I’ve been working with the youth in our church around four years of so now and every year I say to myself I’m going to get more into my Bible so I can work with the teens that way on top of general life advice and whatnot.
It’s an inner city church and we have a traditional youth group night on Sundays and then we have Skatechurch nights of Fridays and Saturdays and we are starting a highschool Bible study on Wednesday evenings.
We asked our Wednesday evening students about different formats to work the group with and they decided that they would like to start with hearing parables and discussing those and how they apply to their world.
My turn to speak is this Wednesday and I’ve been working through my Bible and asking everyone I can what their favorite parable is because I had it in my mind that I was fairly lost when it came to my Book.
I’m pleasantly happy that as people would tell me about their favorites I knew what they were talking about! I realised that I am more into my Book than I thought I was.
But that doesn’t solve my problem of finding a favorite or picking one to fit what I’m trying to reach them with.
We have some pretty troubled teens and one of my top concerns at the moment is the drugs that have stopped creeping in but upgraded from weed to coke.
Now I thought there was a parable about a grapevine and pruning away the bad stuff but what I found in Matthew didn’t quite work.
We have done the lost sheep and the son who said he wouldn’t work and then did so far.
I would like to read some of your favorite parables and maybe what they helped you through. Hopefully it will inspire me to find the one I am searching for. Either way I’d love to hear your thoughts.
The parable of the talents, I think. It’s a bit of a shame that someone always has to explain that ‘talents’ means currency, not abilities - because it’s a parable - insofar as it has a metaphorical meaning, it can be thought of in terms of other resources, including abilities.
It can be quite a good one for inspiring young people to quit indecision and do something (in the right context, of course).
Mangetout, to sin boldly, as Martin Luther said, eh?
While it’s not truly a parable, I’m a big fan of John 8:1-11. This passage really cuts to the heart of Christianity, and to the core of all attempts to improve ones self for that matter. We all have all done the wrong thing, probably all too often. Nonetheless, we need forgiveness and to let that forgiveness free us to do good.
I like the one about harvesting a field. Okay, let me narrow that down. Different workers come to the field at different times. There are ones who come early in the morning - and they have an agreement to work for a certain price for the day.
Then others come later, and others after that, and the owner of the field makes a deal with each group. At the end of the day there is an outcry when the early group finds out that all the groups have been paid the same wage, no matter when they started.
Then the owner explains how it’s perfectly fair. It’s a metaphor for entry into heaven, of course. Unfortunately, I don’t know it’s chapter and verse or whether the parable has a common name.
It has an encouraging, “start where you are”, message, though.
Mine would be the Prodigal Son: (freely paraphrased) the younger son demands his father give him his inheritance NOW, the father does and the boy goes and wastes it all on riotous living. He has sunk so low as to have a job feeding pigs, when it occurs to him that the servants his father has eat better than he does. He decides to go back to his father and ask for a servant’s job. The father sees him before he actually gets to the farm, and calls out for a fine robe and a ring to be brought for his son. He orders a calf killed for a feast to celebrate the return and runs out to meet him. The older brother is bewildered why his father would celebrate the wretch’s return when he (the faithful older brother) had never been given so much as a goat to share with his friends. The father’s answer is great: you have been faithful and will be rewarded, but we need to celebrate because we thought your brother was dead and now we find he is alive and safe.
To me this parable means that even though you have demanded things of God and squandered your gifts, you can and will be welcomed home again.
Mine is the one about the crooked steward. He is about to be fired by his master, and decides to cancel out his master’s creditor’s debts. Not only is his master impressed by this act of embezzlement, he praises him!
Moral: stealing from your employer is OK!
I’ve always liked the one with the rich man in hell. Besides the obvious message, it says to me “You can’t wait for the perfect reason to do what you should be doing because someone dedicated to their laziness can always find excuses.”
I always thought Parable of the Sower was pretty good. It has kind of an evangelical message and does that annoying thing where it necessarily equates good people with the ones who accept God’s word, but for some reason I’ve always liked it.
This is the end of a pretty craptastical week for me, and I have to say that reading these has made me feel better. Thanks to everybody for posting one
olives you beat me to it! I’ll have to go with my second choice.
The Parable of the Nails
A young boy was constantly misbehaving. Nothing the parents tried helped. Then, whenever the boy misbehaved the father would drive a nail into the door of the boy’s room. That’s it - just drove a nail. He didn’t say or do anything else. Soon the boy’s door was covered in nails.
But when the boy did something good, the father removed a nail from the door.
Eventually, the boy noticed this and started doing more good things. After a long time, all of the nails had been removed from his door.
The boy asked “Father, what about the holes in the door?”
I’d heard about the Parable of the Nails, but never actually heard it. As the father of two sons, I love it. I’ll send it to my sons, as they are now starting their own families.
Just “The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard”. Matthew 20:1 - 16
(“Bible Online” and search for “vineyard wage”)
Similarly I like the one about the woman and the lost coin, and the shepherd and the lost sheep (Matt. 18: 12 - 14): much though God values all those who were never lost, He wants us all.
That doesn’t inspire me to do good things. That inspires me to avoid doing good things so that I don’t have a Swiss cheese door that anyone can look through.
Um, OK. But like all the “theories of parenting” I had or knew of before I had kids, this goes out the window when the real kids come along for real in reality. I can’t distill years of family therapy into a parable, but that’s what it took for my two kids. They’re 14 and 11, and even though they are great kids, we are not done yet.
Also, googling around I see other, completely different parables of the nails.
