Holly Hills' Teaching Topics & Electives

Good morning. Good to see you all here this morning. We are proceeding through our five-part series. We're number four here moving on to teaching topics and electives. As we go through this, a part of what we're doing is presenting what does scripture say about these topics. Along with that, we're talking about here's how things are done at Holly Hills. It's sort of in the in-house discussion and presentation.

And so if you're here visiting or here for a short period of time, I hope you'll understand that and bear with us. Now, I want to begin this by presenting, this is, yes, a picture of Hal Malloy, those of you who are familiar. And this is, well, anyway, this is a great moment. I present it because nine years and two months ago I sat down with Hal and we had a discussion. Well, I'm getting off track.

I'll get back to it later. At any rate, here you have, and this is on page one of your handout there, this poetic pattern for Ephesians 4, 11 through 13. And it's taking one of the passages that Wayne read for us here and kind of presenting it in the poetic form that the Apostle Paul seems to have put this passage in.

The first part, and he gave some as, and then he has this phrase some as, and apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and then the last one, pastors and teachers. So he gives basically five gifts. Now, what we have pointed out before is essentially Christ gave these gifts, not just as gifts to these people who are given these gifts, but he gave these gifted people to the church. These people are actually gifts to the church body from the Lord himself. It says he gave, and looking at the prior context, this is about Christ giving these gifted people as gifts to the church body. And why did he do that? What's the purpose? For the equipping of the saints for work of service.

And one of the things you'll note here, we typically will use in our handouts and the presentations, the New American Standard Translation. What I've done is to tweak it a little bit to reflect, for the most part, definite articles or the lack of them. That is, the use of the equivalent and the original language, the. So, for example, I have the equipping of the saints because the original language reflects that.

But rather than the work of the service, it's actually work of service. The building up of the body of, and this is something in Ephesians that is often overlooked, of the Christ. The Christ. Ephesians has 23 times the Christ, and this is one of them.

Until we all attain, and so here's something that's key, we'll be taking a look at it here shortly. That this is where we're headed, this is where we're aiming for. The until is where we're headed. It's not where we're at, it's where we're going. It's the direction towards which we're growing. Until we all attain to what?

To the unity of the faith, the knowledge of the Son of the God. To a mature man, to measure of stature, which belongs to the fullness of the Christ. The first point we have here, and this comes out of verse 11, is the Apostles and Prophets were a foundation.

This comes out of Ephesians 2.20, just two chapters before.

They were a foundation, some of whom authored the Word of God, that is, they wrote books in the New Testament. Why do I say some of? Not all of the Apostles were assigned to write a book of the New Testament, but some of them were, and obviously some more than others. But that is a part of the starting work of the foundational work of the apostles and prophets.

Secondly, evangelists tell the gospel of salvation they did in New Testament times, and that is also done now. Tell the gospel of salvation as revealed in the Word of God. And by the way, I think that when we tend to think of evangelists, we're oftentimes thinking of mass, type ministries. In reality, that's only a fairly recent phenomenon throughout church history. But I think there may be another value to the evangelist besides going out and directly telling people the gospel, although that's a wonderful thing and that's exactly what God has in mind, but also telling us how to convey the gospel. That is, I think, an overlooked role of the evangelist, telling us how to convey the gospel to others.

Pastors, as the church's shepherds, are to be able to teach. That is a part of actually a fairly long list of job description items for pastors. Pastors is the Latin term for shepherds. So we just oftentimes just go to the term shepherds. That's the root idea. They are to be able to teach. What is teaching is to explain and to convey, to get the message across regarding the Word of God. And finally, the teachers are indeed to teach the Word of God, to convey. The pastors have that as an aspect of their role. For teachers, that is their role. Okay, now we have in verse 12 the equipping and building up.

Equipping is to give the tools that are necessary for those in the church to do the work of serving others in the body of Christ. You see, I'm not in the ministry. You are. Okay? You are. That's what God really intends here. It's equipping the body of Christ to do the work of the ministry. I'm not in the ministry. You are. I'm an equipper, right? Equipping gives us all, and I think you say, what's equipping for?

