The Preparation of an Adult Sunday School Teacher

Peter Y. Woo, 8/2001

    F.B.Meyer, in his book "Meet for the Master's Use" (not to be confused with Frances Havergal's "Kept for the Master's Use"), talked of the honor and reverence that goes with those Levites assigned to the duties of handling holy vessels. An example was Ezra coming back to Jerusalem with all the holy vessels from Babylon. We Sunday School teachers are the similar holy vessels bearers today. How awesome are the duties! Our holy vessels are the many aspects of the untold riches and mysteries of Christ. Our charge is: "Preach the Word." (II Tim.4:2), "Keep the word of life," (Philadelphia Church), "Rightly dividing the word of life," (II Tim. 2:15).

    Jesus said in John 17:19, "And for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth." If I want my children to receive God's grace, I must sanctify myself and live a holy life from day to day. If not, they will see me as a hypocrite. The same way it is with SS teaching. I cannot expect them to be moved by the Word, unless I live a holy life myself.

    I discover that adult SS members are hungry and thirsty, but as Bro. Philip Chong once said, "Teaching adult SS is like a restaurant: one strike, and you are out. One bad meal, serving stale or tasteless food, the customers will come no more. Don't blame them. Blame yourself for serving food that lacks freshness. I want my SS Class to serve good spiritual meal every week."

    How then do we serve a good meal? If you know the secret, it is not hard. Otherwise you will spend 20 hours poring over the commentaries, spending another hour doing "dress rehearsal" before the mirror, polishing your hand motions, your eye-contacts, and your stories and jokes, and still have no confidence that it will be used by the Holy Spirit. You will still be trembling with fear and apprehension inside.

    I don't think I got all the answers, but in God's grace I have found a few, over the years. Here they are:

    1. "Let the Spirit move your heart with the Word, then it will move the listeners. Don't expect them to have life-changing eye-opening experiences, if you yourslef are not moved to the depths of your soul." These are the unforgettable words of more than one older brothers of Hong Kong Univ. Christian Association, given to us before they graduated. So our job, when preparing a SS lesson, is just to catch a glimpse of the heart of God, from the SS Bible passage. It may be a glimpse of His holiniess or of His yearning for us to live in His presence, or simply to love Him. It may be a glimpse of His plans for you and me, for the world, for missions, which is a project dear to His heart. Once my heart feels the powerful soul-quake of the Spirit, I really need the commentaries no more. My duty is more to feed souls, not the intellects of the SS congregation. So: let us feed souls!

    2. Place myself in the shoes of the participants. Why do they come to Adult SS? For social mirth and chit-chat? No. They come because they are weary at heart and thirsty of soul. When they read the Bible, they have so many unanswered questions, and often they just turn away, in despair. So as a teacher, I must hit on the problems that they most likely are grappling with. So: ask myself questions, ask the tough questions, then look for answers. Appendix 1 will have an actual example.

    3. Learn about spiritual power. This is a new dimension. A spirit-filled person does not need to be eloquent. He needs not be well organized and structuring his lesson in points A,B,C and 1,2,3. However, he is so successful in total willingness to be a tool in God's hands, that people hear more a message from the heart of God Himself, than a message of his own elaborate preparation. He is so willing to have his emotions controlled by the Spirit, that you see more of God's heart feelings flowing through him, than his own personality. Because of this absolute surrender to the Spirit's control, his words and emotions hit the audience's souls as if every thought and word is chosen just at the right moment for the right need of each person. Is this fiction, fantasy, and ideal, or a possible reality? Read a chapter or two of F.B.Meyer. (E.g., see http://www.ac.biola.edu/~woopy/books/fbmeyer/secrets ) It penetrates your soul as no other writer can. Is it eloquence or just good writing skills? No. It is the result of years of a personal quest for the infilling of the Spirit, as told in his booklet "Secrets of Christian Living", and others. Instead of getting the gift of evangelism, or healing, or tongues, he got the gift of healing souls and spiritual insight into the nature of healthy spiritual life. His sermons penetrate the listener's hearts even after 100 years, across the old pages, immortal, just like a Rembrandt's oil painting.

    4. Be excited over the biggest theme of the Bible, and the biggest project in God's own heart ----- salvation in Jesus Christ. Are you really convinced that other cults, religions, philosophies, ideologies, do not offer any other comparable salvation plan? The world around us regards us as paranoid idiots, oversensitive about what they do not regard as sin, such as marital infidelity, homosexuality, adultery in thoughts or in action. They say all these are human nature, and "God made us this way." We are just a small group of die-hard extreme conservative religious fanatics, that are at least 50 years behind the times of the new century, and we will die out, the sooner the better. So, are you still convinced that there is really such a thing as "sin problem" in our society? Or as they say, we are only overly sensitive?

