By Steve Cordle
Recently my wife and I were blessed to be able to attend a marriage seminar sponsored by a national ministry. (If you haven’t gone to one, do yourself a favor and go; you deserve it!)
For two and a half days we took in high-quality teaching about the principles of a Christ-centered marriage. Truthfully, very little of the material was new to me. As a pastor, I had taught most of the principles myself. In fact, I could fill in most of the outline blanks before the speaker started! When I looked ahead at the discussion questions, they appeared fine, but particularly novel.
While the sessions were good, do you know when the sessions got most interesting? When my wife and I sat down to work through the application material. Those questions which looked fairly ordinary on paper became the launching point for significant and vital conversations. And over the last couple of weeks, those conversations have prompted me to be even more intentional about showing love to Linda. In other words, they produced life change.
In our churches, people can hear a good biblical message and look over some questions about it. In fact, sometimes they can say, “I’ve heard that already, how about something deeper?” But it is in the application — the doing — that the lives truly change.
How do your groups help people apply the Bible? Share your experience with us!