Connect

The Bible Our Sanctuary - Introduction

September 06, 2026 0 0

Introduction

The Bible is not a book.

It's not so much a thing we read — as a place we go.

The Bible is a library and a sanctuary, a meeting place — to discover who God is and learn who we are in the process. We have created this 8-part Bible study to introduce (or re-introduce) you to these ancient and yet ever-new, fascinating and life-changing words.

Whatever you’re feeling, whatever your history, you can find encouragement, wisdom, comfort, inspiration, challenge and wholeness in this place. The Bible is somewhere you can laugh and cry, praise and lament, rage and delight, celebrate and rest, hope and discover, and perhaps most powerfully of all — learn to forgive

We want to encourage a sense of expectancy when we come to the Bible — by thinking of it firstly as a place of encounter rather than just some old tome on a shelf. We believe heaven touches earth on a daily basis and we can experience the reality of God in our everyday lives when we come to the Bible with an open heart. The divine is not a fairytale and the Holy Spirit is closer than we know.

To learn about God we can’t just read about God, we have to encounter God and not simply as individuals, but as communities. This is the reason why we encourage small groups to gather together to share and study in this amazing library. As we go we invite you to engage with and explore all your senses — how can music and art and nature help you to appreciate the Bible more deeply?

The Bible is a place to meet our ancestors but also our contemporaries, our friends but also our enemies, God but also ourselves. This life-giving library is not a static rulebook, but a multi-room archive of human experience. But this archive is a living archive, shaped to help us face real pressing issues, enabling us to have face-to-face conversations with God.

This series will introduce you to several of the vibrant, complex characters we meet in the Bible and the various genres it contains, and equip you to explore them. Over a season of two months we will come to the Bible from the perspective of how its stories and its wisdom speak directly into our 21st century lives and emotions. This in turn shapes our thoughts and actions, enabling us to be what Jesus would call salt and light in the world. The theme will also be shaping worship services, and multimedia resources across Sanctuary First and amongst the congregations that partner with us.

Meeting with God!

Read on for a brief introduction to the incredible William Tyndale (without whom we wouldn’t be meeting like this and talking like this!) and eight weeks of discussion questions. These are designed for small group Bible study in local Connect Groups and to inspire sermon preparation and the development of worship resources. The material is open-ended; these are conversation starters to prompt you to go deeper and see where the Spirit leads you.

From the provided texts, we will explore how the Bible teaches us that God meets us wherever we are, even when perhaps we are on the run, restless searching for more, when things are falling apart, or we’re failing in a moral sense to be honest with ourselves and others. In our readings, we discover God is often encountered amidst the ordinary highs and lows, victories and failures of our everyday lives, becoming a touching point for the eternal – for something more. We will see that God speaks through nature, people, and places, surprising the most unexpected people with grace and forgiveness. Within all these encounters, we will see the costliness of grace and therefore the depth of God’s love.

So, are you ready to meet with God?

Step into the library, there’s a seat waiting for you…

 

Jump into Week One!