Preparing the Lesson
Some teachers think that preparing the lesson is merely the loading of
a cannon with powder, that it may go off with a big bang in the
presence of admiring scholars. And the more powder, the bigger bang.
So they load up with scintillating similes, and pretty parables, and
striking stories.
Other teachers have set up some historical or theological or ethical
target-board off at a distance from their class, and load their cannon
with ball, that their scholars may see how accurate is their aim and
how fairly they can hit the bull's-eye. So they prepare a mass of
facts and figures, arguments and evidences.
But the wise teacher rejects _in toto_ the cannon notion. He sees in
each lesson a ledge of that grand mountain of life--of Christ-serving,
strong life--up to which he must lead his little band, on which he
must plant their feet so firmly that they may not slip back during the
six days' interval, but may be ready for the next fair terrace, and
the next.
So the wise teacher, in preparing the lesson, knows that he must first
reach that ledge himself; must repeat the journey over and over until
he has learned the easiest way for little feet; must make ladders with
rounds close together; must spread sand on slippery places and stretch
ropes along the edge of the cliff. He, too, lays in supplies of
stories and pretty parables, not, however, in the form of powder, to
make a show, but (if this is not too severe a twist of the simile) as
dainty food to keep the young travelers fresh and hearty. He, too, has
facts and figures and arguments and evidences, not, however, as
cannon-balls, but in the shape of iron bridges and railings and ropes,
that the way may be solid and safe.
There are some teachers that do not study at all. It is as if a
will-o'-the-wisp should undertake to guide one on an important
journey. Those teachers are going they know not whither, over they
know not what road, for what purpose they have not the slightest idea,
and land always in a bog.
Emphatically, the teacher that is not always climbing himself will
leave his class on a very dead level indeed. He should be reaching
down and pulling them up, but he is soon compelled to stand where they
are and push, and ends with believing his "level best" to lie along
the smooth road of the easy-going valley.
The teacher who ceases to grow ceases to teach. That is why a
Sunday-school lesson cannot be crammed. That is why preparation for it
must extend all through the week. Growth cannot be ordered offhand.
It comes from Father Time's shop, and he is a deliberate workman. You
will lose your hold on your class if each Sunday hour does not begin
with you a little above them, and end with them at your level. This
advance cannot be won Saturday night, or during the space between the
first and second bells for Sunday-school. Such a spasmodic leap ahead
will leave you too much out of breath even to tell them to come on.
Dropping metaphor, of which we may have had too much, there are several
substantial reasons why the Sunday-school preparation should extend over
the seven days of the week. Thus only can you utilize in the Master's
work odd bits of time, your Bible on the bureau while you dress, in your
hands on the street-cars or while you wait for the meat to be cooked.
There are many Bible verses which should be carefully committed to
memory in connection with each lesson, as the teacher's best reliance
for commentary and inspiration. These verses should be running through
our heads as we run on all our six-day tasks, and should sing themselves
to all our labor-tunes. But chiefly, it is only in this way that we can
accumulate hints, and grow into the truths of the lesson by experience.
With the lesson theme for a nucleus, it is astounding to see what a
wealth of illustration, of wise and helpful comment, each day's living
thrusts upon us. Every event is a picture of some truth which needs only
a sensitive plate to be photographed forever. That sensitive plate is a
mind which is studying that particular truth.
How much time do you spend in studying your Sunday-school lesson? You
see that no true teacher can answer that question, any more than the
poet can tell how long he is in writing his poem. This is the
inspirational part of the teacher's work, and not the mechanical part,
and his brooding will have issue of life just in proportion as the
Holy Spirit dwells in his heart. But along with this lofty work must
go lower processes, of which it is far easier to speak. I mean those
lower processes which alone we are likely to call "studying." Permit
me to lay down a programme for the study of a Sunday-school lesson.
To begin with, let it be always with pencil in hand. You have seen
iron filings scattered in rough confusion over a sheet of glass. And
then, when the magnet was placed beneath, you have seen those ugly
bits of metal dance into the daintiest designs, fairy curves and most
symmetrical figures. Such a delightful magnet is a pencil or a pen for
all the disordered thoughts and fancies of our brains. Next to the
Bible, the Sunday-school teacher's inseparable companion should be a
lead-pencil.
