Snippet: How to Help Your Kids Get Bored with the Bible Fast

Snip·pet | ˈsnipit | noun a small piece or brief extract.

Another one from Jon Collins (BibleProject Podcast, Dec 13 episode):

“My experience had been these {Bible] stories were given to me at a very young age, and they became overly familiar and they became dead and boring. And so I wasn’t interested in them anymore. And it happened quickly. I can remember in grade school [thinking], ‘I’m tired of these stories.’ …I think they felt dead because we were just moralizing them. …I’ve heard that one. I get it. I get the point. Don’t tell me again. Versus an opportunity to start to see all these patterns and beauty and then [how they are] connected to deeper more interesting questions I have about life, that kids actually want to think about too.”

This was from their end-of-the-year series on their paradigm for reading the Bible, a paradigm that fits what the Bible authors are actually trying to do. It’s amazing.

And the snippet is from a Question and Response episode in that series where someone asks about helping kids read the Bible.

If we treat the Bible as just a lesson book on how to live (i.e., a manual for living), we tire of it quickly. Each story seems to teach one moral lesson. Once you get it, you want to move on.

While it may be a very big manual and hard to get through it, do you go back to a manual once you’ve read it and once you now know how to do whatever you wanted to learn to do?

And think of the four gospels. They’re not a big collection yet so important. But how sad to treat it like a manual and feel like you’ve conquered its meaning.

And how many people hate manuals altogether anyway?

The Bible does show us how to live, but it’s so much more. And the meaning is layered by design. On the one hand, there are some simple things we can understand. And we can understand all that’s necessary without being Bible scholars.

But the more time a normal people spends reading it, the more the layers the authors intended becomes evident.

This series is about the “so much more” the Bible is and how to read it for all it’s worth.

In this same episode, Tim Mackie offers an example. He’s starting Proverbs with his kids in their family Bible club and showing them Proverbs’ connections to Genesis 1-2 (a connection beautifully and skillfully portrayed in their video on Proverbs in the Wisdom Series). This is something accessible to kids and adults alike. Check it out.

And check out their paradigm series on their podcast if you want to reignite a love for reading Scripture or take your reading to a new level.

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

Snippet: "It's impossible to understand God's Word..."

Snip·pet | ˈsnipit | noun a small piece or brief extract.

Here’s one from Jon Collins in an episode of the BibleProject podcast (Nov. 15, 2021):

“When you’re reading the [New Testament] you’re reading in English someone writing in Greek thinking in Hebrew.”

His comment follows a discussion of Paul’s statement in Romans that in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed, and how Paul’s understanding of “righteousness” is heavily informed by the Old Testament’s use of the term seen through the prism of Christ.

Given that uncontroversial and indisputable realty, no single person has the knowledge and resources to figure out what Paul means by “righteousness” alone. (And let’s not forget the thousands that passed on copies of a letter whose original has been lost, determined that Romans belongs in the Bible, worked through the many instances where the copies didn’t agree on exact wording, translated Romans, edited the translations, published or uploaded the Bible you use…).

So let’s finish the sentence, “It’s impossible to understand God’s Word…” What comes next?

“Alone.”

You can and you should read the Bible when you’re alone, but even when you’re alone you’re not alone. What you’re reading is the work of thousands upon thousands. And your reading has been informed by the work and influence of thousands of others you have known and who went before you.

And what is true about the Bible you hold is true about the entire Christian life, if the Bible you hold is true.

So let’s not try this alone.

Photo by Keren Fedida on Unsplash