Sunday school is an indelible institution in churches all across America. Millions of people who identify as Christians have attended Sunday school in their matriculation as followers of Jesus The Christ.

Sunday school is where the basics are taught and discussed and many Sunday school teachers and facilitators study long hours to break down complicated biblical constructs for believers in their beginning stages.

We need Sunday school teachers like the one I have at my church. They are necessary and needed but Sunday school is the first step in one’s growing spiritually.

The African Apostle Paul phrased it like this; “I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready, for you are still fleshly. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not fleshly and behaving according to human inclinations?”

Unfortunately, far too many people who attend church or who say that they are believers in Jesus The Christ have settled for what Paul calls “Milk” instead of “Meat.”

Regrettably, too many people in the church are still too comfortable being “babes,” in the faith.

Far too many people who claim Jesus are too comfortable with an elementary biblical, theological and spiritual education. They cannot take or stomach “solid food.”

When the New Testament records these words “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth,” it is challenging followers of The Way, to travel in the way of the deeper discipleship of study.

I always advise my members who attend bible study classes and, in my sermons, to always read what came before the text of scripture you are focusing on and read what comes after the text you are reading in order to put the verse of scripture in proper context.

As Dr. Frederick Douglass Haynes, III has aptly stated “text without context is a pre-text to con people.”

You cannot understand the fullness of the lessons of the bible only anchoring your thoughts on a particular verse of scripture that you like.

To focus on text without context is to con people the way Puritan, Evangelical, Christian Nationalist, read scripture to con their own people and anyone else who listens to their bad theology.

For the next few weeks, we will examine what I’m calling “What you did not learn in Sunday School,” to expose some of the challenging and deeper meanings to biblical, theological and spiritual education.

Let me close on a familiar and beloved text of scripture from the Old Testament book of Jeremiah.

In Jeremiah 29:11 it says “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

This is a powerful text. This text has encouraged and inspired millions of people for over two thousand seasons.

But the text holds an even more insightful and power packed meaning when we remember the context in which it was written.

God through the prophet was giving encouragement to people who were in bondage in Babylon. They were forlorn, frightened and had feelings of being forgotten my God. Jerusalem had been ransacked, the temple destroyed and the people of Jerusalem carried off into Babylon in the foreign land of Babylon.

And to deeper the distress, God had orchestrated their nadir in a foreign land because the people lost their way and their focus on God’s will and God’s ways.

Therefore, we must always read what the text verses that came before God’s promise to put God’s promises to the people in proper context. God speaks these words through the prophet, “Get settled in exile. Build houses in exile; plant gardens in exile and eat what those gardens produce in exile; Take wives and have your children marry and have children in exile; Seek the welfare of the city you are in in exile, pray for it because as the place you are in prospers so will you prosper in bondage in exile. You will not come back to Jerusalem until seventy years has been completed in bondage in exile.”

After that section then God makes the promise that says “I know the plans I have for you…”

The deeper meaning says that God sometimes will orchestrate your difficulty, distress and disappointment in response to your own greedy desires and lustful pursuits that disrespects the dignity of other people. That is a very difficult reality to people in the 21st century who have been fed a false narrative of God being entitled to pamper them no matter how they treat other people different from them.

Another deeper insight is that sometimes God does not take you out of a bad situation but will provide and preserve you while you are in that bad situation if you remain faithful to God and not hateful because you don’t get exactly what you want.

And finally, sometimes the promise to deliver you will not come to you but through you to your progeny after you. It is a word for people who only live in the now and only seek their welfare but who do not try to prepare resources for those coming after them. You know, selfish people.

For many that is difficult to handle especially sense we have been indoctrinated and acculturated into the ideology of individualism, greed and immediate gratification of the society we presently live in.

That is why many choose to just recite and read the latter portion and not the full scripture. Yet we miss the power of how God is providing and protecting even while in a precarious predicaments. We miss being grateful for what we do have.

May someone be challenged and encouraged at the same time. Uhuru Sassa!

Rev. Dr. John E. Jackson, Sr. is the Senior Pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ-Gary, 1276 W. 20th Ave. in Gary. “We are not just another church but we are a culturally conscious, Christ-centered church, committed to the community; we are unashamedly Black and unapologetically Christian.” Contact the church by email at [email protected] or by phone at 219-944-0500.