March 14, 2019 – Click here to listen
The two wisest men who ever lived, Jesus and Solomon, were master teachers. Jesus taught with parables or short stories and Solomon with proverbs. Every day people were not lectured to as many pastors do today; instead they were given stories that ordinary people could relate to and understand.
There are 35 parables in the four Gospels. Someone defined a parable as an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. The word parable literally means “brought alongside.” It takes something that is easily understood such as a simple story or word picture and uses it to illustrate something that is not understood, a spiritual truth. One example presented in Matthew was when Jesus describes what will happen to those who follow Him and those who don’t using different parables that the agrarian people of the day understood and could relate to. Farmers readily understood concepts such as the wheat and tares, and the seed falling on different types of ground. They could easily envision separating the wheat from the tares, tying them into separate bundles, and then putting the wheat into the barn and burning the tares up. Imagining God’s angels separating the followers of Jesus and putting us into heaven and sending the sinners to a fiery eternal existence in hell at the end of the age made it easy to understand what it will be like for the righteous and unrighteous when Jesus returns for His church.
I say all the foregoing because I believe that Jesus’ teaching method is very effective, and I think should be employed in our own daily ministries. Can’t go wrong following the example set by Jesus . . . I challenge you to come up with a story that most anyone can understand in which a spiritual lesson can be derived.
Matthew 7:24
“Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. “And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. “Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.”