Today was the second CM team meetings where you are to start investigating your passage.
At this point you should be getting a sense of how you are going to attack your passage. Hopefully everyone came prepared and ready to go. Bloggers, your responsibility is to post a comment linked from this post (at the bottom of this: COMMENT) about your time today.
I want you to respond to two things: 1) What did you do and what were the highlights from your discussion of the passage today? And, 2) what is your general plan of how you're going to collaboratively tackle the exposition and further study of this passage? Try to give a healthy paragraph for each question.
If you have any questions, you can contact me by email: bhigley@bbc.edu
Blessings
Bill H
19 comments:
1 Thes. 2: 1-16
Today was a wonderful day in our group's discussion on our passage. All of the members of our group were present today, and that made it helpful because this time we could all discuss out thoughts on the passage. Steven, our team captain, brought up his thoughts on the passage and he gave us a few ideas on how to formulate out exposition. We began to discuss that the goal of the Thessalonian church was to please God and how that should still be a goal of the church today. And that's when Mr. Higley hit me on the head with his rolled up papers;) We also decided that there are basically three main points to the first sixteen verses of chapter two.
- As christians we are to lead by following Christ.
-As christians we are to "walk our talk" ( and then we came up with this catchy saying!!!) here it goes... " Your talk talks, and your walk walks, but your walk talks louder than your talk talks"
-And finally the third point would be: As christians we are to pray with out ceasing.
All of the members in our group came well prepared to discuss the passage that we have been assigned.
GALATIANS
Our facilitator wasn’t able to make it today, so we only had three. Each of us had prepared by reading Galatians three times and making observations. We focused on two main topics: The Galatians and Paul.
First, we decided that the Galatians had problems with being “fickle” and “wishy-washy.” We compared them to the seeds from Matthew 13 that grew up fast but died quickly because their roots weren’t deep enough. The Galatians had been swayed by false teachers and Paul wondered if he had been wasting his efforts (4:11).
Paul wrote parts of Galatians very abruptly and harshly. It seemed that he would brag about himself and then scold the Galatians. We determined that Paul was defending himself and the gospel, not trying to build himself up. He said he was not trying to win the approval of men, but of Christ (1:10). He was right to be upset because, though he had given the Galatians the full gospel, they had turned away from it quickly in favor of false doctrine.
Next week we will be discussing more contextual information, along with studying the character of Paul more deeply. We will also discuss the circumstances of the letter more fully.
1 Thessalonians 2
When our group met, we first re-read our passage out loud, each reading a verse in a round to make us pay more attention to the passage and better focus on it. During our session we marked down as many observations as we could find.
Some observations we found were Paul's compassion for the church (v.8), how he worked hard day and night so as not to take any from the church(v.9), his concern for their sufferings and his thankfulness for their faithfulness and endurance(v.14).
For the next session, we intend on finding some applications from the passage.
In yesterday's meeting we accomplished a lot. Each member was to come to the meeting prepared to discuss Ephesians 4:1-8 intelligently, as well as come with some outside research from commentaries. We discussed each verse individually and collaborated our thoughts and notes regarding each verse. It was really neat to see how each member of our group was able to come up with different expositional thoughts about the verses; it worked out very well:).
Some highlights to our discussion were: V. 1 - to walk worthy means believers are to live to match their position in Christ. Vs. 4-6 - these verses focus on each member of the Trinity and how unique each of their roles are, yet they are completely unified.
Since this week's meeting went so well, we are going use the same tactics for this week's meeting. We are going to do outside research on Ephesians 4:8-13.
1 Corinthians 12-14 Today all of our group was present as we further discussed our passage in detail. We first read our lengthy passage to refresh in our minds what were about to tackle during the remainder of the semester. We again discussed in detail the controversial issue of tongues and what information we had on the subject. Through our discussion we realized that we would like to know more on the subject and discussed ways of further research into the subject.
Our group discussed options for our mysterious final project, and determined in order to gain a better understanding of our passage that we would pick a different section of the passage to all focus our energy on each week.
Our group began its time by each silently reading our passage and writing anything that caught our attention on how 1 Cor. 12-14 relates to the church. Here is a summary of our discussion:
A)Themes we found repeated throughout passage were:
-Unity of the Body-Many members, one body. (v 26) we are one family suffering together and rejoicing together.
-Love-ch 13 is central chapter; love is catalyst for all gifts, love is what makes these gifts work together in a church setting.
-Tongues-speaking in tongues is pointless if there is no interpreter.
B)Areas we decided needed to be studied further:
-Greek word edify. (found in 14:4,5,12,26)
-spiritual gifts mentioned elsewhere in scripture. (Romans 12, Ephesians 4, 1 Peter 4:10-11)
C)Questions we want to answer in our presentation:
What are spiritual gifts?(Definition)
What Gift Do I have? (Identification)
Why Do we have Spiritual Gifts? (Intention)
How do I use them? (Application)
Next time we meet we plan to organize how these areas will be further investigated.
GALATIANS
Friday our group briefly reviewed what we talked about last week to refresh our memories, and for group members that were not there. One of the key verses we focused on in this discussion was Gal. 5:13which talks about how even though we have freedom through Christ we shouldn't abuse that freedom. We used MacArthur Commentary on the book of Galatains to help shape our thoughts further on this verse. Often as Christians we do things that aren't technically "wrong" or "sin" but how is it affecting those around us?
We talked about how the first four chapters set up chapters 5 and 6 and we made plans to do our own studying on chapter 5 with commentaries and other recources. We are going to come to class prepared to discuss what we have been learning in our own personal study of chapter 5.
