What are we doing here? Part 3

I wrote a couple of posts earlier this year about the classes we are taking and the things we are learning here at New Tribes Bible Institute. We are now down to our last week of classes, which means our whole first year of training is almost over. We will be here at NTBI for one more year before heading to the New Tribes Missionary Training Center for our last year and a half of training. Time is flying by, and before we know it, we will be overseas. Exciting but a little scary, too!

The classes that I talked about in my first post were Biblical Foundations, Evangelism, Bibliology, Pentateuch, Hermeneutics, Acts and the Roman World, and Islam.

In my second post, I talked about Old Testement History, Proverbs, The Love of God, Prophets, Psalms, Ezra/Nehemiah/Esther, Intro to NTM, and Theology.

Since then, Aaron and I both took Life of Christ, which covered all four gospels (some in more detail than others). Not only did we learn the content of these four books more in-depth than we ever had before, but we learned important facts about the background, purpose, and structure of each of the gospels that will really help us in the future as we study them more fully. I'm sure we could spend our entire two years at NTBI on the four gospels and still not exhaust everything there is to learn from them, so we really felt like this class just gave us a lot of tools and a foundation to study them on our own. 

We also took a class on the book of Acts. Again, it was so neat to see the overall purpose and design of this book. It truly is a book of transitions...transitions from the gospels to the epistles, from the law to grace, from Israel to the Church, from Peter to Paul, and from the earthly ministry of Christ to the continued ministry of the glorified Christ. This class was so good...we were truly sad when it was over!

We are just finishing up a class on I Corinthians right now, and our thinking and attitudes are changing in many ways as a result of this class. The Corinthian church had a lot of problems--just as churches do today. But before Paul even begins to touch on correction and discipline for these problems, he reminds the Corinthians of their solid standing with Christ--their place as holy saints with Him. What an encouragement to us today! No matter how much work God has to do in our lives, we can always be assured of our position in Him. We are also learning a lot of practical things from this book when it comes to dealing with other people--and in particular, other Christians. I can safely say this has been a worldview-changing class for Aaron and me in many ways.

Additionally, Aaron took quite a few classes this semester that I wasn't able to take, since I was home with our kids. I was able to listen to some of them online, though. These classes are:

Partnership Development: In this class, he learned the biblical basis for partnership development and some practical skills that we will most definitely be using in the future as we raise support to go overseas.

Bible Basis of Missions: This is a class whose name is pretty self-explanatory. In this class, they traced God's intent for missions--to reach out to fallen man--from the beginning of the Bible to the end. It is so neat to see His heart for mankind, and convicting to know that we need to have the same heart.

Discipleship: This was just a two day, five hour course on discipling other believers. 

Spiritual Warfare: This is a subject that neither of us knew/know a whole lot about. Since we will most likely be moving into an animistic tribe, though, an understanding of spiritual warfare will be pertinent, and Aaron gained at least a little better understanding of what spiritual warfare is all about and how we, as Christians, fit into the "battle."

Hermeneutics II: This class was part two of a class that Aaron took last semester. It dealt with interpreting the Bible, and here at NTBI, they approach biblical interpretation from a literal-historical-grammatical interpretation. This is one of the classes that I was able to listen to, and it was incredibly interesting. I feel like we have a much better grasp on how to interpret Scripture--especially those difficult places like the Prophets that we had no idea how to interpret before.

Christology:  This was a theology class about the Messiah, Jesus Christ. It traced his appearances and activities throughout all of Scripture.

Anthropology/Harmartiology: The shorter name for this class is "Man in Sin." It was a theology class about mankind, and how fallen mankind can be reconciled to God.

I think I covered them all! Looking back at all we learned this year overwhelms me. I have a goal this summer to go back through the notes for many of these classes to write important information in my Bible and try to get some of the things I learned more engrained in my mind. We are so excited to be back here in August, taking more classes!

So what have we been doing here besides going to classes and studying?

We've been having cookouts with friends,

spending time with our senior friends before they graduate this weekend,

playing in the stones,

going to the playground,

having LOTS of help with the kiddos at the school picnic (while Aaron played a quite long softball game), :)

playing in the bounce house at the school picnic,

eating apples by the campfire,

celebrating Ivy's 18 month "birthday,"

and spending Mother's Day with my little family.

We are very excited to head home for the summer once our baby is born, but we sure will miss being here at NTBI!