Teaching on Parables

Jesus often taught in parables, and his parables are rich in truth for Bible teachers. However, teaching the parables can have some challenges. Some approach parables allegorically, expecting every element of the story to have a spiritual application. This can be problematic because the parable becomes hard to interpret. Some approach teaching the parables in a word by word, line by line, or verse by verse style looking for various points from the story. This often misses the point of the parable. Interpreting a parable takes work, often the context of the time gives essential information in finding the point of the story.

Creators and Guests

Host

Dr. Gregg Watson

Associate Dean of Academic Services & Professor of Old Testament Studies

Host

Dr. Paul Kelly

Professor of Educational Leadership

Host

Tyler Sanders

Director of Communications

Producer

Courtney McCaa

Digital Media Specialist

What is The Bible Teaching Podcast?

Practical instruction for today's church leaders with Dr. Paul Kelly and Dr. Gregg Watson.

Tyler Sanders 0:00
I'm your host, Tyler Sanders. And I'm here with Dr. Greg Watson and Dr. Paul Kelly. Today we're talking about parables, and how to teach them. Dr. Kelly, why don't you kick us off.

Dr. Kelly 0:08
Well, I obviously parables are such a rich source of teaching, and one of the things that we love to teach, and at least I do, and I think that part of the reason why is because Jesus was just such a great storyteller. That over and over again, you know, as Jesus is trying to make a point, instead of just doing what we tend to do, or what I tend to do, and say, okay, here's the point. That Jesus told a story and tried to encompass the truth in a story. And some of those feel a little awkward and a little backwards to us, because it's like what do I know about sheep? You know, but that was common for people to know there. Or what do I know about the way that they tilled land and stuff like that. I've never lived on a farm, we tried to do a garden one time and I think everything died. But for the people in Jesus's day, those things were always the case. But I do think that there's some easy ways to sort of miss teaching the parables well. Don't you think so, Greg?

Dr. Watson 1:10
Yeah. But interpreting a parable has several different dimensions, it takes some work. Like you said, man, it's referring to things that come out of what was significant or mainline in their lives. And so the point is often going to be, you've got to understand the nature of the agricultural references, or the warfare references, or the financial whatever. Whatever Jesus is doing, you got to understand it as much as you can from their perspective. And it takes some work and digging, but look, most of the people that are teaching sunday school are smart people. And the information is there.

Dr. Kelly 1:52
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's true, too. But I think that sometimes if you have a rhythm in terms of how you teach, if you always teach sort of a verse by verse approach, or you always teach in one of those ways, that sometimes the parables can kind of trip you up on that. Because, really, if I go through the parable, and I am trying to make three points out of a parable, and I'm trying to help people to understand the three different points, or I'm trying to help them see a parallel between every word in the parable, it's really easy to sort of miss the point of the parable. I think one of my New Testament professors back in the day used to say that you can't really make a parable walk on all four legs. That not everything in the parable is going to have direct application to life. That every word is essential and important, but not every word is going to have direct application to life. And that if I really understand the parable, that I've got to understand sort of what it's trying to teach, what the point is. And not always, but generally, a parable is gonna have a point.

Dr. Watson 3:02
You know, one of the points that we make over and over and over again, is that our primary task as teachers is to make the text understood and understandable. And, you know, like you're saying there, you got to understand the different kinds of texts you're looking at. When you're reading a narrative, like in the story of Abraham, it's a different thing from reading a parable. A parable has a certain form, and it's got a certain purpose. And like you said earlier, the important thing about the parable is what is the point. It's not six points. A parable is typically going to have one solid point to make. And you've got to find that point. The second thing is, is that they're not allegories. Unless there's a specific thing where allegory-and typically with allegory, you find one thing and you can equate it with something in reality. The story represents something reality, one to one. Parables are more like metaphors, where "the kingdom of God-"are similar extended similes. "The kingdom of God is like..." And the point Jesus is making is like these things...so find that point.

