us.

Paul does this in other ways as well. When he wants to show husbands how to love their wives, he points again to the death of Jesus. “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” (Ephesians 5:25) To show Christians why they should put sin to death, Paul reminds Christians of their union with Christ. (Romans 6:1-14) When he encourages Christians to forgive, he announces that God forgave them. (Ephesians 4:32)Theology is crucial to practical Christian living.

3. STUDY THEOLOGY FOR YOUR GOSPEL CONVERSATIONS

We want to see the gospel go forward and for more people to hear about and believe in Jesus. This means that we need to have more conversations about the gospel with people who do not yet believe. How are we going to have these conversations if we do not know and understand theology?

There was a popular “Christian” song in the late 1990’s titled, “Jesus Saves.” The gist of the song was that we don’t need to confuse people with weighty theology. We just need to tell them that “Jesus saves.” Sounds simple enough, but what if they ask “Who is Jesus?” or “What does Jesus save me from?” Now you find yourself in a theological conversation and you need good answers to those questions.

Many conversations about the gospel with people who don’t believe will involve dealing with objections to the gospel message. You can answer these questions superficially or you can do the hard work of helping people to get to the root of their doubts. Every objection to the gospel involves some aspect of theology. If they object that hell is cruel, you’ll need to talk about the holiness and justice of God. If someone wants to know why he can’t just be a good person, you’ll have to explain the righteousness of Christ and salvation by faith alone. These are theological discussions, but they make a deep impact.

4. STUDYING THEOLOGY LED TO MY CONVERSION

I was a youth pastor when I realized I needed to be saved. To make a long story short, I made a profession of faith at a youth camp in middle school, immediately ran back to the things of the world, and through a series of difficult events started going to church again. I fell in love with the Bible and was convinced I should be a pastor.

While I was a theology student at a Christian college and a youth pastor at a local church, I started to doubt the reality of my profession of faith. Through this, I started reading about sin, salvation by faith alone, election, and the new birth. I came under intense conviction and slowly realized that I had never been saved.

The night it all came to a head, I asked myself what I would say to God if I stood before him on the last day. My answer started with everything I had tried to do in his name. In my heart, I realized my answer was rooted in a trust in my own righteousness and called upon Christ alone to save me.

Memorizing 2 Corinthians 5:17 and Ephesians 2:8-10 and thinking about important theological issues through the lens of my own crisis of faith led to my conversion. No one will ever convince me that theology is not important, soul-saving, or life-giving.

Theology is simply the way that we explain who God is, who we are, what is wrong with the world, what God has done to redeem us, and the future hope we look forward to. Studying and understanding theology will give every Christian a deeper love for God, a stronger walk with him, a greater love for the people around us, a stronger commitment to our local church, and an increased confidence in the message of the gospel as we talk to people who need to hear it.

Source: http://equip.sbts.edu/article/4-ways-doctrine-impacts-every-day-life-church-needs/

Three Ways to Make the Bible Easier for Kids

by Bobbie Jamieson

Teaching children the Bible is actually a whole lot easier than I thought. All you need is passion and integrity. After all, if you cannot reach children with God's Word how do you expect to connect with adults. As with everything it starts with baby steps. We're talking half of a Bible chapter. Most children's Bibles are actually super legit. Bobbie Jamieson provides some top notch tips on connecting your kids with the Word.

"Now, I’m a grade-A theology nerd, but I didn’t actually set out to found a preschool seminary in our home. The parallel only struck me after we’ve been doing this for a few years, and it struck me because of the way these three basic habits all reinforce each other and help our kids engage God’s Word. So, we recently read of Jesus’ promise to give the Spirit in our story Bible, and our older daughter exclaimed, “Dad, that’s "where we are!”—meaning we’d just read of Jesus’ same promise to give the Spirit in John 16 in morning Bible. And when a character from the Old Testament is mentioned in one of the Gospels, she’ll often say, “Hey, I know him! He’s in my Bible!

  

“All told, this takes maybe fifteen minutes a day. Ideally we do all of this every day, but realistically we do most of it most days—maybe five days a week. We read about ten verses or half a chapter of Scripture at breakfast, along with catechism questions. And we read a story from the story Bible before bed. That’s it. But we can already see these habits radically shaping our kids’ minds, hearts, and lives.

We’ve had to shift our routine plenty of times when it just wasn’t working. We’ve found breakfast a good time for more active teaching since the kids have energy and, while they’re eating, are as close as kids get to being a captive audience.

“Kids love structure, and they thrive on routine. One of the best things about this ‘seminary curriculum’ approach is that you don’t have to think too much about it: just read the next few verses, teach the next few questions, read the next story.

Plus, the structure itself does a lot of explaining for you. Your kids won’t encounter the Trinity as an abstract puzzle to be solved, but as the Father, Son, and Spirit who work together to save us. And while they’ll ask questions you can’t answer, the catechism gives them plenty you can.

