Thank you for visiting today’s blog. Today’s theme is parroting our Sunday school answers by how we live.
Teaching embellishments is devoted to ways of how we can teach important principals to our students, our family, or maybe even sharing God’s gospel with our friends without preaching. We could do so by example. I hope these lessons can be of use to family devotionals, youth ministries, and family home evenings.
At church today I heard a very interesting comment about the usefulness of expected answers in Sunday school. And of the encouragement for us to live our lives in the same way that we answer the questions we give in Sunday school.
How many of us have experienced the following scenario. We’re in a Sunday school class with fellow adults or teens and the teacher expresses a certain gospel principle that we are familiar with. The teacher asks certain questions and we give the type of answers that are expected. For example, if we were teaching the first commandment of: You shall have no other gods before me, we might be asked what other gods might be in competition to the one true God?
Our stat answers might be
1. Faith in our own intelligence,
2. The pursuit of career or money, or
3. The pursuit of fame, or
4. Having other interests that take more about time.
Each of these can interfere with our pursuit in establishing a strong, personal relationship with Heavenly Father. All of these are answers might be expected to be given in a Sunday school class.
One might wonder how this can be useful to a student. Here are some ideas. When parents teach their kids arithmetic, they may first teach by repetition and memorization. The child learns that 2+2 = 4. As the child begins to mature we might give them little toys or pictures on an iPad where they may drag-and-drop icons that represent 2+2 = 4. As a learned the first principles of math, they can then learn additional concepts. They can start developing their logic and deductive skills to determine that 2+2 = 4. As they mature further, they gain more developed knowledge by moving up to 2×3 = 6. And so a progression of knowledge and experience gives children the ability to grow in their knowledge.
So it is in Sunday school that we learn the important principles of God’s gospel, such as faith, obedience, repentance, etc. We may have learned these principles in our youth, if we have gone to church throughout our lives. We learn by repetition that is then embellished by our personal experiences. We observe how faith has become a part of our lives through our deductive abilities of cause and effect. We see a few personal experiences that our faith in God can be rewarded by observations of seeing his influence in our daily lives.
Often the simple lessons need to be learned through repetition, because often the basic principles of the gospel have the strongest effect in all aspects of our lives. On top of old knowledge, we learn new aspects of some principles, year after year.
Even our perceptions blossom by observation of cause and effect.
As we become more mature in our knowledge of the gospel. We might touch upon principles that are more complex. Because we have gained a testimony that we can trust God’s word, we find that we can use similar principles of trust and faith in concepts that are new to us. In the us. We combine old knowledge with new knowledge to increase our familiarity with all of God’s principles.
If you would like to give some feedback of how you have found how Sunday school has helped you in your life and your growth with your relationship of God, please feel free to share it. Fellow teachers, what techniques do you use to make known well-established principles of the gospel come across in a new and fun way to your students. So they don’t disengage from hearing the same or same OS Sunday school?
