Tips for Teaching This Week’s Session of The Gospel Project for Adults
Every week for Volume 4: From Captivity to the Wilderness, Ken Braddy, Lifeway’s director of Sunday School, will offer guidance to help leaders prepare to lead and teach each session of The Gospel Project for Adults.
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This week’s training notes:
This week, your group will be studying Unit 3, Session 2, A Priest of Righteousness, which focuses on Abram’s encounter with Melchizedek, a priest to God Most High, and how this priest points to a greater priesthood than what was to come through Aaron. Here are three things to know, read, and do as you prepare for this week’s session:
Something to know
First, I want to just say that I am extremely excited for you all to be studying this passage together. This is one of the big E on the eye chart passages when it comes to seeing how all Scripture points to Jesus; it’s one that Scripture references itself multiple times over both as foreshadowing and in revelation of the substance of Christ’s priesthood. So a lot of our additional resources for this session are focused on that aspect. But you’re also going to want to pay attention to the matter of tithing as it appears in the passage. A lot of us tend to start thinking about tithing only in terms of timing and amounts. But when we look at the passage itself, we just see that Abram tithed to Mechizedek. But we don’t see a command to do so. Instead, He did so as an act of worship, a response to God’s blessing through Melchizedek that we see in Genesis 14:20. And so when we talk about this in the study, we’re not going to be talking about some of the finer point arguments we often deal with regarding tithing. Instead, we want you to focus on tithing as a response, as an act of worship.
Something to read
For something to read, I would definitely encourage you to read the illustration for point 2 of this session on page 114 of your leader guide. This illustration provides a helpful launch point for discussing the issue of God being no respecter of persons—that is God does not show favoritism as far as social class, nationality, family, or ethnicity are concerned because of the gospel. And this was true of Abram as well. Abram was hardly a virtuous man. He was from an idolatrous people, and he did more than his fair share of wicked and stupid things. But despite his often great sins, Abram had a heart that desired to worship God. He wanted to obey Him. And that is why Abram was blessed by Melchizedek.
Something to do
Finally, as something to do this week, take some time to watch the video in the Additional Resources called Getting Excited About Melchizedek by D.A. Carson. This is a plenary session talk from a Gospel Coalition conference about 10 years ago, and it is outstanding. Carson does a masterful job of helping connect the dots from Genesis to the Psalms and to Hebrews, showing how Jesus is the One to whom Melchizedek pointed forward to.
