What does all this have to do with Teaching? - 06
Sin will get in the way.
If you’ve read the preceding posts you may be wondering, What does all this have to do with teaching people God’s Word?
You thought this was a book geared to helping men who wanted to someday become an elder in the church. This chapter is supposed to help me to learn how I need to become a better teacher of God’s people.
So what is all this talk about: paideia, shinan, autonomy (self-law), self-deception, sin, regeneration, unlearning, interpreting knowledge, suppression, sense of deity, and so forth? My hope was to lay some gravel as a base. It is so that you to realize that teaching God’s Word to people is more complicated than simply sharing Bible knowledge with a person who stands eager to receive it.
You should know going in that most non-Christians are predisposed against knowledge: both God’s written revelation and His natural one. Trying to teach them about the things of God can feel an awful lot like calling out into a large empty forest hoping for a faint human response.
Now, you might console yourself thinking, That’s OK, I am mostly concerned to teach believers! And I think you should be.1 But then, secondly, you should know that very often Christians don’t want to hear what God says either.
Even in the Church, among brothers and sisters, the sinful nature is the greatest obstacle to the teaching and learning process. The non-Christian is controlled by it. The Christian still has IT in him and he can let IT lead the way rather than God’s Spirit.2
So say you are teaching on the propriety of worshiping and resting and not laboring on the Lord’s Day.3 And present in your congregation is someone who owns a grocery store that happens to be open at the very same time the words are falling from your lips. What is the man thinking as you attempt to teach the proper parameters of God’s 4th Commandment? He could be thinking, I don’t believe that commandment matters any longer in the New Testament. Or, People have to eat on Sundays, and sometimes they need to pick up food to do it. Or, he might be thinking, Here goes Mr. Legalism again! Whichever one of these responses match the grocery store owner, your problem as a teacher is not whether or not you’ve taught accurately God’s Word. Is it?
Why not? It is because there are obstacles inside of learners that prevent them from learning. All Christians carry baggage. Often, the sin inside of them can cling to pieces and portions of their past and present. Someone may have had an abortion. another may have been raised by a single mother. These past experiences are still present in them. And it can certainly make a congregant tender to the touch in regard to those subjects. They bristle out of fear and do not want you to open up a can of worms in them.
Another person may be giving in to pornography daily. And, it is almost guaranteed there are gossips, backbiters, the proud and self-righteous within the Church.4 They likely feel guilty. Your teaching is bound to add to it.
Then there is the guy who considers himself more doctrinally pure (more Scripturally astute) than you. He’s listened in the past to something you taught, that he did not agree with, something “important” to him. So, he wonders, what could you possibly add to my knowledge since you’ve blown it on that other matter? Or he lies in wait, what else will you compromise of God’s Word? Such a one will not learn much from you, and he will quickly be perturbed by any noticeable “shortcomings.”
I hope you’re beginning to see that even if you’re the clearest expositor in the city, it won’t matter if people don’t want to hear God on a given matter. And, oftentimes, a fellow believer’s sin, and guilt, or pride and unwillingness to repent, will quickly close you down. So teaching is one thing, but having someone learn what you’re trying to teach is quite another.
You will find, however, if elders stick around and faithfully teach, whole congregations can be transformed by it. Of course, some will leave. And sometimes it could be in small clusters. Do not be discouraged. It might be that they were the tares among the wheat.5 In that case it is actually healthy when Jesus decides to pull them out. The wheat will usually learn and obey and become more mature. This leads to greater joy within the congregation, and people will begin to look forward more and more to worshiping and fellowshipping together. Maturity is attractive to those who are being saved.
Thankfully, God gives us the concept that His Word will not come back void.6
In some the Word will be effective and in others it will actually act as a hardening agent. Jesus said this was the fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah, that some will hear the truth but not perceive it. And then Jesus said, “But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.”7
So, though sin can be an obstacle to a learner, there are blessed learners too. Their eyes are not being blurred by sin, nor are their ears blocked up. They will be the ones who actually benefit from your teaching. And they will act upon it.
So what is a teacher to do? Paul told Timothy, “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.”8
You go about teaching, is what you do. You be patient too. God will need to do the work in His people for you to succeed as a teacher. I remember years ago, an older pastor colleague telling me, “All I can do is preach faithfully God’s Word. The rest is up to Him.”9
So then, an elder should work hard at studying the Word. He should also labor to clearly present it to others. But along with both of these, he will have to prayerfully rely on God for any fruitfulness.
Oh, and one more thing. You, wannabe elder, you have sin in you as well. And this can greatly hinder you as a teacher.
This does not relieve you and me from our obligation to teach the nations. We must certainly bring the Gospel of the Son to people who are not Christian. This is the Great Commission. We must also uphold God’s Law in the world, though they dismiss us for it and/or persecute us.
Galatians 5:16-17, “But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.”
This is basic 4th Commandment stuff, though some in the Church have wrongly taught against the need to keep this commandment, and as a result have helped to cripple whole societies.
Despicably, we Church people tend to excel at the sins by which we are able put ourselves at a higher level than others around us.
Matthew 13:24-30
Isaiah 55:10-11, “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”
Matthew 13:14-16
2 Timothy 4:1-2
The pastor was Ken Van De Griend. He was a great, Christian Reformed Church, guy who served in Waupun for a few years. He passed away in 2023 at age 79.