Preserving the truth in the Church has always been a priority. Paul was constantly concerned that his spiritual charges learn the truth just as he taught it; he also expected them to pass it on unchanged, just as they received it from him.

And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others. (2 Timothy 2:2)

Christians must realize that the Lord Jesus organized the Church to preserve and pass on the truth of God. He built into its structure the necessary functions that will provide nourishment for God’s children. The leaders of a church need to make sure the flow of truth inside Church functions remains free and unobstructed, so that the “pure milk of the Word” can get to all the people of God. If we don’t recognize how he organized this to happen, or (what would be worse) if we work against his plan, people will shrivel up spiritually and won’t be able to carry out their responsibilities under God.

It was he who gave some to be Apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work. (Ephesians 4:11-16)

And this fits in with one more thing that we ought to notice from the Hebrews passage: not only do we need to know these basics, we ought to know them well enough to teach others. The author is really pinning us to the wall about this. It’s not an easy matter to teach something to someone. If you’ve ever tried it, you know already that you have to know it very well if you want your student to understand it. It’s been said that a successful teacher has to know ten times more about his subject than what he intends to give his/her students; this is so that he will be able to sort through exactly what to say, and how to say it, to make it stick in the student’s mind.

But not only will this deeper knowledge benefit our own understanding of the truth, we also have the responsibility to pass on the faith to the next generation. They need to know these things too. Who else will teach them except we who first learned it? If our students see that we love it enough to take it seriously and set up the church in a way that this information will get passed on to succeeding generations, then they will also take it seriously. Perhaps our present crisis of the younger generation turning away from the church in droves is because they can see how little importance we put on these truths ourselves. If church is just a matter of empty and meaningless ceremony, with little or no real knowledge behind it, that won’t appeal to a generation looking for answers. We will be responsible for their falling away.

What we want to do in this study, therefore, is cover the fundamentals of the faith. As you go through them, notice the method:

First, the material is sketchy at best. Each fundamental of the faith is a broad topic, and unless we want to write an entire book on each one, we have to keep it short. Obviously there is much that we could have looked at, but we don’t have the chance to here. So it will be up to you to search the subject further in the Bible and get well-grounded in it.

Second, you will find that the lessons often take the time to correct faulty thinking. It ought to be no surprise, when you think about it, that Christians who are brand new to the world of God have a lot of mistaken notions about God from their past. They have been taught for years at the feet of their former master, the great Enemy of our souls, the Father of lies (John 8:44). When they first enter the world of light, they bring with them a lot of baggage from the world’s way of thinking that has to be discarded.

Finally, if some of this is new even to older Christians, that shouldn’t be a surprise to you either. The modern Church hasn’t been doing a very good job at training converts in the fundamentals of the faith. (One proof of this is the dismal fact that millions of new converts to the cults of our day came from mainline Christian denominations – they weren’t taught the truth, so they don’t know a lie when they hear one.) Usually what happens when someone is converted is that they are welcomed joyously to the ranks of the faithful, encouraged to worship and pray and witness, and then left to fend for themselves when it comes to Christian education or the mastery of the Bible. They struggle to understand sermons and Sunday School lessons without the benefit of an introductory Bible survey course or lessons on how to study the Bible for themselves. It should be no wonder that, even later when they’ve experienced a lot of Christian life, they still have holes in their Christian world view that nobody filled in for them. Hopefully we can do that here.