What book is nearest you while you study your lesson? Teachers may be
classified finally by their answers to that question. Is it the
commentary, the atlas, the Bible dictionary, the concordance, the
question-book, or the Bible? If the commentary, your comments will
fall fruitless to the ground. If the atlas, your class will wander
nowhither. If the Bible dictionary, your diction will have no issue in
deed. If the concordance, your class will know little from you of that
concord which passes understanding. If the question-book, the value of
all your study is at least questionable. No; let me emphasize this
statement: _Not a single lesson help should be touched until
everything possible to be learned about the lesson from the Bible
directly has been learned_.
For this you will need two Bibles at least, one to be kept open at the
lesson, one to turn back and forth in pursuit of references and
information. The first must be a King James reference Bible; the
second, the noble translation of Victoria's reign. Thus furnished,
read the lesson. As you read, examine your mind. What questions assail
it? Those moments are full of matter. Those questions are the clues to
the lesson labyrinth. Those perplexities constitute your programme. "I
wonder where this place is?" you will say to yourself. "Who was this
man, and what was his past history, that he did this deed? What does
this odd phrase mean? Is that sentiment a just one? Is that act a
model for us modern folk?"
As these difficulties come up in your slow and thoughtful reading, jot
them down, and the resultant half-sheet of scribbling means half the
work accomplished. But hold! Did you read through a child's eye as
well as your own? Did you read in the plural number? If not, you must
read the lesson once more, with a poet's imagination noting this time
the difficulties which you strode easily over, but which would soon
trip up little feet. When you write down such points on your paper,
underscore them. And underscore them again. A vast deal of preparation
for teaching is fruitless because it is made in the singular number.
The next stage in our lesson study will be to answer our questions.
Points in regard to antecedents and motives will be answered by the
chapters intervening between the last lesson and this. Those should next
be read. Many difficulties concerning customs and laws will be cleared
up by parallel passages and the references of your reference Bible.
Those same references will collate for you helpful utterances on the
ethical problems of the passage. Comparatively few people know, by the
way, how nearly a reference Bible allows one to dispense with the Bible
dictionary, Bible index, concordance, and commentary. I am continually
astonished to see how few are the questions which may be asked about a
passage that the Bible itself does not answer if closely scrutinized.
"But all this is a waste of time," you object. "In the lesson helps
all of these points are stated and discussed, fully, methodically,
concisely. Others have done this work for me, anticipating all my
difficulties. Why need I repeat their labor?" Surely not merely to be
original. There's too much original work crying to be done to waste a
moment in duplicating unnecessarily work already done for us. But the
Bible study cannot be done for you. It must end in familiarity with
the Bible, in appreciation of it, in a wide-awake understanding of the
problems it presents, to be obtained in no way except by original
work. If difficulties are solved before we have felt them to be
difficulties, if customs and phrases are explained before we have
discovered the need of an explanation, and places located before we
fall to groping after them, it is the old story of "light won, light
lost." And so I wish to repeat that the one proper commencement of
study of a Bible lesson is the Bible, and the Bible, and the Bible;
once to note our own questions, once to imagine our scholars'
questions, and once, in large measure, here, there, and everywhere,
concordance, index, references, and atlas at our elbow, to answer, if
it may be, from the Book itself all the questions it has raised.
And when this is done, even if every question has been answered, open
arms to the commentaries and the lesson helps, the wisest and richest
you can find, and as many as you have time for. Why? Because twenty
heads are better than one; because the Hebrew and Greek and travel and
debate and experience and insight and spirituality of our best
thinkers will suggest new points of view, add a world of illustration,
may even upset some of your conclusions. Stand sturdily, however, in
the presence of these learned doctors. You will be tempted to throw
away your own honest results and adopt their wise and brilliant
homilies. If you do, your class will laugh at you, or yawn. You will
be giving them, not your life, but your rhetoric. These helps are for
inspiration, not respiration and circulation. They are for hints
toward originality, not hindrances. They are useful in strengthening
your own thought, vivifying your own feeling, confirming your own
conclusions, opening new vistas for your own exploration, suggesting
methods for your own practice.
If these two lines of preparation have been faithfully carried out, you
will by this time have accumulated a mass of material which will be
confusing, and the third step is to reduce it to order. Long practice
has convinced me of the utility of the plan of writing out questions.
