Many of us grew up in Sunday School, or attended Vacation Bible School, or in other ways learned lots of Bible Stories as we grew up.
I remember cotton ball clouds over Jesus as He walked on the flannel board water, and the stern look in David’s young eyes as his cardboard cutout figure hurled that smooth stone at Goliath, and the Popsicle stick Noah’s Ark that we made and stuffed with pairs of imaginary animals. You remember all that, don’t you?
But I often wonder how much these stories impact us as adults, and how the faith of our youth translates into saving faith in a grown-up world. It’s one thing to imagine faith’s exploits on a remote (non-threatening) battlefield, Philistia, but it’s quite another to do them in our spiritual battlefield, Philadelphia. Slaying giants and stopping the mouths of lions are easy to imagine when we are light years away from that culture and those times. (Forgiving one another real sins and bearing with one another’s life-size quirks: that’s another story, isn’t it?)
I’m convinced that the only way those stories make real sense to us, and make real spiritual differences in our lives, is if we see how they are connected to the overall story of God’s redemption. That is, somehow we must relate the Bible Stories to the Bible’s Story–and it has only one!
This is why we invite our Blue Church family every year to read the Bible’s story in a systematic way. There are a number of ways to do this, the simplest being to begin at the beginning, mark your place each day, and keep going. You don’t need a schedule or a special Bible. But you do need to schedule a time and choose your Bible.
If you’ve ever read through this amazing Book, you know what I mean. If you’ve never made the trek, believe me, it will open your eyes like nothing else. And it will make sense of those VBS stories you heard years ago.
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
2 Timothy 3:16–17