Topical Bible studies on the Affections
1. Topical studies…
Here’s another Bible study series I wrote for MSG, my Thursday night Bible study group. This one is a topical Bible study series – and from it you can see the way I now go about writing topical Bible studies.
The difficulty about topical Bible studies is that you have lots of passages that you could look at. So how do you do it well? Do you try to look at all of them? do you only look at only one of them?
In these studies what I try to do is firstly give people a quick overview of what a number of passages say. We would get people to turn up and read out different passages, and then process what they’ve read in a simple and quick way – perhaps by filling in the blank in a sentence that summarises that verse, or connecting that verse to the correct summary. This allows you to have breadth – but quickly.
But there will also be a second part of the study where we slow down and look at one passage in some depth. This might be a longer passage, and we’d have several questions for us to explore its meaning and implications. This allows you to also have depth – informed by the breadth they have just seen.
Of course, you have to choose the passages well to provide an adequate survey, and make a good choice about which passage will be good to stop and reflect on more. But I’ve found that this tends to work really well for topical studies.
| Breadth | Many passages | Quick | Fill in the blanks (or similar) |
| Depth | One passage | Slow | Several questions for discussion |
2. …on the affections
This set of studies in particular was about godly affections of a Christian (see previous posts from Jan 25, 26, and Feb 04, 11, 13 and 28 last year). There were eight studies, addressing the following affections:
- Love for God
- Fearing God
- Thirsting for God’s word
- Hating sin
- Longing for Christ’s return
- Jealousy for God’s glory
- Joy in Christ
- Zeal for good works
The idea was that often we focus on godly actions (eg. read your Bible, turn from sin, don’t be greedy) – but we don’t focus on the godly affections that underlie and give power and stamina to these actions (eg. thirsting for God’s word, hating sin, longing for Christ’s return). And yet when we turn to the Bible we find that the Bible is actually very much interested in our affections.
A warning also that we found that as we went through the series, they were quite ‘big’ – in the sense that the kind of change in life and priorities and affections demand was massive. And to have eight in a row like that would have been somewhat overwhelming. And so we actually broke up the studies with two reflection / review studies so that people could stop and reflect on what they’d heard, and how they were going in the things they’d heard the previous few weeks.
You can get this set of studies from the link below as a PDF file. Feel free to download and use them – though be aware that they are very much written for my way of leading studies!
Affections studies – all (download page)
In hindsight I think I would have also added a final study about being born again (John 3). Because really, it’s impossible for an unregenerate person to grow these affections inside of themselves. It actually takes a new birth for this to happen – and for some long-time regular churchgoers, this new birth may never have actually happened…
[ PS: how do you write topical Bible studies? ]
