Ripe for Harvest

S ESSION 4: N URTURE AND T RANSITION • 389

2. All exegesis begins with exegeting (reading) the lives of your listeners and beginning with their issues and ideas.

3. You enter into communication through the back door.

a. What are the burning questions being faced by the listeners I am dealing with?

b. What are their primary concerns?

c. How might I in my communication, immediately make contact with my listeners as an entree into my message?

4. John 6: I am the Bread of Life.

B. Content: relate the concerns and experience of your listeners to the data and testimony of God’s story in history through the Word of God. 1. Making contact is only a first step; the role of the biblical communicator is to speak the truth in love (it is about communicating content).

2. The content of the message of the biblical communicator is rooted in the Word of God.

a. The Word of God provides dramatic benefit to the hearer and believer, Ps. 19.7-11.

b. The Word of God is able to completely outfit God’s man and woman for the good work that God has prepared for them, 2 Tim. 3.16-17. c. The Word of God is able to reach into the innermost parts of a person’s being and distinguish between the truth and falsehood, Heb. 4.12-13.

3. The duty of the biblical communicator is to exegete the Scriptures.

Context Values/Vision

a. Observe the details of the text in its original and literary context (what did this mean in its original context?).

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