Below is the transcript for my first biblical teaching video presentation for the religion class I am taking this Fall semester of 2016.
The video can be found on youtube at:
The video can be found on youtube at:
I hope you enjoy watching as much as I enjoyed writing this little project.
I know there are several issues that need improvement both in the lesson itself and in the video quality, but this class I am taking is designed to help me improve so stay tuned to see more and hopefully better presentations later on ^_^
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Hello everyone, welcome to my first
ever, biblical lesson teaching.
I want to welcome you and I hope
you find some food here among the words that God allows me to say. On that
note, let us begin with a word of prayer.
Prayer
Now the passage I want us to look
at today is from John 3:16.
But not the John 3:16 we all know
so very well about God’s love for this earth, but instead from the book of
First John, from chapter 3 and verses 16-18, and this passage is about what our
love response, to God’s love, should be toward our fellow man.
1
John 3:16-18
What do these verses have in common
with our current lives?
Some of you may be duly familiar
with these passages,
- especially if you’re a Liberty
University professor -
but something I’ve learned about
the Bible is that, over the years, the more we look at the same passages over
and over, and the more we study, then the more we will see God’s revelation to
us
– Perhaps not all at once, and
perhaps not something so totally different than what we have seen before, but
we can see it more deeply and more intimately.
Here the old negative-nancy saying
comes to mind, “familiarity breeds contempt,”
except in this case we have a
positive spin – “familiarity breeds content.”
So let us look at the content of
these passages and see what we can become more familiar with – more intimate
with.
My goal here first is to help us
look at the verses I mentioned and see what they are about and then secondly to
open them up in a common theme to our eyes and ears that as we experience them
again – we can allow God to work through those channels to speak to us so we
can take away what He would have us receive.
Read
1 John 3:16-18
The first thing that pops out
whenever I read a passage of scripture,
and this is just my usual personal
experience,-
-is of course the spiritual
conviction that comes to mind related to whatever thing I have been struggling
with giving up. Whatever issue I have been striving to keep from giving to God,
that’s what surfaces in my mind and I can’t get it out, especially if I am
knowingly living in sin, even if its just a little thing.
You may not have this response when
you first open up the passage of 1 John 3:16-18, and that’s okay.
Perhaps instead your response is
one of agreement and interest. You see with your eyes something that is in
agreement with your core beliefs, and that is good.
Now whether you’re convicted to the
core and about to get up and leave, or whether you’re inwardly nodding
excitedly in anticipation for the message on this passage, or whether you’re
anywhere else in between, let me encourage you go pay attention, because the
theme of these verses is “love” and when God talks to us about “love” we know
its “gonna be good,” because God is a God of Love.
The first words spill out the theme
clearly to us, “By this we know love……that he laid down his life for us…” and
this is of course in reference to the same thing that the gospel book of John
is referring to – God’s sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross for our sins, to
be a propitiation for us to cover the debt accrued by our sins and to cover our
dirty ugly sinful selves so that when God looks at us, He sees Jesus’ sacrifice
and because “the punishment that brought us peace was on him” (Isaiah 53:5) so
that our relationship with God can happen!
This is the great and significant
love that this passage begins with and immediately John ties it into what we –
the audience, the Christians in this world – need to be doing in our daily lives,
and that’s
“and we ought to lay down our lives
for the brothers…”
…
Well I don’t know about you, but being
beaten and having a crown of giant thorns rammed over my head and metal spikes
hammered into my hands and feet…is not something that I want to be doing, and I
don’t think that that particular death is what this passage is telling us we
have to do, although what we do need to do may be very difficult.
Thankfully…Christ is the only one
that had to die for our sins, but “laying down our life” is not only referring
to our physical death! Especially if we look at the whole other 80% of this
passage.
It goes on with a bit of
explanation, because I’m sure the believers of the time were hearing this and
were maybe wondering the same thing, saying something like “oh I don’t know
about this dying stuff. I’ve got a family and a household to maintain and my
net-mending business and my kid’s barmitspha is coming up and the sheep
festival and the donkey races and…and…
The passage says, “But if anyone
has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart
against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love
in word or talk but in deed and in truth.”
Now I don’t have a lot of time
left, but before I finish here, let me finish unpacking these points on “love”
and “death” and I’ll try to tie it into what we should be doing with our lives
in TODAY.
Here, John begins with the theme of
love, moves through the reminder of the great sacrifice of Christ, lifts that
up as an example of what we should be doing in our daily lives, then makes a
statement of what might be happening instead, because he knows we are humans
who are making mistakes, and then he ends with a much needed encouragement
towards mending our ways by following what God’s word tells us to do…which of
course should result in good.
“But if anyone has this world’s
goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does
God’s love abide in him?”
This part of the passage is the
meat. This is the main point.
The believers at the time were
human, the believers of this time were human and we humans have a huge tendency
to seek, seek, seek after what makes us feel good and what makes us happy and
the pursuit of goodness and pleasure are not inherently evil but for us as a “holy
priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9) there is something more to life and what we always
can so easily forget is that as we go and live and seek to gain, we
forget about others or we ignore others, especially the dirty and the hurting
and when we are stuck on the next thing that we hope to gain from our next
event or experience, we ignore the brothers who are suffering all around us…
Or, we are sufficiently proud of
ourselves for giving a monthly mail offering to a poor kid in a far away
country.
Or we are sufficiently proud of
ourselves for being so encouraging in the morning welcome at church.
Or we are sufficiently proud of
ourselves for being so fantastically ministry minded when we helped that person
pick that thing up that they dropped but they didn’t notice.
These are good things, and we
should keep doing them, but is this laying down our life?
Are we responding to 1 John 3:16-18
like we should?
I believe that God is referring to
us laying down our plans and our extracurricular activities…not the stuff that
we have to do to keep getting by, but things that we don’t have to do, the
PLEASURE SEEKING that we all know is there, no matter how big or small.
If we are honest with ourselves we
can see it clearly. And if it is not there, then praise be to God! But be aware
and don’t let personal pleasure seeking get between you and sharing Christ’s
love with the world around you!
God has each one of us in the place
where we need to be – as little lights in this dark world – as little children
– simple and dependent on God – confounding the wise of this world and we
should be loving them all which in this day and age of hustle and bustle and
iphones and vacations and sports and even if I didn’t mention your particular
hobby, we all have one that we could do a little less of so we could do a
little more of this loving in action!
Now I’m not here to preach fire and
brimstone on anyone, least of all God’s chosen people whose salvation status is
safe and secure in His hands, but what I do want to do and what John wants to
do and what God wants to do is help us notice that when we see this passage, we
are honest with ourselves about our lives, we recognize what areas we need
cutting out, what God has already been trying to trim, and whether we have been
resisting or whether we have been dragging our feet, let us remember Christ’s
bold acceptance of the crucifixion sacrifice and stand up from grasping around
on the ground for the next bit of pleasure, dust ourselves off, and look to God
to lead us in practical steps towards meeting the needs of those around us.
May God bless us in that endeavor.
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