ROMANS 12-15
This meeting our group decided to begin to work our way through the passage starting at the first part of our passage (Romans 12). The highlight of our time was discussing the place we have in the body of Christ as we read 12:3-8. We found other passages that related to the topic such as I Corinthinas 12 which helped us continue to get a hold of what is being said in this passage.
Our general plan for the future includes bringing commentaries and study Bibles to our meetings to help us understand various things (especially context) in our discussion of the passage. We especially want to better understand the context of what we are reading (historical context as well as context in Romans and purpose in Scripture) because we believe that will be key in helping us understand the passage. We plan on working with a few other strategies as well that we are currently discussing.
Philippians
On friday our group went over Phil. 1:1-11. First we had to find the most secretive coolest spot on campus (We'll never tell), so that we can focus as a group without distraction.
Tim our group Captain led the discussion. We took the greetings of Paul in Philippians and compared and contrasted it with the other epistles-Galatians, Ephesians, 1 Thes., and 1 Cor. The comparison we found was the repetitive phrase of "Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ" in each of the epistles. The Contrast was on how Paul represented himself at the beginning of each epistle. In Philippians Paul calls himself a bond servant, in Corinthians, and Ephesians an apostle by the will of God, then in Galatians an apostle not from men but Christ. Our group was trying to figure out why Paul chose to represent himself in different ways, and Philipians different from them all calling himself a bond servant. Something cool that John our facilitator pointed out about a bond servant was that it means: giving up your will, swallowing up in the will of your master. With the letter of Philippians being a letter of encouragement it was if Paul was telling the church that in all we do, we are servants for Christ. As chritians we are called to our master to do whatever He asks us to do whether that be in chains like Paul, or serving each other in the church.
We also took time to discuss vs. 9 where it says to love to abound in all knowledge and discernment. What is that? One answer could be that we come to love someone despite of the they truly are. Also exemplifying the love that Christ bestowed on us. We are working towards the love Christ had for us.
Our group discussed this passage seriously, and we learned alot just from these first few verses. the book of Philipians contains life lessons.
Our passage is the book of James. Our highlights of our discussion were based around how we know that the author of the book is in fact the half brother of Christ. We also spent some time developing the likely hood of the date it was written and where that may have fallen in conjunction with the book of Acts, which provided us with an idea for what was happening in the church that caused James to write what he did.
Our plan as of now is to start with a word study. We decided on committing to read the passage throught three times before we meet again and come up with a list of words to study so we can further grasp what James is saying.
In Fridays meeting our group did little discussion over our passage and more on trials. Some of us had some minor trials going on that we made seem so big, such as the paper due date was changed. After talking for a while we discovered that it was a good thing it was such a minor issue. We later got into discussion about some trials that may come about in the church.
We took some time to get to know eachother better and it helped a ton. It was a very successful meeting and we look forward to next friday.
1 Timothy 3
After traveling to the undergroud on Friday my group dicussed our passage. We decided that the text is split in three subtopics: qualifications for elder, qulification for deacons, and introduction of how to live the Christian life. Then we tried to figure out how these topics related to each other and connected.
We questioned what "a pillar and buttress of truth" really meant. We wanted to know what the implications for the church are to be that pillar of truth.
For futher study we are going to look at the context of the passage to see how our passage connects. We are also going to to compare elders and deacons in the Greek text.
P.S. Thank you for letting me blog late!! Sorry I forgot! :)
Romans 12-15
Our group discussed chapters 12-14 one at a time. First we read through them and then talked about what the main focus of each passage was. We found that chapter 12 was how to act in regards to other people in the church, chapter 13 was how to act in regards to authority, and chapter 14 was how to act in regards to other believers. We did not have time to go over chapter 15. One common thing that we found in all of the chapters was how we need to be loving and humble. We need to submit ourselves enough to serve others. One point that our team spent a lot of time discussing was at what point should we stop submiting to the authorities over us. We know that if it is against a direct command that GOd gave us then we need to follow the Bible first, but if it is just an example in the Bible should we go against the authority then?
Next time we meet we are going to read through then discuss chapter 15. We are also going to look at all of the chapters as a whole in the correct context. We are also going to go over all of the gramatical issues and the interpretation of the passage.
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John 1 and 17
On friday our group really made a big step in understanding the correlation between our passage and it's relation to the church. First we discussed the theme in John's writtings and agreed that he refers to the Word a lot and also the idea of "light and dark" he often mentions.
As I mentioned earlier we discussed the relation between John 1 and 17 and the Church. The unity between God the father and God the Son is the example of unity that the Church needs to follow. We also realized that John 1 is the introduction to the Word, which is what the Church's foundation must rest upon. We ended on the supposed fact that ch. 1 shows how the church looks towards God by glorifying and worshiping and ch. 17 shows how God intercedes for us. Both ch. 1 and 17 displays the relationship between Christ and the Church.
Phil 1
This last Friday, our group just read through our passages and started making observations about it.
We pointed out three main points in our passage.
Glorifying, Missional, and Church Unity.
Glorifying- found in verses 19-30, specificly 21 and 22.
We read that Glorification towards our God through the church involved Kknowledge-(learning more about who God is and our role in the church), Discernment, and being Blameless-(as believers in Christ we must be blameless in our daily life/walk).
Verses 12-13, show glorification through imprisonment for Christ
Missional- our mission is proclaimed in verses 15-18, by advancing the gospel verses 12-13
Unity- there was a lack of leadership (pual was in prison)
Each member understood the observations well, and we are going to pick it back up on out next group session.
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