Last night I texted the students and asked what they wanted to talk about. Of course I was prepared just in case I didn’t get any responses, lucky I did get a few texts back. Below are the text and how we tied them all together.
Galatians 3:15-29 : The first text I received back said that they wanted to talk about “equality”. Though this would not be the first text I would normally go to for equality it did seem fitting for the night. I opened up by talking about how now because of Christ there is not “Jew nor Greek” and so on. Paul takes the class and gender structure they have and show how in Christ all are equal. We then talked about how we see people and addressed the question of whether or not we made distinctions in how we viewed people. Simply put, “Do we view people how God sees them or do we pick and choose who we will love?”
Matthew 8:28-33 : The second text I received back said that they wanted to talk about Jesus casting the demons into the pigs. Though I would normally never connect these two text I wanted to make sure that we covered everyones questions and at the same time showed them that everything in the Bible connects to the glory of God. Doing this proved to be easy to do as we talked.
First we reviewed the question brought up by Galatians 3, “Do we see people the way God does?” Using that question we honestly said that many times we do not see people the way God sees them, but why? The cause, I believe, is because we let things come into our lives and influence how we think about and see the world. These things can be as simple as music, movies and more. We allow those things to slowly possess us. Of course this is only loosely connected to the possessed men. They were possessed to the point of not longer being the men they onces where. However when we let the things of the world come into our lives we slowly begin to become less of the people we once were. Only when we turn to Jesus and allow His life, death and resurrection to change us do we begin to become free from what possess us.
Revelations 22:6-9 : Lastly, a student wanted to also talk about the book of Revelations. Though it would take MONTHS to really take an adequate look into the book of Revelations we did use the last chapter as a way to wrap up the night. I wanted to make sure they saw that when John hears and sees all of the things described in the book of Revelations he beings to worship the angel that is with him. The angel then tells John the one important point within of all of scripture, “Worship God”.
To say the least it was an interesting night. I don’t know if I will keep asking them to text in their topics. Though it brings forward some great topics it also makes it difficult to really plain out a lesson that doesn’t lead to more questions. The positive side of the night was that we were able to connect the scriptures to show that the Bible is all about God and His glory!
Pastor Mike Moore 