Dr. Kelly 3:02
Right, right. Like I was thinking that we could use this illustration out of Luke 11. Jesus starts out the passage, giving them the model prayer, the Lord's Prayer. And then he moves into this sort of weird parable where he says, "he also said to them, suppose one of you has a friend and goes to him at midnight and says to him, 'Friend, lend me three loaves of bread because a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I don't have anything to offer him.' Then he will answer from inside and say, 'Don't bother me. The door's already locked and my children have gone to bed. I can't get up and give you anything.' I tell you, even though he won't get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his friend's persistence, he will get up and give him as much as he needs." The parable is clearly talking about prayer. But if I allegorize this, then it presents a picture of God, that's awful. You know that God is somehow a stingy god, that's sitting up there saying, "Okay, you just have to keep banging on my door, because I don't want to give you anything." Well, clearly, that's not what Jesus is saying.

Dr. Watson 4:40
"Come back when I'm ready!"

Dr. Kelly 5:28
Clearly it's not what he said, you know. And, really, I'm not even sure that the man who's being persistent is giving us the same kind of picture that we would want to have with prayer where we we don't just bang on God's door expecting Him to do something and stuff like that. There's an attitude and all that, that probably is not what Jesus is trying to get us to understand. What he does want us to understand is that our prayers ought not to be just sort of a 'let me pray for this and move on', but that I continue to pray, that I continue to call on God, that I continue to bring my request before Him, to ask Him for help. My sister in law right now is dealing with leukemia, and doctors think it's treatable. We're excited about that. But it's a long process. So continually, I'm asking God to move into her life to help her, to care for her, to be close to my brother because this is a really difficult time, and to bring healing. It's not a prayer I'm saying one time, it's a daily prayer, and sometimes multiple times a day prayer that I'm praying, because I know what she's suffering and what she's going through. And I'm calling out to God consistently on that. I think that's the teaching of the parable. And if I get into some of those other areas of trying to make points of everything that happened, trying to make everything parallel to the way that we pray, I think we miss Jesus's point.

Dr. Watson 6:58
An illustration that goes along with that, I'm reading right now, the story of Marcus Luttrell, who in about 2005, 2006, was part of the mission where the most special operations people in history were killed in Afghanistan, and he was the sole survivor out of his platoon of four. And then the rescuers, like 20 or 25, operators were killed in the helicopter when they were coming to get him. And it tells about-and he goes into real detail about the entire battle, and then getting down and surviving-what this man had to survive, and his friends getting shot, being riddled with bullets, one getting shot in the head and still getting up and firing. I mean, it's something beyond most of our ability to think. But one of the things that really struck me the most is he said, "through all of this, in my mind, I never quit praying. The Lord is my shepherd. The Lord be with me. Help me through the valley of the shadow of death." And I think that's what this is. He's praying, 'Lord, helped me find a way out of this. Get me-show me the way out of this. Don't necessarily pull me out. Show me how to get out. Give me the way. Show me the way.' And that seems like a really striking parallel with what we're talking about here.

Dr. Kelly 8:24
Yeah. Agree. Yeah, I do think that the hardest part of teaching parables, really in some way, the hardest part of teaching scripture, is sort of getting to what is this really trying to teach? Because we spent too much time in school, you know, learning our math tables, and so sometimes we approach scripture like it's our multiplication tables. Where two times two is four, and four times four is 16, or whatever. I shouldn't go any farther than that, because I'll start messing up. But, you know, sometimes we teach like we just have all of this, sort of word salad we're trying to give to folks, and I think that if we can really help them to get what Jesus saying most of the time, these parables have something to say that has huge application for our lives.

Dr. Watson 9:19
And please take the time to show the people you're teaching how you're doing it. To give them a tool of being able to do this themselves. You want to enrich your Sunday school class, you want to make it deeper and bigger. Give them the tools they need to bring it deeper and richer.

