Survey of the New Testament - Lesson 1

Good evening! Welcome. Glad you all are here. I want to take just a little bit of time this evening to introduce what we’re going to do, and go over some of that stuff, and then we’ll jump right into the topic at hand, okay? Let’s start with prayer.

Father, we do understand that we cannot be like you unless we understand what you are like. We understand that you have made yourself known and your will known. We thank you. I thank you for these people who are here, who want to learn your will and to learn more about you. Father, we pray that as we go through the New Testament, this will not be knowledge that accumulates, but knowledge through the power of your Spirit that transforms. We pray that our lives and our hearts and our minds will all be different as a result of looking at your Word. In Jesus’s name, amen.

I. What is the Purpose of the Biblical Training Institute?

The Biblical Training Institute exists for one basic purpose and that is to deal with issues of biblical literacy. There was a thing I read a while back, was from a pastor who spoke at a convention of some sort (I don’t know the specifics), and he said, “At the end of football stadiums, sometimes you’ll see the word ‘John,’ and then a ‘3’, and then a colon, and ‘16’. ‘What is that?’” And most of the people had no idea what it stood for. The number one guess was it was John Madden’s weight, but they didn’t know why the colon was in there. The second most common guess was that it was the location of the bathroom: tier 3, row 16, or something. Almost no one recognized it as a biblical verse. In that same setting the pastor said, “There’s a story in the Bible about a person who was swallowed by a large fish. What was that person’s name?” And with something like 90% assuredness, the people answered, “Pinocchio.” Biblical illiteracy is at an all-time high. It is one thing to be a new believer and have everything kind of new—that’s fine; but it’s something else to have been in the church for many many years and still not know these most basic things. And that’s where the Biblical Training Institute came from; it was a desire to help raise people up to a strong level of biblical literacy.

Another book that’s interesting to read along these lines is one by Kent Hughes. Kent’s the pastor of College Church in Wheaton; it’s across the street from Wheaton College. And he wrote a book called Set Apart. And it’s a series of sermons that he did, and in those sermons he statistically laid out where the church is. And the point of the statistics was to show that there is no verifiable difference in America between the church and secular society. And actually, the highest divorce rate is among Christians in the South. The lowest divorce rate is in New England, where very few people are Christians. And so the church is at kind of a significant crossroads in terms of: “What does the Bible say?” And then just as importantly: “How does that affect my life?” “How is that going to change me?” And so that’s what the Biblical Training Institute exists for; it’s to help train people, but to train them in order to be transformed.

II. Who is the Biblical Training Institute for?

Who’s the Institute for? Well, it’s for any Christian who wants a firm foundation. And again, you know where you are in this whole journey. And so it really is for anyone. A lot people have a lot of knowledge in one area, and are kind of weak in another. And one of the things that I’m trying to do is to level out and to kind of fill those ditches in your knowledge of Scripture and stuff. So we’ll be working on that as well. It also is especially for anyone moving into leadership in the church. Titus says that elders must be able to teach truth and refute error. If a person does not meet that qualification, then they shouldn’t be an elder. And the question is, where do you go to get trained to be able to teach truth and refute error? So those are some of the things that were in the back of my mind as we put this class together.

Just so you know, this is basically the Master’s level class I taught when I was in seminary, with a whole lot more theology than I was ever allowed to put into a class. So it’s going to be a Master’s level seminary class, New Testament Survey, with a lot of theology. But please understand, I’m going to assume very little on your part. I know some of you are new Christians, and you don’t want me to assume a bunch of stuff. But I’m going to kind of start from ground zero, or at least pretty close to it. So if that helps you to kind of judge where the lectures are headed, that’s where they are. I should also say the Biblical Training Institute is part of a larger effort; it’s BiblicalTraining.org. And this is a web project that I’m involved in. It’s basically making an online school for free, and it goes anywhere from information for new believers all the way up to full-blown seminary courses. And about a year and a half the core curriculum will all be done for BiblicalTraining.org. It’s important because that’s where I post everything. So the talks that I’m giving are all being recorded. They’re going to be posted there so if you miss one, you can go to it. If you’ve missed handouts or you want more copies of it, all that stuff is going to be posted on the site.

III. Three Stages

A. Head

Let me address what were going to talk about from a slightly different angle. I call it the three different stages of head, heart, and hands. I’m going to use these words quite a bit. I want to make sure you understand. A lot of what I’m going to cover is “head stuff.” It’s information about the Bible, and what I’m going to try to do is paint a very large picture. I’m going to try to give you the overall structure of the New Testament. And then when you get bits and pieces you’ll know where into the structure those little pieces fit. Lots of times we know a verse here or paragraph here, but I want to make sure you have a full appreciation for the New Testament as a whole. So we’re going to do big picture stuff, and then bits and pieces you’ll know where they fit in overall, okay?

