Creating church communications any time of the year is a challenge, but preparing for Easter is one of the most challenging because there is so much to do for the Easter season, starting with Lent and then all the preparations and finally the celebration of the most important event of the Christian year—the resurrection of our Lord.
For this and for all other times of the year I hope this site encourages you and give you practical tools to do your work effectively, but more important than all those things is that you need to ground yourself in the Word of God. For you to do truly effective work as a church communicator, you must be strong in your faith and the foundational way to do that is to know God's Word.
I often describe myself as a "writer and teacher for Jesus" and long before I started teaching church communications (and that was a LONG time ago) I was teaching Bible classes. In the many years, I've done that, as any teacher knows the more you teach the more you learn and I'm learning so much as I prepare my lessons for Bible 805 the class I do live each week at my church and also my PODCAST: Bible 805.
This last week in the process of teaching through the Bible in Chronological Order (which I think is an essential way to study it if you want to truly understand it) I did a lesson on Typology, where you learn how the types or spiritual truths that were shown in partial form in the Old Testament are fully revealed in the New Testament. For example, the lambs were sacrificed as an atonement (a covering) for sin in the Old Testament, but Jesus came as the perfect lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
Imagine what it must have been like for the Jewish audience who followed John the Baptist and who for their entire lives had watched lambs sacrificed in anticipation of the coming Messiah to see him look up at Jesus approaching and to say, "Behold the Lamb of God!"
This is only one of the images we talked about and I got to thinking how much richer will be our experience of Easter if we understand the Old Testament background of it.
To strengthen your heart before Easter and to grow in your relationship to Jesus and knowledge of His Word I'd like to invite you to listen to Bible 805. The lessons and podcasts are posted by each Monday after the Sunday morning lesson. You can jump in at any time as the lessons are self-contained, but I pray many of you will join us in our adventure through the Bible. This is the message we all ultimately work so hard to communicate well. We need to do our best to learn it well.
