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The Teacher and the Sunday School
I
AM glad that I am to talk to you up
on a subject so vital in the life of the
church and of the nation. I may be
pardoned for saying in the outset that
I do not believe that a more important
subject can possibly be considered by
you at this season of your convention.
I believe that of all the classes of work
ers in the Kingdom of God, the Sun-
clay school teacher is the least prepared, and 1 be
lieve that the shabbiest and poorest work that is
done anywhere in the realm of Christianity is done
in the teaching of the Sunday school lesson. But
I do not say this with any intention of being harsh
or critical of our Sunday school teachers or of
their faithful work. They are not to be blamed so
.much for their lack of preparation, for I be
lieve that their lack of preparation grows out of
the fact that they do not realize the value of that
preparation, and it is our fault for not showing
them their need.
As I travel over this country I find the fewest
number imaginable, for the number that are teach
ing, that have any real grasp of the great truth of
the Bible. You can easily see when you walk into
a Sunday school, without having to be told, whether
or not the teachers of that school are such teachers
as have been given a real comprehensive grasp up
on the Bible.
When you go into a Sunday school and see a
teacher standing before his class with a quarterly in
his hand teaching the lesson, you can put it down
that that teacher does not know his Bible and ought
not to be teaching it, and if I were a Sunday school
superintendent I would not have such a teacher in
my school. I would no more allow a teacher to
stand before a class and teach the lesson from a
lesson help than I would allow a minister to stand
up before me Sunday and read somebody else’s
sermon. What we need to do is to inspire the
great army of men and women who are engaged in
the work of teaching in our Sunday schools with
more ambition to know the Word of God.
THE TEACHER’S PROBLEM.
But when we are doing this we shall find ourselves
confronted by a solid wall of problems which, if
we are not careful, will discourage us. For exam
ple, we find a great many people who say: “Yes,
I know I ought to be trained to teach, and I would
if I were able to go to some Bible training school.
I Should be only too glad to be able to do it.”
Then there are others who say: “I should be glad
to be trained to teach if I had the library that you
ministers and Bible teachers have, but I have not
access to such a library, nor have I the time, if
I had the library, to take up such a work of prep
aration.”
I am in fullest sympathy with such a one. I
realize how such things are, and I do not come to
you with any idealistic, theoretical suggestions for
•preparation, but I trust that I bring some practical
suggestions to you busy teachers who have not the
time to go to the training institute and who have
not the money to buy a large library, and
who would not have the time to study if you had
the library. I want, if I can, to get close to you
busy men and women and show you that it is possi
ble for you to master your Bible.
This is a day of training. Every department of
life today is engaged in some kind of training.
When I was in Chicago not long ago a friend said
to me,* pointing to a large building, “That is the
college for book agents.”
“What do you mean?” said I.
“I mean that it is a college where book agents
are trained to sell books. They have something like
fifteen hundred students.”
Our great insurance companies have schools of
training for the training of insurance agents.
Great department stores are having schools for the
training of clerks. I went into one of them last
summer in New York. That firm has a school in
which every one who is to clerk in their house has
Lecture by T)r.
Broughton before the State Sunday School Conbention, Athens, Ga., April 22, 1908
The Golden Age for May 7, 1908.
to remain a sufficient length of time to become
acquainted with the methods that that firm uses in
conducting its business.
Ard it is so in every department of life, until we
ecme to the Sunday school; and there we go around
picking up teachers without any regard to their
qualifications, to their spirituality, to their grasp
of the Word of God, or their ability to impart the
same.
The question that I want to bring to you is one
of the method of Bible study. I believe in method.
God works upon a method. He had a method when
he created this world. He had a method when he
created man. And if you will follow the Word of
God you will see that God has always operated in
everything according to method. The Word of God
is a book of method, and there must be method in
its study.
But I do not mean to say that you are to have
a method and follow that one method all the way
through and all your life long. No man can do that
to advantage, but there must be a definite meth
od in all Bible study, and that method must be
followed in order to get results.
I am going to give you some of my methods of
Bible study. I follow one for a while and then an
other and then another, but I try to always keep
a method in my mind.
To start with, there is the method of studying the
Bible as a whole. Every teacher ought to have a
comprehensive grasp of the Bible as a whole. First,
it is necessary to know the origin of the Bible —
how we got it; how few of our teachers do know how
we got our Bible. Then we need to know not only
its origin but we need to understand something of
the contents of this great book as a whole —of the
great doctrines of the Bible —how they fit in, how
they are each related to the other, what they are
intended for and how we can apply them to the
life that we live today. Get a conception of your
Bible as a whole from Genesis to Revelation. As
you undertake the study of the Bible as a whole,
one of the first things that is going to impress you
is this, that God, in giving this book to the world,
had in His mind a definite, fixed plan, and that He
worked upon this plan from the beginning until the
'end. No man is fit to teach a Sunday school class
who has not seen something of the plan of God
in the Bible.