It gives us spiritual capabilities, spiritual tools, if you will. The building up of the body of Christ, body building, is supplying truth and understanding and insight into the Word of God. The Word of God is the key instrument for equipping the body of Christ. It's not just, here it is, we could all just try to memorize it, but what does it mean? What's the significance of it? How should I understand it? That's the key. It's the insight.

So that we have a church body that has structure and function and capacity for mutual service, for service between one another. In verse 13, It describes what we are growing towards. Actually, I didn't get into verse 14. That describes what we're growing away from. But verse 13 is what we want to focus on here this morning, is what are we growing towards.

And he starts off with the unity of the faith. Now, the faith is the whole set of the apostles' teachings. It first shows up in the early chapters of Acts. That term, the faith, gets continually woven into the rest of the New Testament all the way to the book of Revelation. The faith. The word pairs, the faith, the truth, the doctrine, the gospel, appear about 200 times in the whole New Testament.

I would suggest to you that that probably means it's important, right? One reason for the emphasis in this particular passage on the unity of the faith is that the truth is singular. There are a number of folks who go around with the idea that, well, this person's got that idea, and this person thinks the Bible says this, and we've got this group over here that says that, and who knows, all those things may have a little bit of truth to them. No. The Bible describes consistently the truth as singular.

God intended one meaning for the Word of God. And one reason why that's so is Christ is himself the personification of the truth. He is the person who claimed, I am the truth. Very simply, he said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. What did he mean by that? Let me expand on it a little. I, Jesus said, I, in contradistinction to anyone else, being in fact God, am the singular truth, the singular way, the singular truth, and the singular life.

That's the full expression of what he had just said in John 14.6.

The other thing as we look at Ephesians 4.13 is that we are knowing and growing into Christ.

You see, knowing isn't just knowing a lot of stuff. In fact, I think that's one hazard to some of the Bible colleges and seminaries and things of that sort. It isn't just getting the right answer on the test and getting a nice grade back. It's not just what you know in order to get a good grade and to pass the test and to get degrees and go through classes. It's what you know so that you can grow in it. It's what you know so you can grow in it. And all of that is centered around Christ. All of it. It's all centered around Christ.

Now, you have on page one a slide that looks like this. Before anybody runs screaming out of the room, give me a minute, okay? This is a little complex looking. Let me see if I can explain myself and simplify it. We're switching now to 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17.

And here it is in a kind of a poetic pattern. And it goes like this. All scripture is, now at the time Paul wrote this, there was certainly the Old Testament in place. It had been in place for over four centuries and accepted as scripture. The New Testament was in the process of being written. By the time Paul wrote this, this was chronologically probably his last letter. So he had written with this letter the last of all the letters that would be included in the New Testament. A number of other New Testament books had also been written, probably the earliest of which was James. So the New Testament was in the process of being written. The Old Testament was already completed. So that's what he meant by all scripture, all the Old Testament, all the New Testament, either that which is completed now or will be completed.

It is inspired by God. In the original language, that's one word. It means God breathed. God, when he had these things written, breathed them out onto the page, if you will. These are from God. It's not just like God sort of inspired some writers and they were sort of inspirational in what they wrote. God breathed it out through these authors of scripture. Peter even puts it this way, the Holy Spirit carried these authors along. The next one. All scriptures inspired by God for entertainment, for its literary value, For the fact that it might be sort of personally inspiring? No. It has spiritual value. There is profitability in it. Spiritual profitability. It has spiritual value. For what purpose? He gives four of them.

For teaching. That's the explaining and conveying. Explaining it and getting the message across. Talking about it so that people understand it. Hopefully, as teaching takes place, we have a series of aha moments. Isn't that the way it should be? We go, ah, now I understand. Now I see. That's what that's talking about. That's what teaching should do, is it should present to you a number of aha moments. Hopefully, when I'm done teaching, you aren't just completely puzzled, right? The next one, and this I think is important to look at, reproof and correction. This is a pair.

The first one, reproof, is identifying what isn't true. One of the qualifications for an elder out of 1 Timothy, chapter 1, verse 9, is that an elder has to be able to say, that's false and this is true. There is a place of identifying what isn't true. That's step one. Step two is pointing out what is true. For reproof and for correction, they're actually not just incidentally connected, but deliberately connected. The reproof said that's false, but here's how you get back on the path to what's true. See that? See the distinction? I'll give you an example. If the terrain looks like this, you're probably not in downtown Denver, okay? You're probably not in downtown Denver.

