Before you begin Chapter One, we want to name the hermeneutic — the interpretive method — that governs everything in this teaching and, in fact, everything Breaking Bread Global Ministries produces. We call it Line Upon Line, Precept Upon Precept: No Scripture Stands Alone. It is not a clever phrase; it is a conviction, and it comes directly from Scripture’s own description of how God teaches His people.

God’s pattern of teaching, according to His own Word, is cumulative and cross-referential. A single verse, read in isolation, was never meant to carry the full weight of a doctrine on its own. Truth is built the way a wall is built — one line laid carefully upon the last, one precept confirmed and clarified by another, until the fuller picture stands.

This is precisely why the chain-reference method taught in Chapter Four is not simply a helpful study technique — it is a theological conviction put into practice. No scripture stands alone. Every verse belongs to a fuller conversation that runs throughout the whole of Scripture, and our responsibility as students of the Word is to let Scripture interpret Scripture, rather than isolating a single verse and building a conclusion on it that the rest of the Bible does not support.

A verse pulled away from its surrounding chain is a brick pulled out of a wall. It may still be a brick, but it is no longer holding anything up.

This is the method Breaking Bread Global Ministries has embraced and prescribes across all of our teaching materials, and it is the method this teaching will model in every chapter that follows: line upon line, precept upon precept, always checking one scripture against another, and never resting a conclusion on a single, unconfirmed verse.