So my buddy Chris and I get together once a week to study the Bible. Chris is someone rediscovering faith and looking to move deeper into what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. So studying with him has been really fun and exciting.
We've been studying through the book of Philippians, using this letter as a pattern to help him know how to study other Biblical letters on his own. Our first task (which has taken over a month) was to read through the book together and identify information concerning the author, recipient, purpose, and situation. On Tuesday, after taking a week off, we got together and finally finished that first read through. After we finished I asked Chris to give me a summery of what we suppose to be the truth regarding who wrote it, why he wrote it, who the audience was, why they needed to hear this message, etc. Surprisingly Chris rattled off a pretty thorough rundown of the book and everything we'd talked about even five weeks back. After he rattled it off I opened up my really dry, boring, and very scholarly Word Biblical Commentary and read the theologians eight reasons for the writing of this book and low and behold they matched Chris' evaluation almost to a word! It was pretty cool. And I've got to make a point to say that I didn't really lead the study with him except to give him some tools that aid in understanding the type of literature he was studying. I also would give my perspective on things that we were reading, but in general this was Chris reading the Scripture, using a few simple tools, and thinking purposefully and he was able to understand and interpret Scripture on a basic scholarly level.
While I understand that there are certain things that we need commentaries and original language for, but the Bible...well, it's just really amazing. Well done Chris and well done Jesus.