"You haven't studied your Bible until you can intelligently read it in the dark." - Sabbath School Lesson
A collection of all sabbath school lesson study guides designed to help you to independently apply yourself to the study of your Bible until you can answer scripture questions in the exact words of the Bible.
*Since 1888.
"There is no better way to express the thoughts presented in the Scriptures than in the very words of the Scriptures, and teachers are therefore urged to require that the answers to the questions shall be given in the exact words of the text. ...Do not consider any lesson properly prepared until any question which will admit of being answered in the words of the text set apart for the lesson, can be readily answered in the exact words of the text without looking at the printed text. This can not be accomplished by a hasty reading of the lesson a short time before the Sabbath school... There is no one who can not profitably read the portion assigned fifty or a hundred times during the week. Read it, question it, meditate upon it, until your brain sees it, and you can read it intelligently in the dark." - Lesson Writers
Have you ever wondered why adventists, who are supposed to be the people of the book, are today just as clueless about the scriptures as any other nominal christian? It is a true proposition that this is greatly due to the departure from the original method of study which focused more on the scripture than on the words of men (the lesson writers).
Here are a few quotes from lesson writers which are worthy of notice.
"Seek to know what the book (Ephesians) says and means, not what the lesson writer may mean. His earnest desire is to open the book to all. Therefore study the book." - 1903, Quarter 3.Your mind is like an empty shelf. You may fill it with the pure truths of the gospel or, at the peril of your soul, add also the poison of the thoughts formulated in the infidel and deceptive mind of the contemporary theologian. When you make a comparison of the earliest and the latest lessons, we have no doubt that you will appreciate the former.
"...where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." - Christ
"...the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth." - Paul
"Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not... How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." - Jacob
"God has a church. It is NOT THE GREAT CATHEDRAL, neither is it the national establishment, NEITHER IS IT THE VARIOUS DENOMINATIONS; it is the people who LOVE GOD and KEEP HIS COMMANDMENTS." - Ellen White
Until within a few weeks few had a correct understanding of the church. To many the church was the grand cathedral where they went to worship week after week. But the experience of being locked up at home has led all of us to accept, although unwillingly by some, the grand truth that God dwelleth not in grand cathedrals made with hands. For if this were the case then He would also have been locked up in the magnificient stuctures that have now been desolate for weeks. If you appreciate the truth that there ought to be a church in your home but are at a loss of what/how to study, worry not. You can use Sabbath School Lessons with great profit.
→ Jump Straight In"The word of the LORD was unto them precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little." The best way to begin using this resource is to go to the list of topics and pick a topic or a book that you might have an interest in studying. We recommend that you begin with the earliest lessons.
We have spent several mornings, evenings and weekends working on Sabbath School Lessons as a part time job, and this has gone on for about 4 years now. But we have been slowed down greatly by the fact that we have also been working on the csycms flat file CMS and static site generation software which was intended to host and serve this project. CSYCMS was powering both Advent Hymnals and Sabbath School Lessons Archive
But we experienced a lot of challenges with csycms, namely: (1) It was not possible to implement search. This is because we used an implementation of lunr which works by looking at the flat file contents, the same way that Grav used to work the last time we checked. But both SSL and AH have quite a lot of files so that a lot of memory is required to successfully handle a search operation. (2) The fact that searching in csycms requires a server means that we could not host the sites as static sites and still have the search feature. (3) The site was constantly going down because of some bug that we have not been able to trace when there were several requests to be served. With the csycms arrangement we would be required to change our focus from building the sites content to debugging our software, then another bug would appear as soon as this one would be fixed, then we would desire this and that feature that csycms does not have. For instance, if we were to continue developing csycms, we would implement google custom site search and search, etc. But see how much time would be spent, or wasted, in reinventing the wheel.
But we have now made the following changes: (1) We have dropped csycms. Or, in more encouraging terms, csycms has served its purpose and must now be laid to rest. "To everything there is a season". Aside from powering both SSL Archive and Advent Hymnals for 4 years, it was also a great learning experience in software development. (2) We have also moved the sites from a VPS to github pages. This is going to ensure greater stability seeing as the github servers should be able to handle all the traffic to the sites as well as save us a ton of money in server costs.
We have spent several mornings, evenings and weekends working on Sabbath School Lessons as a part time job, yet there are many more hours required before we can bring this to an end where only maintenance work will be required. It takes about 4 hours on average to do a single lesson. So that the whole project will require about 2000 man-hours (or 84 full days) to accomplish. But it will take much less if you could help. It will take 500 people only a single session of 4 hours to clear this work. See how:
Then we can begin on the work of translating the earliest lessons into Kiswahili and Luo.
"...where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." - Christ
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