How To Teach The Bible 1 by Pastor Dolapo Lawal: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

God himself is a teacher. Exodus 4:12 — he promised Moses, "I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall say." Psalm 25:8 — "Good and upright is the Lord; therefore he will teach sinners in the way." Isaiah 54:13 — "All your children shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of your children." Peace comes through teaching.

The Hebrew word for teaching is yara. Its root meaning is to flow as water, to rain, to lay or throw — especially an arrow. Figuratively, it means to point out as if by aiming the finger, to teach with precision. That same word is used for "shoot" 18 times, for "cast" 5 times, for "rain" twice. Its total occurrence is 84 times. Teaching, in God's language, is precision — like an arrow released toward a target.

What It Means to Be a Bible Teacher

A Bible teacher is someone who systematically explains doctrine so that believers understand, believe, and are established in what God has already revealed.

Doctrine comes from the Hebrew leqach — "something received," fair speech, learning. It is not merely theology. It is God's instruction. The Greek equivalent, didache, means instruction.

A Bible teacher is a ministry gift — a gift from God. Ephesians 4:10–11 — "He who descended is also the one who ascended far above all heavens, that he might fill all things. And he himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers." These are the people Christ left in charge to determine truth. What they say the Bible means, in many regards, is how people will begin to see it. That weight is immense.

A Bible teacher's primary assignment is to explain divine truth accurately, so believers understand, believe, and are established in what God has already revealed.

The Orthodox Teacher

The first mark of a genuine Bible teacher is that he is orthodox — not inventive.

Orthodox means saying things the way they were originally said. A teacher can find creative ways to present truth, but must never distort the idea. Once the teaching becomes too psychological or too clever, it leaves doctrine and becomes philosophy.

• If the Bible says salvation is by grace through faith, a teacher says it that way — every time, without upgrading.
• Definitions are fixed. Doctrine is not a matter of this year's revelation versus last year's. Scripture is not an app to be updated.
• Paul is not adding more. What is added to what he wrote is contamination. There is a curse on those who add to scripture.

When studying foundational truth, an orthodox teacher does not form an opinion in isolation. He checks scripture and also checks how the early church fathers interpreted that subject.

As a personal example: the first framework that made sense of the Trinity was modalism — God as one person in three dimensions. But when consulting the Apostles' Creed of 300 AD, that framework had to be abandoned. The disciples of the disciples did not preach that. Understanding may be incomplete, but the content must match what they preached. That is what orthodoxy means.

If a disciple listened to Jesus for two or three years, they heard the same sermons repeatedly. Jesus had no more than eight core topics. Disciples at the back of a crowd were quoting the message with him — because repetition embedded it. The disciples, likewise, were not inventive. They said what they were given to say.

Explaining Revelation — Not Producing It

The second mark is that a teacher explains revelation — he does not produce new revelation.

Revelation is not in the teacher's head. Revelation is not in the teacher's heart. Revelation is in the word of God.

Nehemiah 8:8 — "So they read distinctly from the book, in the law of God; and they gave the sense, and helped them to understand the reading."

The job of a teacher is to help people understand what they have read — not to bring in something that was not there. The explanation must come from the reading itself.

Teaching is the clear explanation of what is already written, so that understanding is produced.

How to Explain Scripture — Contextual Interpretation

Explanation must answer what the text means before what it means to people. Doctrine begins with meaning, not application. The meaning of the text is found in context.

There are several layers of context to consider:

1. Immediate Literal Context — Pretext and Post-Text

   No verse is allowed to mean something that contradicts its surrounding verses.

   The parable of the lost coin cannot be used to teach about finances, even though it involves a coin — because the surrounding parables are the lost sheep and the prodigal son. The context establishes that what is lost is not glory, not a marriage, but a soul. Teaching finances from that parable, having seen the context, is not wrong teaching — it is false teaching. Wrong teaching is ignorance. False teaching is an intentional distortion.

