Preparing to Teach- A Guide for Students’ Early Bible Teaching

Effective teachers do two things: prepare themselves and trust God for the results. Trusting God means that you believe, and you try to increase your belief, that God is going to do his part:

·  drawing all people to himself (John 12:32)

·  reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor. 5:18-21)

·  revealing people’s sin and their need for him (John 16)

·  using his word to pierce people’s hearts (Heb. 4:12-13)

With God doing all that, what exactly do you need to do? You need to be prepared to present God’s Word in a way that connects the hearers to the truths you’re teaching.

Here is a helpful way to remember the ways you need to prepare yourself:

1.  Prepare your mind (mental preparation)

·  You must KNOW the passage you’re teaching, inside and out.

  1. Try to memorize the passage or key verses from it. That will get it stuck in your head.
  2. You should learn a lot more about your passage than what you teach. This creates the ICEBERG EFFECT. What’s above the surface is a small portion of the iceberg—90% of the iceberg is underwater. In the same way, your hearers should get the sense that you have really studied your stuff, and if they ask you questions about it, you’ll know the answer. This will help you speak with confidence. (Contrast this with school presentations where students use big words when they obviously don’t know what they mean.)

·  Take the truths from your passage and ORGANIZE them around a MAIN POINT

  1. Have ONE BIG POINT that you want to get across, and cut out anything that doesn’t fit in with that

·  Decide not just what you will say, but how you will say it

  1. Use things like antithesis (explaining the opposite of what you’re teaching), illustrations (“it’s kind of like this one time…”) and humor—but these must be planned out to be effective!

2.  Prepare your heart (emotional preparation)

·  Reflect on your passage of scripture until you love it! God’s word is full of incredible treasures. Spend time with it until you appreciate it.

·  Pray for the needs of your hearers until you are full of love for them.

·  Consider these questions to get your heart in the right place: If my hearers really understand this, what kind of blessings would happen as a result? If they completely miss what I’m teaching, what negative consequences would occur?

·  Doing these steps above will get you into a state of mind where you feel like you absolutely must convince them of how true and how awesome these truths are—that’s a great mindset for teaching!

3.  Prepare your soul (spiritual preparation)

·  Turn to God every day and express how you simply want him to work through you.

·  Having a hard time believing that God will come through and make this an awesome experience? Talk to God about your doubts, and work through this with him!

·  Practice through your teaching, but also pray through it. Ask God to help you in preparing your introduction, main point, delivery, and as many details as you can.

·  Reflect on how God is willing to work through you. Romans 8:32 says “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” If God was willing to go to the lengths of the cross for you, he is willing to speak through you!

·  Reflect on how God is able to work through you. Ephesians 1 mentions God’s “incomparably great power for us who believe.” It says “That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead.” If God is able to take a corpse and bring it to life, he is able to speak through you!

4.  Prepare your body/materials (physical preparation)

·  After step 2, you should have come to a point where you are genuinely excited to share God’s word with your hearers. But now it’s also essential to express that excitement! PRACTICE being animated and energetic!

  1. Practice your teaching out loud in order to get your points memorized, and then practice it out loud to rehearse how you want to speak—with excitement! Pretend the students are in front of you while you practice.

·  Take all your notes and condense them to a single page, or at most front and back. The notes are not for you to read. They are for you to refer back to if you get lost, so make sure to make them simple enough that you can find your place at a glance.

·  Prepare any visuals you will use—these are very effective, and more-so the younger your hearers are.

If you have done these steps (not perfectly of course, but if you’ve put effort in) then you should trust that God will come through. He LOVES coming through for us when we trust him, and he loves to see people’s lives transformed by his truth! 1 Cor. 12 says that he has put the parts of the body of Christ right where he wants them, and that includes you in this teaching role! In Ephesians 2:10, God reveals that he has prepared good works in advance for you to walk in. If you look closely at the passage, it says that he did this NOT because you are so awesome and capable, but because you are a new creation in Christ. He is a big God and he really can work through you!