Teaching with passion

Seth Godin has an interesting post on teaching that I have been thinking about for a little over a week.

Here are a couple of his thoughts that caught my attention.

“If you teach--teach anything--I think you need to start by acknowledging that there’s a need to sell your ideas emotionally. So you need to use whatever tools are available to you--an evocative powerpoint image, say, or a truly impassioned speech.”

“If it’s worth teaching, it’s worth teaching well. If it’s worth investing the time of 30 or 230 or 3330 people, then it’s worth investing the effort to actually figure out how to get the message across.”

One of the thoughts that’s been going through my mind is how many youth pastors teach the Bible with passion! If a guy selling Oral B toothbrushes to a dentist can’t get enough of his product and makes a passionate speech to a group of dentists to buy his product, how much more should those who get the opportunity to teach the Word of God be filled with passion to impart the living Word into the hearts of students? I'm not talking about screaming to them, I am talking about pouring over the text until it's seared into our hearts so we have something from God to declare. I am talking about teaching from the viewpoint that this Word is so worth your time right now because of what it has been doing in my life all week as I have been thinking about it and praying over it! I am talking about preparing to teach well, not just get through a message or a series!

Students are the most passionate people in the church and they are longing to hear from their leader the passion of the Christ as revealed in His passionate Word. Students are longing to see that the Word we are teaching has first taught us. Students are looking for us to call them to a radical faith worth dying for every time we get the chance to stand up in front of them and teach.

We aren’t selling Jesus. We are simply opening up the GLORY of God revealed in His Word (Ps. 19:7-9), and passionately proclaiming to this next generation that there lives must be first saturated in the Word of God because there is nothing sweeter and no greater reward,

“10 They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold; they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the comb. 11 By them is your servant warned; in keeping them there is great reward.”