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What is God up to? Byron Hartzler - Director & Teacher with the ESBS in Lake Lure, North Carolina, USA Being the staff of a recently pioneered SBS outside of YWAM, we’ve been wondering what the Lord is up to with us. In our 3rd year, we have fewer students and more staff than we’ve ever had, and that led us to pray about what God would have us do with our excess time this year that would be both a service to the body of Christ and attract more people to the Emmaus School of Biblical Studies (ESBS). We have 5 staff, all of whom are very capable and experienced and are looking for as many teaching opportunities as possible. We felt as a staff that the Lord was leading us to focus some of our efforts toward putting together an Inductive Bible Study day retreat, where we teach people how to study their Bibles for themselves. Initially, we were thinking that it would be a success to have 20 people come out, but on the day of the event there were 75 people in attendance! We spent a total of 8 hours teaching through the method, and then moved onto practicing the method. Our heart was to be very practical and at the same time to do some preaching about the wonderful message of Titus.  We’ve been overwhelmed at how people grabbed a hold of this and were excited about getting into the word on their own! The response has been wonderful, so we are planning another Inductive Retreat in Charlotte, NC on March 21st. Several churches in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina have also expressed interest in having us come and do a retreat for their congregations. Amy Stevens of Titus Project has put together a short booklet on Inductive Bible Study that is such a great tool, and fit exactly with what we wanted to communicate. Our desire is to use our SBS resources to bless and train the body of Christ; a potential that any SBS graduate possesses.  We are looking forward to what God has for us in this. He is already blowing it open far more than we’d ever imagined! We have something so great to offer to the body of Christ as a whole, and we want to be a part of ministering to them and helping them the way that God has enabled us. Hopefully it will lead to more people being interested in doing the whole ESBS, but most importantly, that they would fall in love anew with the God of the Word. J.I. Packer, in his book Knowing Scripture writes something that is motivating for us and a reason that we are doing what we do: “If I were the devil, my first aim would be to stop people from digging into the Bible. Knowing that it is the word of God, teaching man to know and to love and to serve God, I should do everything I could to stop them from reading and studying the God of the Word. How? I would distract the congregation from preaching and teaching the Bible and I would spread the feeling that to study this ancient book would be hard and they would be okay if they didn’t. I would cause doubt about the truth and relevance of the Bible and I would want them to stop using their minds. If I looked at the state of the church now, I would say, good job.” I pray that this is a motivating factor for you too. God has gifted us with a knowledge of how to know the God of the Word, and how to make it simple and less daunting a task for people. We are just grateful that God has opened up this door to help the body of Christ in this way.
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