Jun 24, 2013
A Helping Hand for your Bible study
by Andrew Camenga
Every Sabbath, Seventh Day Baptists around the world gather in Bible Study groups (frequently called Sabbath School) and explore what the Bible teaches. Many of the classes for adults choose to use the passage chosen by the Helping Hand in Bible Study—available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese thanks to the dedicated labor of many people—because it provides a valuable set of resources to help Bible students prepare for their time together in unhindered studied and open discussion of Scripture.
In addition to answering the question, “What should we study this week?” the Helping Hand provides:
Daily Bible Meditations: Each week’s lesson starts with the Daily Bible Meditations. These passages are chosen to be short enough to read relatively quickly and will cover the primary and background scriptures for the week’s lesson. Each passage is paired with a paragraph or two of text that encourages you to ponder on the meaning of the text for life.
Heart of the Lesson: God intends for Scripture to change us and to challenge the incorrect ways we look at the world. The Heart of the Lesson attempts to tie an observation about life, a question about that observation, and Scripture together in a faithful manner. While your class may choose to take another lesson from the text, the Heart of the Lesson provides a challenge from the Bible.
Key Verse: The key verse is chosen to represent the lesson focus.
Questions for Studying the Text: We write these questions to help you think about the text during the week. They try to cover the range of learning represented by the cognitive domain of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Some questions will have straightforward one- and two-word answers. Other questions will require bringing significant knowledge of the whole Bible to the answer. Still other questions will look to applying the text to our daily walk. Some of the questions may not even have an answer.
Understanding and Living: Explaining the context, historical background, and focus of the text is one purpose of this section. Another purpose is to encourage you to apply the Scripture to your life right now.
Hints for Teaching the Class: We provide lesson aims that touch on facts you should know, ideas you should understand, and behaviors or feelings that may result from the lesson. From time to time, we also provide teachers with interesting, quirky, and helpful methods for approaching the lesson material. This section does not describe how to teach the class; however, we hope that it will provide thought starters for teachers.
Looking Forward/Looking Back: Each lesson is connected with others during a quarter. This one- or two-sentence summary helps you connect with what is coming in the next lesson or remember all the lessons in a unit.
Large Print Helping Hand
The Helping Hand in Bible Study is available in a large-print format for churches in the United States and Canada that subscribe to the regular edition of the Helping Hand. The large-print edition of the magazine is available as a PDF and maintains both the layout and page numbering of the print edition. For more information, contact the Board of Christian Education office.
E-Book (Kindle Version)
The Helping Hand in Bible Study is available for purchase from Amazon.com. This e-book includes the full text of the print version and provides the text of Scripture for the Daily Bible Meditations. You can find out more through this link: http://7db.info/hh-kindle