But let's talk about how you have to get there, right? That's the correction. The reproof is saying, that's not quite right. But here's where we have to go to get to what's right. See the difference there? So those two words go together. They're the two sides of one coin, if you will. The next one, the last of the, here's the reasons for why it's profitable, is for training in righteousness.

This is actually a word that means child training. Training up towards Christ's righteous character. That's our position. That is the position that we have in Christ. training up towards Christ's righteous character. You see, as believers, we're already in Christ and Christ is in us. In our eternal position, we already have Christ's character, don't we? We have been justified. That's called declared righteous. Christ is our righteousness.

So there's no question of trying to get some righteousness, but it's being trained up in the position that we already have. You see, as Christians, we're born with spiritual amnesia. We don't know who we are. So we have to learn that, don't we? And that's one of the reasons why we have teaching.

Finally, so that the man of God may be adequate. That's sufficient up to the task. Anybody here enjoy taking on something for which they're totally inadequate? Not so much, right? Not usually. The Word of God is intended to make us spiritually adequate and sufficient. We have that sufficiency in who we are in Christ and who he is in us. But we need to catch up to it by understanding and insight. That's why it's there. Equipped for every good work. Having the tools for each godly task. Having those tools is important, isn't it? Every one of us in the various things that we've done in life, we'd like to have the proper tools. I'll give you a little illustration.

In spring of 1859, my great-great-grandfather came through Denver. Very interestingly, someone was painting Denver at that time. Here's the picture. This is what Denver looked like, and I was looking through his diary, and it very much fits this description right here. The way he described Denver is 25 canvas roof houses, one Hispanic woman, and a bunch of teepees. So this is it. So he came through Denver.

Well, the night that he came through, one of the things he wrote in his diary, he says, this place is lawless. There's no lawman here. This is a crazy place. That night, somebody shot an army captain. Well, my great-great-grandfather was a medical doctor. He happened to be just passing through, the only doctor in town. And so they said, is there a doctor around? And he said, I'm it. And they brought this captain to him that had been shot.

But what was he lacking? Tools. So the doctor, my great-great-grandfather, held the army captain in his arms while he died. He didn't have the tools. He lacked the tools. Oh, by the way, after that, he went on to Golden City, as they used to call it in those days. Having the tools is important, and that's one of the reasons why we gather here. It's one of the reasons why we have electives and things of that sort. Very important.

Biblical teaching is profitable for recognition of error and correction, reproof and correction, right? Training up in righteousness, Christ's righteousness. making us adequate for the work and service that God has called us to, without which we won't be adequate, frankly. Equipping is preparation for biblical ministry, the ministry that you are all in. It's a way of beholding the Lord through His Word so as to be transformed into the image of Christ, a work of the Spirit. I have a few verses there on one slide.

Let me go quickly through them because I think they're Helpful and insightful, 2 Corinthians 3.18. But we all, with unveiled face, this is in contrast to Moses in the prior verses, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, beholding the Lord Jesus Christ through his word, are being transformed into the same image, into the image of the Lord, from glory to glory. That's growth. It is a work of the Holy Spirit, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.

First Peter 2.2 says, like newborn babes, long for the pure milk of the word. And by the way, that word long is an imperative. What does that mean? It's something that you are called upon to do. You have to actually take an action. Long for the pure milk of the word so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation. Are you saved? Yeah. But there's a growth in that salvation. How are you going to grow?

The word. The word of God. Peter wrote two letters that we have. His second one ends with this verse, 2 Peter 3.18, but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

It's the same word grow in the original language as 1 Peter 2.2, but this time grow is the imperative. How about that? You must take action to grow. How are you going to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ? He already answered that. The Word of God. See that? Boy, scripture is just amazingly consistent. I'm impressed. Okay. Biblical teaching explains.

Biblical teaching can also be seen as explaining what has happened to everything and everybody. How did we get here? Why are things the way they are? How is it that I can possibly be saved? What has happened to everything and everybody? Things physical, things spiritual. What is happening?

