They Don’t Know

I was was having a conversation with a child and happened to mention Goliath being almost 10 feet tall. We had been talking about getting tall. She seemed a bit confused so I asked her if she knew who Goliath was. She said she had never heard anything about him. I was surprised that a kid 9 years old had never heard the story about David and Goliath. After thinking about this I realized that in our society today children don’t hear the Bible stories that folks my age grew up hearing every Sunday in Sunday school. Most children in our nation are not taken to church on Sunday. And I think that is very sad.

Children don’t hear about Moses seeing a burning bush that was not consumed by the flames, and how he obeyed God by going back to Egypt to confront Pharaoh, or Jonah being swallowed by the big fish, and how the walls of Jericho came tumbling down as Joshua led the Israelites around that wall. They haven’t heard about those friends of Daniel, with the weird names, being thrown into the fiery furnace, and they were not burned the least little bit. And of course how the youngster David killed the giant Goliath with a sling. They miss the story about Elijah praying to God to send down fire from heaven to burn up the wet sacrifice and how he killed those 400 pagan prophets, and how ravens fed him every day while he was hiding in the wilderness. They don’t hear the stories of Jesus feeding thousands of people with a few loaves of bread and just a few small fish, or how he healed people like the lepers, not leopards, and how he raised Lazarus from the dead.

But the saddest and most tragic thing about all of this is children are not hearing the wonderful story about Jesus dying on a cross, and how three days later he rose from the grave. No one tells them that Jesus died for them. Children have no idea that their only hope for eternal life is through Jesus who loves them so much that he died for them.

I heard two men about my age talking about a lady who had all the children in their neighborhood come to her house once a week to a Bible study. She had them memorize a Bible verse every week. These two men were children who were eventually saved because of this wonderful woman. I don’t know how this method of teaching children these great Bible stories about God’s hero would work today, but I do know there is an urgent need to reach children whose parents don’t take them to Sunday school. This is definitely something that should break our hearts. We need to pray for the children on our nation that somehow we can find some way to teach them these wonderful Bible stories, and about our God who loves them so much.