22nd June 2025
Ordinary Habits that Change the World:
They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching...
One of the joys of worshipping at HTSJ is the fact that so many different people from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences are involved in Bible teaching. Through preaching and leading at our services - Sundays and midweek, leading our children's and young people's groups, or home groups, telling the Bible story at Little Fish, or taking school assemblies, I reckon that between 30 and 40 of us are actively involved in sharing the apostles' teaching in our church and community.
This is a huge privilege, and a demanding task. And it poses a question and a challenge: if around half our regular adult congregation are ourselves regularly teaching others, how are we resourcing ourselves? How are we ensuring that our teaching, whether for the whole church or small groups, whether for children or adults, is the outflowing of a mindset and spirit that seeks to continue learning, to be formed and shaped by the teaching that has shaped the church since the very beginning?
In John 16, Jesus promises the disciples that the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send, will lead them "into all truth" (John 16:13). This is not to say that the apostles' teaching, or the Word of God, has changed. God is eternal, and God's teaching remains the same. But we change, and our context changes, and unless we are continually allowing the Holy Spirit to speak to us and form us through our studies of the apostles' teaching, our faith will calcify; we will be stuck in the past.
I consider my journey to faith to have begun seriously on the day my Pathfinder leaders gave me a set of Bible Reading notes. For the first time, I realised that God wasn't just for Sunday School. For the first time, I realised that God could speak to me and I could speak to God at home, in my bedroom. It was a vital step for me to grow into a living faith. But if my understanding of God and God's ways in the world had remained where it was when I was eleven, that would not be a mature faith. I need to keep returning day after day to the apostles' teaching, keep on exploring how the Spirit is speaking into life now, keep on being formed and shaped and changed by what I read.
The good news is that there are more ways for us to encounter the apostles' teaching than possibly ever before. As well as Bible reading notes, there are podcasts - Lectio 365 and Rooted from the Bible Society are two that I have found helpful. Or, if you prefer to study the Bible with others, why not join a home group?
The early church "devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching". I wonder how we can grow in the apostles' teaching over the coming weeks?
