You may wonder why we teach through books of the Bible at our Sunday services. Most churches have messages focused on some aspect of our daily lives – marriage, parenting, emotional health etc. The goal of such an approach is easy to understand. Exactly how teaching through books of the Bible would be helpful to you may be less clear. To many, the Bible is unfamiliar. It can seem foreign to our busy modern lives. It talks about history and places you may have never heard of. It contains strange language – you’ll find many words you may have never heard before. And some of its ideas even seem wrong by today’s thinking. How could understanding such a book be of any value?
But, perhaps that is just the point. The Bible is old, very old. What we call the Bible is really a collection of ancient manuscripts. These were written by 40 some authors, from many different cultures, over a period of more than 1500 years. And yet these manuscripts weave such a coherent story of God interacting with the world that they have been collected into one volume. The story it tells about life and the world around us is different, very different. It contains ideas that are not found anywhere else.
The writings contained in the Bible claim to be the account of God’s dealings with the world and his message to us. This is a fantastic claim. It may strike you as unbelievable. And yet the Bible contains some amazing things – like promises claimed to have been given by God that were fulfilled hundreds or thousands of years later. If the Bible’s does contain knowledge from God, it is information worth knowing. It would, in fact, be the ultimate source of knowledge for life.
Jesus said you would know a tree by its fruit. If the writings contained in the Bible really are from God and tell us how to know him, it should produce some pretty good fruit. We have found this to be true. We invite you to test the fruit by coming and learning the Bible. And by getting to know us. What you hear may seem strange at first – it did to us, but we keep coming to hear more because of the living hope that God has given us through his words.