Extensive research reveals the trend of evangelical Christian's knowledge of Scripture is decreasing every year.
A seminary professor made this sobering statement in a course designed to prepare the next generation of Bible teachers. As an older student sitting among mostly young men and women, I already suspected it was true. I'd been teaching for over fifteen years. But upon learning this verifiable fact, I felt like I'd been punched in the gut. With a trembling voice, I questioned the professor, "How can we hear this and not fall facedown weeping?"
Shameless Truth-Tellers
At Revive '15: Women Teaching Women, Jen Wilkin exhorted women's leaders from 2 Timothy 2:15 to become shameless truth-tellers. After making the ironclad case that we've become a nation of Bible illiterates, she pulled the fire alarm by saying, "The modern church cannot afford for its women to be biblically illiterate. As we go into the dawn of post-Christian America, we must treasure and teach our sacred text as recent generations have not."
Three Skills Necessary for Bible Students
If we want to feel deeply about God, we must learn to think deeply about God.
Jen advocates that the methods teachers use matter in order to rightly handle the Word of God. Our methods need to cultivate a deep and enduring adoration of God. A woman who loses interest in her Bible study has not been equipped to love it as she should because the God of the Bible is too lovely to abandon for lesser pursuits. If we want to feel deeply about God, we must learn to think deeply about God. This means we must ask the women whom we teach to be more than just consumers. We must ask them to be students in the true sense of the word, not passive but active, in the way they approach the Scriptures.
1. Teach your students how to think (love God with their minds).
In Scripture we're commanded to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Is that a verse for men only? Is it God's intention that women love Him with their emotions and men with their intellect? No.
Often women in the church aren't challenged to have a thinking faith. We agree we want to be changed, so what is the path of transformation? Romans 12:2 answers, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind." The path to the renewing of our feelings is through our thinking. Right thinking should inform right feeling. (Case in point: Jen's deep-seated love for cheese puffs died a slow death after reading the nutrition label.)
The heart cannot love what the mind does not know. It's a simple formula: Know God, and you will love God. We must teach women to think rightly about God, and that right thinking will beget right feeling.
The heart cannot love what the mind does not know.
2. Teach your students how to learn.
Don't just give students good information; give them good tools. Teachers must push them to seek firsthand knowledge of Scripture. The reason is that the false teacher and secular humanist rely on us not knowing what the Bible says. But so often women have adopted a way of thinking that resembles the telephone game. Women read a book about the Bible without reading the Bible. Instead of being able to quote the Word, we spout off what someone else said about what someone else said about the Scriptures.
God help us if we become content to be curators of other people's opinions about a book that we cannot be troubled to read. Use those books as a supplement to—but not a substitute for—spending time in the Word of God firsthand. You are commanded to love God with your mind, not the mind of Nancy Leigh DeMoss or John Piper.
3. Teach your students how to work.
Let's change the paradigm in the church that just showing up for Bible study is sufficient. Disciples are called to be disciplined. Do you see how the two words are so closely related? If you happen to be good at playing an instrument, you became that way through practice.
First attempts at anything worth learning are hard! It's tempting to quit, but students must be trained to learn a skill by doing it. We must make students do the work. Try not to do anything for them that they can do for themselves. Set a clear expectation that sanctification is hard, but that as the teacher, you'll be doing the same hard work as the students.
In 1 Peter 2, the apostle says we should crave the pure milk of the Word. Just as breastfeeding is a natural and necessary thing, it isn't something we automatically know how to do well. Give students permission to fail at first, speculate sober-mindedly, wonder, and wait for answers to come. Women must get over the desire to have "the right answer." The job of the student is not to please the teacher but to expand her thinking to love God with her mind.
Teachers, you don't have to convince someone to work hard at something they love.
Our job is to help them love Bible study.