GOD A PLAN-WORKER.
The Bible is a revelation of God as a plan work
er, and God reveals Himself in the Bible in the
method of its construction. Think, for example of
this. The first sentence in the Bible announces
God. The last sentence announces man. Here we
have God at the beginning and man at the end,
and all the way from the first verse of Genesis to
the last verse of Revelation is God’s treatment of
man. Take your Bible and divide it into two parts
exactly and where do you find yourself? If you will
do that you will see that the exact middle of the
Bible is at the Sth verse of the 118th Psalm, and
what do you find there? You find, just in the middle
of the Book, both God and man.
Take another thought revealing the plan of God.
In the Old Testament the first question asked is a
question asked by God, and He is speaking to man.
What is the question: “Where art thou?” The
first question asked in the New Testament is a
question asked by man concerning God: “Where
is he?” That is perfectly natural. The Bible starts
out with God searching for man, and the New Tes
tament starts out representing man searching for
God through Jesus Christ.
Take another thing. The last verse in the Old
Testament is a curse. The last verse in the New
Testament is a blessing. That is perfectly natural.
The Old Testament tells of the law, and the end of
the law is death. The New Testament deals with
grace and the end of grace is a blessing.
Take another fact revealing this plan of God.
I can only jump here and there. The first miracle
that we find recorded in the Old Testament is the
miracle performed by Moses —that of turning water
into blood, significant of the curse of the law. The
first miracle that we find in the New Testament is
Christ turning water into wine—wine significant of
life, the vigor and enthusiasm of life. The law
meant death. The turning of the water into blood,
so that there was no life-giving water to drink, was
significant of this. The gospel meant life and the
turning of the water into wine was significant of
that.
Take one other instance. If you will come with
me to a study of the life of Moses you will be
impressed with this fact, that Moses never saw the
promised land. Now, many Bible students will tell
you that the reason Moses did not see the promised
land was because he disobeyed the Lord in smiting
the rock when he should have spoken to it. In part
that is true, but there is a deeper significance.
Moses could not see the promised land. He could
not be privileged to take the children of Israel into
the promised land. Moses stood as a type of law.
The travel of the children of Israel to the promised
land was typical of the travel of the people of God
from law into grace. Moses, representing the law
could not deliver the children of Israel into' the
promised land because it was not the province of
the law to save. The law was only the school
master. Moses, therefore, as a type of the law,
carried the children of Israel as far as he could, as
far as the law could carry them, and then his work
was at an end.
Joshua, whose name meant Savior, came as a
type of the Lord Himself—as a type of the Gospel
of Christ —and it remained.for him as the. type of
grace to take the children of Israel at the point
where the law failed and deliver them into the
promised land of Canaan. Thus we have the plan
of God for law and grace typified in these two char
acters.
And so, my brethren, when you come to study
your Bible as a whole, when you come to read it
from Genesis to Revelation as you would read any
other great book, paying earnest attention to* these
details, you will become more and more saturated
with the realization of the bigness and the wonder
fulness of the plan of God that runs from Genesis
to Revelation. You will see that each thought in
the Bible is as a link in a chain, each link fitting'
in perfectly with the other links, and everything sig
nificant of the great plan of God.
Now, when our teachers get this conception of
this great book, then we are going to have an awak
ening in interest in studying the book.
BIBLE CHARACTER STUDY.
But I must give you another method. Take that
of studying the Bible by characters. Every teacher
should practice this method a great deal. Take the
leading characters, beginning at the beginning.
Take the prominent characters as they stand out,
and study the history connected with each char
acter, and when you have collected and gotten to
gether all the \istory of the character, study it
to see wherein it can apply to the problems of pres
ent day life.
Some time ago I entered upon such a study and it
was one of the most helpful forms of study that
I ever followed. I took the study of the Bible by
characters, first, the characters of women. I select
ed four classes of women. First, I took mothers,
•then wives, then love-makers, then I took just a
general medley. Os the mothers I took Eve and
Sarah and Hannah; of the love-makers, I took
Ruth, Rebecca, Rachel and Abigail. Os the
wives I took Enoch’s wife, a woman of whom very
little is said. The only thing said about her is
what is said about her husband. You have to study
Enoch’s life to find about hers, and I believe that
her character is revealed in the fact that it is stated,
“And all the days of Enoch were three hundred
sixty and five years, and Enoch walked with God.”
It would be a mighty hard thing for a man to walk
with God for that length of time with a quarrel-
