We are beginning a new series in Teen Sunday School that will entail working through the story of the Bible. Throughout this series (perhaps the next year or two), we will work through key stories and passages throughout Scripture that serve as building blocks for the grand story (meta-narrative) that weaves throughout all sixty-six books of the Bible. We won’t necessarily look at all of the typical “Sunday school” stories—we’ll look primarily at stories, discourses, etc. that are picked up by other authors throughout Scripture. The goal is for this to help us understand how the various parts work together to tell us who God is, who we are, and how we can live according to the purposes for which we were created.
To introduce this topic today, we spent some time discussing the idea of “story” in general. Stories are such powerful tools for humans to connect with, since they often portray the way the world works, how we fit into that world, or even a dream of how we wished it could or should be. Whether factual or fictional, stories can spur us on to become who we aspire to be.
The Bible is no different. It contains laws, commands, and some pretty confusing stuff at times. But it also tells an incredible beautiful (and true!) story about who God is, who people are, and the lengths God has gone to (and will continue to go to) for his creation to walk in fellowship with him. The Bible tells our story, and it is worth reading, hearing, and telling over and over again.
To conclude the lesson, we watched a video about the idea of the public reading of Scripture (https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/public-reading-scripture/). The point of this video is to show that throughout Scripture, we see the people of God gathering together to publicly read (or hear) Scripture. This is a command given throughout Scripture, and when the people of God do this, we see that the result is an excitement to worship God and to live according to his purposes. We also see, though, that the people of God often forgets to do this (think Judges 2, or the book of Kings), and the results are catastrophic. When the people of God (whether ancient Israel, or the church today) forgets our story, we forget who God is and what he has done for us, and history suggests that the result will be sin and destruction. We humans are forgetful, so we must regularly remind ourselves of this story.
That’s the goal for the next year or two of Sunday School. We want to spend time as a youth group digging into the story of Scripture and how our lives today fit into that. We want to see how God’s Word impacts family life, or life in middle school and high school. The Bible’s story continues in our lives today.