Robert Cottrill

If you’ve ever been involved in planning a Sunday service, you may have noticed that, once in a while, a theme emerges in the service that you weren’t really planning on. Or, maybe the songs fit with the sermon in a very unexpected way.

Or, sometimes in the Bible studies and conversations that are going on in a local church, it starts to look like God really wants to emphasize certain things, even though you weren’t planning to focus on them.

One of the themes that has been emerging over the last little while in our church here in Ixtapaluca Mexico is our personal study of the Bible.

Our hermeneutics course is ending this week, but one of the last lessons had some practical tips for personal devotions. It turned out that personal devotions was also the theme of the Bible study that week, followed by how to understand the Bible (this past Saturday) and how to study the Bible (this coming Saturday).

My Dad used and developed a tool for his personal devotions called the Bible Card System, which I thought would be useful for the hermeneutics class. So they’ve been trying it out, and I will likely introduce it to our Bible study group and the rest of the church as well. (If you’re interested, you can read about it in English or in Spanish now.)

Of course we continue to dive into Bible study in general at church. On Sunday we continued our biblical anthropology with the theme of Family – an interesting one as we enter into a season with Children’s Day, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day (we celebrated the first one at the service yesterday). This study was all about marriage and gender among other things (and I think the adults especially wanted a few more hours to talk about it! – issues of gender, marriage, family and sexuality are of course pretty practical, especially here in 2021!).

By the way, it was a fun service (although rather eclectic!). Oscar led the service and had some special things for the kids. After the service, we had some photos of children or adults when they were younger, and had to guess who they were (not hard with Hannah and Nathanael – especially that picture of Hannah with a snowman!). Shari made up some gift bags for the kids, and a GIANT COOKIE!

But back to the sermon topic. We’re planning to do one anthropology study a month, and so far it feels like a year-long look at Genesis 1-3. You can just go deeper and deeper into those chapters, and you keep discovering more! But this week, unexpectedly, I think that a big theme that struck me was the theme of identity, and where our identity comes from.

Just to keep things interesting, this Sunday in our study of Romans we arrive at Romans 13. Ah yes, this chapter has been the source of a lot of discussion, studies and sermons in the past few months! So although we didn’t pick it because of recent world events, you can bet we’ll be talking about some of them. (In case you’re wondering where I’m coming down on some of these issues – well, I’m still studying! Maybe I’ll write some posts about it.)

I think we’ve been learning some practical things from one another as we study God’s Word. May we put it into practise in the challenging days ahead!