A Bible Timeline Banner Presents A Creative Approach To Help Teach Bible Events And Characters And Facts
In our Bible study some years ago, a lady who had been a Christian and worked in the local Church for many years, made this statement,"Yes, but Abraham had the Law and so he understood about......" (they weren't talking about the pre-Moses law) I wonder just how many Christians will actually pick up the error in this assertion. Moses existed five hundred years after Abraham and so it is impossible. I have since then made up a Biblical chronological chart and explained visually the dating of people and occasions.
Unfortunately, a large number of preachers and Bible teachers in our churches go on and preach light weight, shallow, superficial, flimsy messages and their members barely grow in Bible knowledge and understanding. Preachers love to preach'moral essays' and'warming affirmations' because supposedly, if we truly love our people this is what we'll do. Regrettable it seems, if God's men and women are falling through the cracks'for an absence of knowledge' as long as we are positive and loving to all. Truly, the more relevant we become to the world, the less relevant we are to the world.
Years ago, I was teaching on the death, resurrection, burial and life of Jesus, and a retired minister and strong preacher of the Bible, who had been in the ministry for forty years, came to me and reproved me smartly over some fascinating points I made and he said 1Ti 1:4'Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do.' I quietly asked him if I had been teaching anything of a heretical nature in any way, to which he replied"No". I continued on to explain that in the case of that particular Scripture, it wasn't referring to examining Scripture but to the false teachings and school of thought of Gnosticism, but he would not accept it. So, how can a forty year minister & worker in the Gospel, not know and understand about a thing that probably half the books of the New Testament refer to?
How could he understand and preach the Bible clearly without knowing about a thing that was so influential in the New Testament church? And then how can the congregation hope to understand these things and be in a position to interpret their Bible well, if they're not told?
Why do we dwell on our pet subjects and feel good discourses?
We instruct on a text from Nahum and a passage about Luke and a topic from the book of Revelation and then the faith of Matthew or the humility of Moses - bits from here and everyplace, but we do not put it all at once in an obvious understandable, easy to remember, perspective with a decent Bible TimeLine and Church History as well. Constantly we are bombarded with new books, modernist ideas, a number of them dangerously edging toward Progressive thinking, when if we were to be taught the fundamental principles of Church history, we then would not be so bound to do the same again.
Let's us as teachers and preachers stitch together the fragments of the Bible and God's plan into a complete picture that our people are able to draw on for the rest of life, helping them to understand God, His Eternal Plan, the role of the Church and ways to better translate the Bible to order our lives by.
It is not difficult to do, and it's not boring if we are ready to put in a bit of effort prayer and fervor, and just possibly you can employ a Bible Timeline as well.
For added info about a Bible TimeLine go to our Bible TimeLine Chart site and see the scriptural study resource.
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