The Felt-Board Gospel

Hi All,

My faith in God, in Christ, has been a part of me since childhood.

Our family attended church every Sunday, so I went to the children’s Sunday School classes while my parents were in the church service.

This was the period of “Jesus Loves Me” songs and the ‘Felt-Board Gospel’. Where cutout characters were stuck upon a felt covered board. Very visual, really worked well for some of Jesus’ Parables, and stories like Noah’s Ark.

That was all good when I was quite young, but as I got a little older, I wanted to read the stories of the Bible myself.

Unfortunately, as I told you, this was during the worst period of my ability to read.

Which meant I was struggling to read the Bible.

I got through the ‘creation story,” and how Cain killed Able, and even the Tower of Babel. Because those were stories I already knew from Sunday School and were each relatively short.

Everything after that became heavier and harder to read.

I would later learn that a lot of people struggled with the Bible this way. Not because they had difficulty reading but thinking that the Bible was the same as any other book, that you started at the beginning and read it all the way through to the end.

The Bible isn’t written that way and wasn’t intended to be read that way either.

There are 66 separate books in the Bible, 39 in the Old Testament, and 27 in the New Testament.

(That’s the Protestant count, it changes slightly for Catholic and Orthodox texts.)

Once I learned that, I knew I could start reading any of those books without having to drudge through every previous one to get there.

That said, there are those with the reverse problem. They read only a single verse or chapter and make their entire belief system on that.

For me, as I began to read better, I learned that context was everything. In every book but most definitely in the Bible.

If you read a verse, you must know what the entire chapter, the entire book, means to understand the verse. That came early to me as I began to study the scriptures, the gospel, and the letters of the New Testament.

Reading the Bible, and discovering the messages it had for me intimately, became a major help to my over all dedication to reading, studying, and to my faith.

Years ago, while visiting the house of a pastor I saw into his library and asked him why he had so many books that he used as reference. Part of me was terrified by the thought of having to read so many books, another part was concerned that how many of those books might take him away from the core message of the Bible. Yet as I began to study more of the Bible, I realized that there were things I didn’t understand and so have sought out other books to gain that knowledge so that I could gain further wisdom from the scriptures.

Now because of this, my wife and I read the bible to one another each night. Currently, I am reading a chapter of the Old Testament, and a chapter from the Gospels. I have found a lot of parallels while reading them this way, and my wife reads a chapter of the Psalms to close it out.

Of all the books I’ve read, the Bible is the most important and most interesting, so I am blessed to no longer struggle to read this book.