Whether these questions are used in the class or not, they clarify the
subject marvelously, and the mere drill of writing them adds fifty per
cent. to the teaching power of the instructor. When I began trying it, I
was astonished to see how many thoughts which seemed to me quite
promising and bright could not be approached by the interrogative mood.
I wanted to lead up to this simile, that illustration, this theory, that
pretty idea. I would soon find that my questions refused to lead up to
them naturally. Why? Simply because these fancies answered no query
likely to rise, solved no difficulty likely to suggest itself, and were
mere adventitious decorations wherewith I had been accustomed to load my
Sunday-school teaching, to show off.
My attempt at formulating questions soon taught me, too, that I had been
indulging in monologue. I found it unexpectedly difficult to frame a
question--one, that is, which required the scholar to do some thinking
to answer. I discovered that I had been in the habit of propounding
"yes" and "no" queries, merely as excuses for five-minute orations.
Then, too, when I began to put down in black and white just what I
expected to put into that precious half-hour, I wondered what I had
been doing with it hitherto. By my previous methods two or three
little notions would keep me going through the whole thirty minutes;
but ideas do shrink so when you put them on paper with a question-mark
at the end! It is wonderful how many questions can be asked and
answered in half an hour. I gained a new conception of the value of
time, and of the teaching value of study hours.
In writing out these questions, then, the first thing to be thought of
is that consideration with which a good teacher will begin his lesson,
but a poor teacher will close: "What is the main teaching of the
lesson?"--as important, this "main teaching," as the compass to the
sailor. What particular characteristic of God's noblemen is this
lesson to strengthen in my scholars? Every teacher should know the
power which is given by an ultimatum; by a decision, that is, as to
the one thing which, no matter what else it wins or fails to win, that
lesson must accomplish. Is it to make my boys and girls more truthful,
more brave, more cheery, more trusting? Whatever the point be, about
that shall cluster the questions, the illustrations, the arguments.
Countries, customs, times, history, shall be only its framework.
There must be other points, to be sure, but merely as side excursions,
from which we return with greater zeal to this our main quest. Those
subordinate points we next determine, and the order in which we shall
treat them, and then sit down to write out our questions.
Does all this seem too mechanical, this writing out questions, and
determining point by point just what results you will seek, and in
what order? It is businesslike; it is mechanical. Why are we so afraid
of mechanism in bringing hearts to the great Mechanic, without whom
was nothing made that has been made? A machine is merely a contrivance
for applying power effectively, and the only question should be, Does
this machinery make my aim more direct, widen and deepen the range of
my efforts? It is a grand and godlike thing to be mechanical, but it
is a pitifully weak thing to stop with being mechanical. Machinery
accomplishes all the work that is being done anywhere, but it is
machinery informed by the Holy Spirit. Our lesson preparation will be
in harmony with all of God's preparing if it is orderly, painstaking,
and definite, binding together, however, all its labored details with
the sweet and creative spirit of prayer. Machinery touched by prayer
is always the machinery in which, as in the old Greek plays, the god
descends. Nothing is mechanical, everything is poetical and spiritual,
that can be prayed over.
But will not all this take time--all this ransacking of the Bible,
original study, writing out of questions, and formulating plans? Of
course it will. Time is what good things are made of--time and toil.
It would be strange if the best of good things, the sanctification of
lives, did not take time and toil. But let us remember two facts: one,
that this work, being thorough work, need not be done twice. Seven
years of such Bible study as I have indicated, and what a
magnificently trained teacher you will be, ready, all ready, for the
next International Lesson cycle, the next Sunday-school Sabbath of
years! We Sunday-school teachers have enlisted for life. It is so much
wiser, then, to study for life. And in the second place, familiarity
with this thoroughgoing way of working makes it much easier and more
rapid than at first. We no longer have to use the concordance, but
memory supplies passages needed for illustration. Bible customs are
soon learned. The peculiarities of Bible language are readily
mastered. The poetic instinct which sees parables and applications
grows with its use until they crowd upon you and must be critically
culled. Nothing ends easy but that which begins hard.
After all, however, these are the lower motives. What matters it even
if the preparation for this blessed work remains hard to our last
Sabbath? Let it be the best we know, and on that last Sabbath, if God
has given us the knowledge that even one soul has been turned to the
supreme happiness by all our toil, we shall deem it rich reward.