Advance Preparation: Conclusion
If you have completed the six tasks described in the previous articles, you will be ready to prepare the first lessons on the biblical book you are going to teach. You will have completed your main objective and achieved the goal of advance preparation.
- Objective: To orient yourself to the biblical book in its entirety and distribute it into logical study portions for the series.
- Goal: To have a distribution of study portions that is based on an understanding of the structure of the book as a whole, along with a collection of notes that summarize the most important information about the circumstances of the original readers and the reasons why the author wrote.
Obviously, depending on the time you have available, you can also add a few other activities to enhance your understanding of the biblical text that you will be teaching throughout the series. Among the additional possibilities that could be mentioned, I would like to highlight the following. Several of these ideas can be easily incorporated into your daily routine with almost no additional time burden.
Additional Ideas
- Listen regularly to an audio recording of the book. Find a recording and listen to it while driving, exercising, or taking a walk. This activity makes it possible to assimilate large portions of biblical text with almost no effort, and it can add much to your overall knowledge of the text. For example, over a decade ago, when I started running daily, I ended up listening to the Pastoral Epistles 40-50 times before starting a series of Bible studies on 1 Timothy. It was a tremendous help!
- Start memorizing the book! You can memorize key verses, entire portions, or even whole books. This will also immensely enhance your fluency with the text while teaching. The greatest benefit, however, will be the degree of meditation on the passage that it will allow you to do. Memorization doesn’t have to be complicated. In high school, I had a teacher who memorized large quantities of Scripture simply by reading one verse aloud 5 times a day for some 20 days straight. And I myself, as a freshman in college, just by listening to a recording every night while washing the dinner dishes, managed to memorize the entire Epistle to the Philippians over the summer.
Original Language Ideas
If you have some knowledge of the original languages, you have probably studied enough to not need guidance in this area. Still, you may find some of the following ideas novel or at least good reminders.
- Start learning/memorizing Hebrew or Greek vocabulary. You have probably already acquired a basic vocabulary that includes the most frequently used words in the OT or NT. For the series you are preparing, you could set about learning the additional vocabulary that appears with some frequency in the book you are studying. There are books that offer such lists, as well as software that can generate them. Deliberately enlarging your vocabulary to include a more specialized subset will greatly aid your study of the original text.
- Develop the discipline of listening to recordings in the original or read it aloud yourself. Back in 2008, I bought a recording of the Greek text of the New Testament read by Spiros Zodhiates, a Cypriot Christian. This revolutionized my way of studying the Greek New Testament, since it was the first time it actually sounded like a real language to me. Since then, I have listened my way through the entire NT some twenty times while following along with the text. Splendid! For a series on a specific New Testament book, you could simply make use of that portion of the recording and listen to it over and over again.
Note: For those who are interested, the Spiros Zodhiates recording is 24 hours 51 minutes long. It needs to be purchased. More recently, however, I discovered an even better recording by Apóstolos Vavylis on Bible.is that is free. This is a faster reading that runs a total of 18 hours and 19 minutes. To download the recording to your computer, choose the «Greek-Ancient» option from http://www.bible.is/audiodownloader. Since both recordings are read by native Greek speakers, they naturally have the historic (modern) Greek pronunciation and are, in my opinion, the most satisfying and reliable way to train your ear and your speech.