And that's what we're looking at now. What's God doing in our lives right now? Even scripture talks actually quite a bit about this. Why is God allowing the things in my life that he is allowing? One of the things I said several weeks ago, I think is still true, and I'll present it again. We need what is happening to us. It's there on purpose. It's there on purpose.

Scripture explains what will happen to everything and everybody. See, Scripture gives us a complete time perspective, doesn't it? How did we get here? How did things get to be the way they are? What's God doing right now? How come this is the way it is? And then what's going to happen in the future? How's this all going to turn out? Should I chew my nails and get all nervous? Can I trust God because He already knows what's going to happen?

And finally, alongside those time-based insights, biblical teaching explains what never has and never will change. And that's really good news. Isn't it good that something isn't going to change? The Lord Himself will not change, and His love and His grace towards us will never change.

Now, I'm going to talk about the way things are done here at Holly Hills. Teaching in the main service is mostly through Bible books, though we will from time to time do a topical study, as we're doing right now. We have one more week. We usually proceed through Bible books. That's our usual pattern. Each one chosen by the elders at times from input from the church body. So by the way, feel free to provide input, right?

In the last nine years, here are the Bible books that we've specifically gone through. We went through the Book of Revelation, Philippians, Ephesians and Colossians, Isaiah, Galatians, Genesis, and 1st and 2nd Corinthians, which we completed about a month ago. Now, the picture of how that I had there.

So would you like to talk about electives now? Yes, we would, Hal. What happened is Hal and I sat down and talked nine years and two months ago. And I said, Hal, after looking at things here, I think we need to start some electives. There's more than just one class before the main service, and maybe even classes at other times, too. And so he was thinking, OK, maybe next year sometime. I said, no, next month. Yes, next month. OK, all right. So quickly, we go about setting up these electives. So that's how that got started, nine years and two months ago.

Teaching the electives, however, is not just something we do. Even though it may have sounded like Hal and I were rushed at it, we actually put quite a bit of thought into it. Many of the electives, usually three at a time, are offered, however, will have at least one Bible book. That was one of the principles we set in place. So now there's a group going through Galatians. At times, we've had two. We had, for example, all last year, two Bible books offered at once.

If possible, electives will have more than one teacher in order to provide for more opportunities for people to teach and for training. We've had people even come from out of state, move here to be a part of this, and then go somewhere else to leave either in state or out of state, but actually people trained here at Holly Hills. A few have even gotten degrees. We offer that as an incidental. The electives are scheduled by the quarter, rarely more than a year long. I think we've had one that's more than a year long, but typically A year is our usual limit. Electives are intended to allow class interaction. You may be wondering why I have two different pictures of the McBrides. Well, if Jack and Winnie are turning blue, then I know they're turning blue, right?

Okay. I have questions and comments and things like that. And what's really neat is now that the media folks have got it set up so in the classes we can actually ask questions and hear them when they're recorded. So that's a really good thing. And the teacher has an idea of what's being understood. If somebody has a question or a comment, opportunity to bring that up.

This context here, as good as it is, doesn't offer much opportunity for interaction. If I see a puzzled look on Roger's face, I know I've done something wrong. But typically, unless there's something fairly intense, I usually don't know what the interaction is communicating to me. One of the other things we said is at least one elective would be intended to be suited to believers who are looking for something more basic.

One of the terms we would use is it's an on-ramp. It's possible for us at Holly Hills here to be looked upon as, boy, how do I possibly get onto this freeway? We've even had instances where, you know, I think Craig Kays was telling me one time he brought a friend of his from work to Holly Hills, and the guy walked out and said, what on earth was that? You know?

So we try to have electives that would be more amenable to someone who's looking for something more basic, more of an on-ramp class, at least one. Electives are chosen based on the interest expressed. So again, your input's valuable. It helps guide what we determine and decide to do. And the perceived need in the church.

We say, well, this is an area where I'm getting a lot of questions. Matter of fact, where we're having this particular year is all year a Q&A class. Why? We have a lot of miscellaneous questions, right? Though we never seem to run out of topics and books, Hal and I actually made a list that if you took the whole series, it would take you eight years to complete those.

Well, now it's been nine, and we've actually repeated, and are about to do it again, repeated classes sometimes two and three times. Major Bible themes is one that, to my recollection, has been taught twice. We're going to repeat that again this next year. We've done that with some others as well. Great Doctrines of Salvation is one that we've offered more than once.

