Our Stories

I was reading recently in one of my college textbooks about the "hermeneutic function of the family." It talked about how the family is the primary entity that should be teaching the younger generations about what Christ has done. It specifically refered to the institution of the passover in deuteronomy as something where one generation passed down knowledge to the next generation of what God has done for them. From what I understood this book pointed out that this section of verses tells us that our families should be the basis of teaching the next generation about God and the Bible.

But as I was reading this I began to wonder and think about what we teach to our children. Many times it is the story of David and Goliath, the story of Jesus and the Children, the Exodus, the creation and other very important and true stories. These are the stories of the faith. But I wonder why we don't teach them and tell them of our stories too.

Back in Biblical times the Bible stories were directly the story of, the history of, their people, or at least (in the New Testament ... for the gentiles) of some of the heads of the faith. It was all stories that happened not long ago. It was a history that largely shaped their culture. But in our day and age it is the history of a people from whom the savior came about 2000 years ago. I guess what I am wondering is why we don't share the stories of how God affected, intervened and changed our lives and our recent history.

Of course it isn't as authoritative as the Bible, but would it not also build faith? Instead of learning just about David and Goliath they could learn about how their grandfather had been working hard to preserve his farm through a drought but everything looked dismal. How he trusted in God and God brought him through. Why not along with the stories of Shaderach Meschach and Abednego we tell the stories of the men of faith and of martyrs of our own time? God has done incredible things in our lives and He still moves today. I think that our children would be missing out on something incredible if we simply told them all the Bible stories but left out how God has provided for us and moved in our day and age.


In the Bible it was truly important for them to pass on the truth of how God moved in their history. Why don't we tell our children how He has moved in ours?