    Next, are you awed in wonderment by the wisdom and efforts put into His plan of salvation? It took only 6 days for God to create the universe, yet it took centuries of implementation of this Salvation Plan, plus the most heart-wrenching sacrifice of His own Son, upon the cruel cross, rejected by men, misunderstood by His disciples, where He died alone. On the other hand, notice how in one masterful stroke, God outsmarted and outwitted the Enemy. The enemy had the same Old Testament as we have, for centuries, yet he could not unfathom God's plan. When the Son of God was on earth, in Enemy's territory, the latter tried his best to murder him, first at infancy via King Herod, then the storm in the Sea of Galilee, then the attempts of the Jews to stone him to death, and lastly seemed to succeed through the frenzied shouts of "Crucify him!" towards Pilate. Yet once Jesus was hanging on the cross, Satan noticed something goes awry, and he tried to tease him to jump down from the Cross. And how did the Cross eventually becomes the deadly wound on the Enemy's power of controlling the human empire? It does not need a deep study of soteriology at the Seminary. No, the early disciples did not go to seminary, and they understood the wisdom and wonder of this salvation. So can we.

    I am grateful for one sermon from Dr ChunKong Yiu of Kaiser Hospital that changed my perspective of the salvation plan, and it affects my Sunday sermons. God used him to point out how the mentality and the theology of Apostle Paul was throughly crushed to bankruptcy. How he rebuilt his theology without rejecting his faith in the Old Testament, and how excited to jubilation when he rediscovered the marvellous plan of God to save the Gentiles and make them join with the Jews to form a new, marvellous handiwork of God, called the church. This "mystery" drove him to breathless ejaculations, took us to its depths in Romans, Ephesians, and Colossians, and echoed by John in the final chapters of Revelations. When the panorama of God's plan hit you, it is like the whole Grand Canyon in its most refined details hitting you at the same time, and you could only humbly exclaim "How Great Thou Art". That is real worship.

    If we are not that excited about salvation, let us seek to understand the excitement of the heart of Apostle Paul as he wrote those epistles. It will get to you. Then you will teach SS with a personal sense of excitement and appreciation, not just a lecture from your prepared notes.

    5. Be prepared to teach and demonstrate the enjoyment of daily devotions and prayer. How do we pray with enjoyment and new discoveries thereof? How do we make Bible reading a joyful mealtime each day? Can we not just teach it in ABC's but do it together with our SS members, so they may also catch the enjoyment thereof? It is one thing for me to talk about astronomy in SS, about the handiwork of God. It is a new experience when I can take them to Griffiths Park Observatory at night and point to the skies and let them feel it themselves.

    In conclusion, God will continue to use you, and increase your hunger, so that you become filled, and then you will feed more souls.

    Appendix 1. Example of Point 2:how to anticipate questions.

    In the parable of the sower (and other parables), why did Jesus said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto ..." and "He who has ears, let him listen!"? Are these little phrases just rhetorical ornaments, or do they mean something?

    The answer is this: if you feel you have heard something meaningful through this parable,you are beginning to hear the voice of God, your spiritual hearing are awakened. So then listen more so intently, to the still small voice of the Spirit, until your sould is on fire, your eyes opened, and your life changed. The purpose of the parables is to talk about the "what", "when", "how" of the Kingdom of God. So we better find out what the Kingdom means. I was so excited when I found out that the Kingdom of God does not mean the church. It does not mean the future Millenium Age. It does not mean an ideal way of doing and structuring the church. It means only this: "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Col. 1:27). It means a new mode of daily living, in submission to the guidance and infilling by the Holy Spirit. Such a mentality of union with Christ, is the kingdom of Heaven. It is a realizable thing right now. It is a narrow way, hence we have to strive to enter through the narrow gate, yet it is a way of joy and peace (Romans 8:6).

    Once we get the concept right, all the passages in Matthew and Luke about the Kingom comes to life, because it talks about a healthy, practical, daily, Christian life.

    So in teaching the parable of the sower, it will send the audience into rapturous joy and restful ecstacy once they see the overall purpose of Jesus' teachings and the feasibility of the new life. Afterwards, the explanations of the 4 kinds of soil are just further details.

    Now comes another question in the listener's mind, after they have heard you teach about the 4 kinds of soil. It is so vital that if you don't anticipate and tackle this question, they will go away hungry. The question is this: how can I avoid being the first three kinds of soil, and be only the fourth kind?

    Briefly, to avoid birds picking away our spiritual nourishment, we need to discipline ourselves to have quiet hearts, so that we can listen. We need to have it in the morning, in the car when we drive to and from work, and during lunch break.

    To avoid being shallow and rocky soil: we must allow the Spirit to show us the rocky pebbles in our life and get rid of them. Don't just worship with only "praise" songs, without songs of soul searching and confession.

    To avoid being crowded off by thorns: recognize thorns that tangle us in life, such as worries about financial insecurities, worries about people, worries about health, retirement, children, what others think about me, my self image, my temperament, my comfort zone, about those who constantly violate my comfort zones, people not appreciating me, my church not giving me a chance to fulfil my greatest potential, my this, my that, ... bloated balloons of the self-life, ready to collapse.

    To become good soil? It takes patience to cultivate and nurture the soul. It takes a long term goal: to bear fruit of righteousness and godliness. Let the Spirit flow through me unto others, and fruits will grow.