B. Heart

But I’m also going to be talking about what I call “heart stuff,” and when I start talking about “heart,” I’m talking about theology because what I want to do is I don’t want the information to sit. I want you to start to process it, and the best way to process it is to think through theologically what all this information does. There’s a two-page statement of faith that goes with the Biblical Training Institute and it’s my guide. I can’t cover everything in the New Testament. So I had to have some guide that would help me pick…okay, I want to talk about this story in Mark but I’m not going to talk about this story in Mark. I use the statement of faith as that guide, because what I want to make sure is that when we are done with the New Testament, the last class is to go through the statement of faith. And you should know every single thing in the statement of faith; you should know the context of the statements, the biblical passages behind them, some of the controversy surrounding them. But I’ve used that as my primary grid to decide what parts of the New Testament we’re going to cover. I want to use theology to tie stuff together and to help you process things. I want you to understand how, when Paul talks about that we are justified by faith, and James says we are justified by works, that you know how those things go together. So, the theology is part of the process of processing the information.

C. Hands

Thirdly, when I talk about “hands,” I’m just talking about doing something with this, and the word I’m starting to use more and more now is the whole word of “transformation.” This is all training for transformation. The Biblical Training Institute exists to help train you and to train me in the process of learning the information, learning the theology, but then doing something with it; our lives being changed, being transformed. If you’re familiar with these phrases, I’m going to get into what’s called “spiritual formation” or “the spiritual disciplines.” These are just some of the ways in which we can take what the Bible says and do something with it on a practical level.

We also are going to try something different this year, and that is, on Sunday, we’re going to have a Sunday school class. And the Sunday school class is a time for you all to get together and reflect on what we learned the preceding Wednesday. Now you don’t have to go to it if you don’t want to; but the problem was, you can’t really, in a class this size, you can’t really discuss things. And since my ultimate goal is transformation, I don’t want this just to be an accumulation of information. So the question was how can we get people to work through the issues that I’m raising in class; and a Sunday school class is the best way I know how to do it. Now if you can’t do it, that’s fine. Perhaps you may want to get with your friends and do it some other time. But there are application questions in your notes. And what we’re going to do in the Sunday morning class, is to work through those questions just to give you all a chance to say, “Mounce is off his rocker; he doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” or, “I never thought about that; I wonder how that’s going to affect how I spend my money.” You know, those kinds of discussions, that’s where ultimately the transformation’s going to happen; as you wrestle with it, as you try to apply it, and as you talk back and forth about issues. So that’s kind of how it’s all laid out. We’ll talk about that class a little later.

IV. Significance of the Logo

A couple of the last quick things on introduction. That’s our cool logo. It’s a very, very important logo. This is one of those logos that actually mean something. We want to be oaks of righteousness, right? (A verse in Isaiah.) And you have to have roots to become a tree. And that is the study; that is the learning; that is the grappling with the theology; that is the building of the foundation of our Christian walk in terms of what we understand. But we also want to produce leaves. We want to grow. And that ultimately is the purpose of a tree, right? The purpose of a tree is not to develop roots, it’s to grow and develop foliage and fruit and whatever the tree’s designed to do. You can’t have roots without a tree. You can’t have a tree without roots. It’s as simple as that. So that’s a very important logo. I want us to go deep. I want us to learn. I want us to wrestle with the theology. I want us to come to an understanding, but the only reason we’re doing that is so that we can grow as Christians and be changed by the power of God’s Word through the work of God’s Spirit. So that’s what’s going on.

V. General Class Information

It’s an hour and a half class. I’ll go about halfway through and then break. And then we’ll come back and we’ll finish it out. So that’s basically how the class is broken down. Any comments or questions or things you don’t understand?

The whole transformation thing is the real trick, because if you’re like me, you were trained in school to accumulate knowledge, period. And it’s really hard to get out of that trap. I really, really don’t want that to happen. So, the ladies here, they all live together, they’ve got a built-in way of processing this stuff. They talk to each other; they can mull stuff over. Those of us who don’t live together, it’s a little different. But we have to have some time to mull this stuff over. “Do we agree? Do we disagree? Do we understand?” And then, “So what? Does it really affect my life?” And we’ll see how we can do that this year.