An overview for Sunday School teachers and Bible study leaders of Lifeway’s “Explore the Bible” lesson for November 9, 2025 on Deuteronomy 12. Includes a sample introduction to the lesson, text outline and highlights, illustrations you can share, discussion questions for your group, and spiritual life applications. A video version of this overview is available on YouTube at:
Several of you have asked for an easier way to print out the lesson — good news: there is now a “PRINT” button at the very end of this article on my website that you can press to print. I hope that will make it easier for you if you want to print the overview out to mark up as your prepare, or to use to teach your group.
INTRODUCTION:
The novelist David Foster Wallace was not a Christian, but he said this in a famous commencement speech he made at Kenyon College in 2005, that he entitled: “This Is Water”:
“You get to decide what to worship. . . . In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God . . . to worship . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
If you worship money and things . . . then you will never feel you have enough.
Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.
Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”
You could read that quote, and/or print/post a portion of it, like:
“Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
And then ask your group to DISCUSS that quote. You could even share some of what Wallace said in the discussion: that if you worship your body, age will do you in, etc.
Then after you’ve discussed that, you can transition by saying that in our lesson for today in Deuteronomy 12 we find some of God’s commands for how He wanted His people Israel to worship — and how they apply to us today. We DO get to choose how we worship, and it is the most important choice we have to make. God wants us to obey Him in the way that we choose to worship.
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