Teaching to Change Lives

My pastor once told me: “look at the Jordan river and at the Dead Sea, one has fresh water continually while the other has nasty smelly water. One receives water and gives it out and the other just receives and keeps it for itself. Which one would you like to be?”. This year I was reading the book "Teaching to change lives" by Dr. H. Hendricks and I gathered three important principles in teaching:

1. Always Be a Learner - to be able to teach others we should always be students ourselves. We need to have the attitude of not yet having arrived and wanting to know more. Schools have programs made purposely for teachers so that they can learn new material that comes out, new discoveries, and new ways of teaching. How much more should we as Christians, who are involved in teaching or discipling, always desire to learn more. The moment we have stopped learning we become like stagnant waters. We have no fresh intake and no fresh teaching for our hearers. 
2. Always Use Your Heart - “the greatest teachers... are the people who have great heart. They communicate as a total person and they communicate to the total person of their hearers” (pg 87) Speaking heart to heart is meeting the other person where he or she is, on their ground. As teachers, our desire should be not only to pass information brain to brain, but to see the teaching as it grasps the hearts of our students. This can be possible only if we teach from our hearts first.
3. Always Leave an Impact -  we want to see lives changed, this is our goal (or it should be). In order to teach this way we need to be involved in our students’ lives. We must be active with a purpose. The greatest example for us in this area was Jesus, as we read in Acts 1:1, He first did and then he taught the disciples. We see this played out in His teaching on prayer. He didn’t say “ I want to teach you about prayer” but He lived such a life that the disciples went to him asking to learn from his prayer life. He is the perfect example of a teacher who spent time with his “students” teaching them to love, to have faith, to be compassionate, etc. In the same way we need to be involved in our students lives, to the point of leaving an impact.

So what type of communicators do we want to be? If we want to give out fresh water we need to be always studying and learning more from the Word of God, but also those truths should be passed on from our hearts and right into our students hearts. Finally we should make sure we invest in our students with the purpose of enhancing the teaching and with the desire that it will hopefully bring a change.

I was really impacted this year by listening to H. Hendricks,  in his early years a great teacher decided to invest in his life and he became a great man and teacher. May we bless others today as we learn from God and pass that on to others.