“If this seems overwhelming, start with just one piece of the puzzle, like reading a story Bible before bed. If you can cement that one habit, consider building on it. When it comes to teaching kids the whole counsel of God, a little every day goes farther than you can imagine."

Source: http://www.christianity.com/bible/bible-study-tips/3-ways-to-make-the-bible-easier-for-kids.html?p=2

We Must Learn to Taste

Thanks to a Facebook friend, I came across this valuable article from DesiringGod's Barry Cooper. He explains how - with the help of a patient and seasoned Believer - he learned to tangibly taste the Word of God rather than merely read it. When we come to the point in our walk with Christ where we savor every letter of His and become totally dependent, obedience is a matter of love and proper fear for God. The magnificent benefit is the pure enjoyment of God rather than obligatory and self-willed obedience. This post is also what I intend my ministry to be about: Not merely a reader and a robotic doer, but a person who is known intimately by the Son of God, Jesus Christ; God Himself; and the Holy Spirit.

"God doesn’t play fair"

Much to my parents’ concern, I hadn’t been to church for a long time. And yet here I was, in my first term at university, sliding into a pew at St Ebbe’s Church in Oxford.

This, I can promise you, was not the result of any pious yearning on my part. Rather, it was because the congregation counted among its number a particularly lovely second-year student of modern languages.
Where earnest parental pleading had failed, she had proved to be rather more convincing.
Stop Reading the Bible

Incidentally, or so it seemed, it was at St Ebbe’s that I met Tony. Knowing that he was the student worker at the church, I politely agreed to meet him for a coffee one afternoon in his study.

It was underwhelming. We looked at a few paragraphs of the Bible together. Then he asked me to explain to him what I’d just read, because apparently even a person in his position can lack basic comprehension skills. Then he asked me how he could be praying for me. Finally, he wondered if I’d like to do it all over again next week. Presumably he was very lonely indeed, so I said yes, and the routine continued throughout the winter, and into the spring.

That six-month stretch turned out to be the pivotal moment of my life. During those meetings, Tony taught me to stop reading the Bible. Or rather, he taught me to stop merely reading the Bible. He encouraged me to act on what I was reading. Trust it. Obey it. Put it into practice. Live it out, so that I would discover, in my own experience, that God’s word was good. Even when (perhaps especially when) it cut across my deepest and most cherished desires and convictions.

This, I discovered, is what it meant to “taste and see that the Lᴏʀᴅ is good.”
Taste and See

How unsettling that the Bible puts it like that. If the psalmist had said, “See that the Lᴏʀᴅ is good,” we might comfort ourselves with the delusion that God could be observed at a safe distance. But we must taste in order to see.

Tasting can’t be done remotely, at arm’s length, or by proxy. Tasting is impossible without coming close to the food in question and opening ourselves. It requires that we pick something up, put it into our mouths, onto our tongues, and swallow it so that it goes deep into the darkness, and then changes us so that — whether we like it or not — we are no longer quite the people we once were.
For years, the Bible had been telling me to “taste and see that the Lᴏʀᴅ is good.” For years, I had been gawking at a plate of food and hoping that the act of staring would fill me up. I somehow expected to know God without “tasting” — without allowing his word to invade me, nourish me, and change me.

Not Just Knowing About, But Knowing

The Bible is not a distance learning program. It’s not primarily for knowing aboutGod, but for knowing him. One of life’s saddest ironies is that many who know the Bible do not know its Author. This is a grand and tragic exercise in missing the point — along the lines of a drowning person catching a flotation device, and then using it to make a hat.

A.W. Tozer was right:
The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into him, that they may delight in his Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God himself in the core and center of their hearts.

Meet the Author

By the time Easter arrived, I knew when I sat down in Tony’s overstuffed armchair that I wasn’t doing it for his benefit.

I had been introduced to, and now knew, Jesus Christ. The one through whom and for whom all things had been created. The one who knew me and had set his loving kindness upon me, before he attended to the small matter of speaking the universe into existence. The one whose humility and tenderness had directed the nails into his own limbs, the spear into his own side. That God had put his pierced arms around me.

Sadly, the relationship with the modern languages undergrad didn’t work out. But in its place, another love, infinitely satisfying and entirely unexpected, was beginning to bloom. At twenty years of age, I was finally learning to taste."

Source: http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/we-must-learn-to-taste

How to Enjoy Bible Study

by John MacArthur

There's nothing I enjoy more than studying the Bible. Yet it has not always been that way. My real passion for studying Scripture began when as a college student, I made a commitment to explore the Bible in earnest. I found that the more I studied, the more my hunger for Scripture grew. Here are three simple guidelines that have helped me to make the most of my study time.

Read the Bible

First, I begin with reading the Bible. That seems obvious, but quite frankly, it's where many people fail. Too many Christians are content with a second-hand knowledge of Scripture. They read books about the Bible instead of studying the Bible for themselves. Books are good, but collateral reading can never replace the Bible itself.