   Once there are two different ideas about the meaning of a text, someone is right, someone is wrong, or both are wrong. The Bible has one meaning. Misunderstanding is interpreting what is said the way you feel, not the way the speaker intended. That contention between interpreter and God's intent is dangerous ground.

2. Historical Context

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   Historical context asks what was happening at the time the words were spoken or written.

   • The word "gospel" — from the Greek euangelion — meant, in the Roman world, the good news of a military victory or the enthronement of a king. When the Bible says "go and preach the gospel of the kingdom," it is saying: go and announce that Jesus reigns.
   • "The world" in John 3:16 — the Greek word is cosmos, meaning a system. The people who heard that message understood it as the evil system of politics, education, media, religion. It is not simply a world of people. Misreading it as "people" reduces the scope of what Christ redeemed.
   • "The Word" in John 1:1 — the Greek logos was not a Christian invention. It comes from a 6th-century BC Greek philosopher, the father of sciences, who taught people to question everything — which is why we have psychology, philosophy, sociology, logic. When John said "In the beginning was the Logos," he was saying: Jesus is the reason behind everything. He is the answer to every question.

3. Dispensational Context

   Since the Bible contains two dispensations — the old covenant and the new — every passage must be interpreted within its dispensation. Something that was right in the old may not apply today.

   • Nicolas, mentioned in Revelation 2, was originally a deacon who began mixing Judaism with Christianity. Jesus declared hatred for that doctrine. The two covenants cannot be merged.
   • "Pray for your enemies, bless those who curse you" is new covenant. Jesus knew that after his death and resurrection, his people would be positioned far above their enemies. The old covenant's "suffer not a witch to live" was a governance instruction for a people possessing a land through war — not a spiritual principle for the church age. To apply it now means every bewitched person in the Galatian church should be killed.
   • Dietary laws, Sabbath regulations, offerings — these all required a functioning priestly system, the Ark of the Covenant, and fire from heaven to confirm acceptance. Colossians 2:16–17 — "Let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival, a new moon or Sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ."
   • Reading the New Testament through an old covenant lens is possible. Someone can preach from the epistles and take people backward. The test: are you reading what God can do to you, or what he can do for you? Reading the Old Testament in the light of Christ means reading it as Israel, not as an enemy subject to judgment.

   Hebrews 8:6 — "But now he has obtained a more excellent ministry, inasmuch as he is also mediator of a better covenant, which was established on better promises."

4. Audience Context

   Every passage was written to a specific audience, and that audience governs interpretation.

   • When Paul writes in 1 Timothy and Titus about how to pick a bishop or expose a false teacher — he is writing to pastors of pastors, not to local church members. A member's instruction is to abstain from false teachers, not to confront them. Confronting false teachers is for those who carry authority over bodies of believers.
   • The instruction "women should not teach" in 1 Timothy 2:12 is Paul's personal practice statement — he says "I do not permit," not "God does not permit." He also writes to "the elect lady" (an elder) in 2 John, commends female co-laborers in Romans 16, and declares in Galatians 3:28 that there is neither male nor female in Christ. In Acts 1–2, women were among the 120, and Peter quotes Joel's prophecy that daughters would prophesy — which means to teach. The same Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7:7, "I wish that all men were as I myself" — personal preference, not divine command. Picking one preference and ignoring the broader corpus is reading law while in the New Testament.

The Weight of Getting It Wrong

It appears God does not excuse ignorance. The servant who buried his talent was condemned — not for malice, but for a wrong picture of who God is. He said, "I know you are a wicked man," and that wrong knowledge made him a worker of iniquity. Jesus' response was not "that's not me" — it was judgment.

People can be preached into deafness where they can no longer hear God directly. John the Baptist understood this. He said, "He must increase, but I must decrease. When the bridegroom comes, the friend of the bridegroom steps aside." A teacher's goal is not to position people as loyal to the teacher — it is to hand them to Christ.

The efficacy of a ministry gift is a gift from God. It must not be stolen, buried, or redirected.