So repetition can make some sense as a refresher. People might have taken another elective and therefore missed it, so this gives them a chance to take it for the first time. Or perhaps somebody has come to Holly Hills since we first offered it, so there are several good reasons for us to offer an elective again, even though we've had it. Now, material is often generated at Holly Hills.

Not always, but many cases, I would say almost most cases, that we develop our own material. Some advantages to that, the teacher is more likely to know and own the material if they've written it, right? There's built-in doctrinal review before teaching it. You aren't just grabbing something, but you're looking at it and thinking about it. Thirdly, we also steer clear of many copyright issues, not all of them. In some cases, we encounter some more. But obviously, if we're writing the material, we're not stumbling over somebody else's copyright.

So that can have some advantages. Now, we say old lessons never die, but old computers do, right? Thanks to the great and faithful work of the support of our media workers in various capacities, Nearly all the lessons at Holly Hills are recorded and handouts for those lessons are posted on the church website. And it's very interesting. We have people here at Holly Hills who remark about that. By the way, we also have people who listen very faithfully to everything that's recorded and presented on our church website and they don't even live anywhere close to here. Not too many months ago we had a lady come visit from Spokane. She flew to Denver to come and visit us because she listens to us all the time. And she wanted to come meet us. It turns out that she went to church with me, oh, that was 50 years ago. But we have people actually all over the world who download these messages and listen to them. And so it's a ministry not only for the people here, although that's certainly the case, but for people on a number of different continents.

We made sure that Hassan got sent home with a number of the lessons and recordings, too. On the church website, I would point you to one particular one, Messages and Audios, the place to go get that if you haven't looked at that. And up here, there is, at the top, Recent Lessons, Current Series. And by the way, we currently have on the website almost 50 teaching series on different Bible books and topics and things of that sort.

So there's a great deal of material. And then archived series. And one of the things I would point out is that some people, they look at the list and they say, well, that's pretty short. Yeah, but there's several pages that you have to make sure that you select through. So just bring that to your attention.

So a person can keep current in a series if, for example, you have to be away or someone is ill. Or you can take the entire series and listen to it. What's interesting is there are some people who listen to all the electives, even though they only attend one. Or they actually attend one and listen to another one.

So that's a fairly common advantage here. We also have Bible studies midweek, mostly in homes, the one exception being the men's study that meets here. Bible studies that extend throughout the geographical area of the greater Denver area and on different topics. We try to keep those posted on the inside upper right in your bulletin. Occasionally we still have to put in TBA because we don't have all the information, but you can check on that.

So that's why I showed the picture of Hal. Hal and I sat down and we laid out these electives and talked about, here, what are we going to do with this? Where are we going to take this? And one of the other things that I would point out is when we're teaching, we do teach the unity of the faith and take it seriously.

If I have a subject about which I have some question. Are we all on the same page here? I will withhold teaching on it until I am certain that we're on the same page. I don't want to teach something that's going to be confusing to anyone. So I think that's one thing to examine. If something is being taught, I want it to be something that all the elders are consistently in agreement with, no exceptions.

And I think that also goes to show that it is possible to say the same thing. It is possible to have complete and total agreement. We don't have to have a unity in spite of the fact that we disagree. But in fact, a unity in which we do agree, the unity of the faith. That's where we're headed. It's the faith that's the teaching of the apostles. So the only question is, what did they teach? Right?

Now, we're moving on next time to missionaries and our approach to missions. That'll include, you know, what are some of the things that we've done lately in missions, including bringing Hassan here, and what's the big picture with that? It even has to do with Ruth Smith and the things that she is doing more recently. And even the recent visit with Eliska from the Czech Republic was one that we're talking about in terms of missionary activity.

All right, let's pray. Lord, we thank you that as we look at the teaching here at Holly Hills that we have the sound guidance of your word. And we thank you that you indeed have a singular truth to get across to each of us. And you have multiple consistent purposes in our gathering around your word, personally, in smaller groups, in electives, and even as we gather here together. We thank you for that. Thank you for the consistency that is there because you are a God of consistency, never changing. And we give you thanks and we give you praise in Jesus name. Amen.