There are many good Bible reading plans available, but here is one I've found most helpful. I read through the Old Testament at least once a year. As I read, I note in the margins any truths I particularly want to remember, and I write down separately anything I don't immediately understand. Often I find that as I read, my questions are answered by the text itself. The questions to which I can't find answers become the starting points for more in-depth study using commentaries or other reference tools.

I follow a different plan for reading the New Testament. I read one book at a time repetitiously for a month or more. I began doing this when I was in seminary, because I wanted to retain what was in the New Testament and not always have to depend on a concordance to find things.

If you want to try this, begin with a short book, such as 1 John, and read it through in one sitting every day for 30 days. At the end of that time, you will know what's in that book. Write out on index cards the major theme of each chapter. By referring to the cards as you do your daily reading, you'll begin to remember the content of each chapter. In fact, you'll develop a visual perception of the book in your mind.

Divide longer books into short sections and read each section daily for thirty days. For example, the gospel of John contains 21 chapters. Divide it into 3 sections of 7 chapters. At the end of 90 days, you'll finish John. For variety, alternate short and long books and in less than 3 years you will have finished the entire New Testament--and you'll really know it!

Interpret the Bible

As I read Scripture, I always keep in mind one simple question: "What does this mean?" It's not enough to read the text and jump directly to the application; we must first determine what it means, otherwise the application may be incorrect.

Gaps to Bridge

The first step in interpreting the Bible is to recognize the four gaps we have to bridge: language, culture, geography, and history.

Language

The Bible was originally written in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. Often, understanding the meaning of a word or phrase in the original language can be the key to correctly interpreting a passage of Scripture. Two books that will help you close the language gap are An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, by W. E. Vine, and Nelson's Expository Dictionary of the Old Testament, by Merrill F. Unger and William White, Jr. You don't need to know Greek or Hebrew to use those books effectively.

Culture

The culture gap can be tricky. Some people try to use cultural differences to explain away the more difficult biblical commands. Don't fall into that trap, but realize that we must first view Scripture in the context of the culture in which it was written. Without an understanding of first-century Jewish culture, it is difficult to understand the gospels. Acts and the epistles must be read in light of the Greek and Roman cultures. The following books will help you understand the cultural background of the Bible: The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, by Alfred Edersheim, Sketches of Jewish Social Life, also by Edersheim, and The New Manners and Customs of Bible Times, by Ralph Gower.

Geography

A third gap that needs to be closed is the geography gap. Biblical geography makes the Bible come alive. A good Bible atlas is an invaluable reference tool that can help you comprehend the geography of the Holy Land. Of course, nothing helps like seeing the land first-hand on a tour.

History

We must also bridge the history gap. Unlike the Scriptures of most other world religions, the Bible contains the records of actual historical persons and events. An understanding of Bible history will help us place the people and events in it in their proper historical perspective. A good Bible dictionary or Bible encyclopedia is useful here, as are basic historical studies.

Principles to Understand

Four principles should guide us as we interpret the Bible: literal, historical, grammatical, and synthesis.

The Literal Principle

Scripture should be understood in its literal, normal, and natural sense. While the Bible does contain figures of speech and symbols, they were intended to convey literal truth. In general, however, the Bible speaks in literal terms, and we must allow it to speak for itself.

The Historical Principle

This means that we interpret Scripture in its historical context. We must ask what the text meant to the people to whom it was first written. In this way we can develop a proper contextual understanding of the original intent of Scripture.

The Grammatical Principle

This requires that we understand the basic grammatical structure of each sentence in the original language. To whom do the pronouns refer? What is the tense of the main verb? You'll find that when you ask some simple questions like those, the meaning of the text immediately becomes clearer.

The Synthesis Principle

This is what the Reformers called the analogia scriptura. It means that the Bible doesn't contradict itself. If we arrive at an interpretation of a passage that contradicts a truth taught elsewhere in the Scriptures, our interpretation cannot be correct. Scripture must be compared with Scripture to discover its full meaning.

Apply the Bible

Having read and interpreted the Bible, you should have a basic understanding of what the Bible says, and what it means by what it says. But my Bible study doesn't stop there. I never study God's Word just to get a sermon. My ultimate goal is to let it speak to me and enable me to grow spiritually. That requires personal application.

Bible study is not complete until we ask ourselves, "What does it mean for my life and how can I practically apply it?" We must take the knowledge we've gained from our reading and interpretation and draw out the practical principles that apply to our personal lives.

If there is a command to be obeyed, we obey it. If there is a promise to be embraced, we claim it. If there is a warning to be followed, we heed it. This is the ultimate step: we submit to Scripture and let it transform our lives. If you skip this step, you will never enjoy your Bible study and the Bible will never change your life.

Bible study is not optional in the Christian life. It is both the obligation and the privilege of all believers. If you are not involved in regular, systematic Bible study, you are missing one of the primary means God uses to bring us to maturity (1 Peter 2:2).

Source: http://www.gty.org/Resources/Articles/A178

Related Resources:

How to Study the Bible - Audio Series
How to Study Your Bible - Booklet