Dr. Kelly 9:39
Absolutely. That's so good. Yeah, I mean, there are kind of some exceptions to what we're talking about. Like if you take a story like the parable of the loving father or the prodigal son, clearly, I mean what this passage is teaching is the love of the Father that extends to His children, regardless of how far we wander, that He welcomes us back. And it's a different picture of God than what we sort of see in our minds when we're afraid that when we sin, that we've messed up. And it's a gorgeous, gorgeous thing. But there's this weird thing about the older brother that Jesus throws in. And it's not exactly saying the same thing. So it's like, you have this sub point that Jesus inserts and I think there's some places like that, where there are these sort of bonus things that Jesus puts in.

Dr. Watson 10:35
Yeah. Well, I think this goes along with you're saying, not always, perhaps not even often, but there are times when Jesus comes along and gives an explanation. So like in chapter 11 verses nine and following, Jesus after he says, 'he will get up and give him as much as he needs'. Because it drove him crazy, you know, he got up gave him-but listen to what Jesus says, "So I say to you, keep asking. And it will be given to you. Keep searching, and you will find. Keep knocking and the door will be open to you. For everyone who asks..." You know, I think that was Luttrell's point that, 'I wasn't necessarily looking to be yanked out of there. But I kept praying, show me the way, show me the way.' And it's just keep asking, keep plowing, because our faith doesn't necessarily lie and what materializes in front of us as much as it is finding that path that's there. Does that makes sense?

Dr. Kelly 11:39
Yeah. No, I think that's absolutely true. When Watson and I were talking about trying to set all this stuff up, one of the things that we talked about...I mean, this clearly...allegorizing parables becomes problematic, but it's almost like there are exceptions to that too. Because Watson was like, yeah but what about the parable of the sewer in this seed? Or the sower and the seed? The seer and the sowed? Haha. The sower and the seed.

Dr. Watson 12:08
Well, if you got a seer, you've got to have a sowed.

Dr. Kelly 12:13
Haha. And the parable talks about these different kinds of seed, and clearly what Jesus is saying is that there are some of us, when our hearts are tendered to the things of God, that we'll produce abundance.

Dr. Watson 12:26
Even there, though, it seems more illustrative than it does allegorical.

Dr. Kelly 12:33
But your point was, Jesus kind of interpreted when they said, "tell us what this means", that he kind of interpreted it as," this means this, and this means-", that when the seed fell on the soil that was rocky, then that's probably people that... You know, so I think that there are exceptions to what we're talking about. But understanding what a parable normally is when I go to teach it and not looking for every parable to be like the exception. I guess is what's kind of important.

Dr. Watson 13:02
When Jesus interprets it as an allegory, it's okay.

Tyler Sanders 13:08
And I think even that one, there's still kind of a main point. There's kind of more specificity you get into. But you can still get back to that main point, and all the parables are gonna have some big picture we're trying to find.

Dr. Kelly 13:26
Well, and I may be getting myself in trouble with this too, but I think that I used to always try to figure out which of these people were saved and which of these people were lost. And I sort of think that's not what Jesus is talking about in a parable. He's talking about this sort of specific thing of the production of fruit, spiritual fruit in our lives. And I sort of think that he's not sort of trying to parse out who's made a commitment for Christ and who hasn't. He's talking to Jews before all this happens, he's really just trying to tell them, if your heart is not tender to the things of God, you're not going to produce fruit.

Dr. Watson 14:11
One of the things too, I think as far as principles of interpreting these, you know talking about 'identify the point of the parable', 'don't allegorize' right. But you can also notice something else. Typically, like in chapter 11, you have an introductory narrative thing where it says, "he was praying in a certain place and when he finished, one of his disciples said, 'Lord, teach us to pray, just as John the Baptist taught his disciples.'" Hey, that was good, might be good for us too. So Jesus gives them this pattern, this basic example of how to pray. But then this parable that Paul was talking about, turns some light on it, put some light on it and says, Look, this is why you pray. This is the way you pray in the mode. This is the outline. Haven't you ever heard people say, yeah, when you pray you need to have this element than this element. If you don't, it's an incomplete-bull. No, it's not Jesus point. Because Jesus immediately moves and when you pray like this, guys, grab God by the robs, the lapels on His robe and shout in His face. Don't give up. But there's typically kind of an introductory thing. Another one that we had talked about today was over in chapter 15. And we were talking about-you know, this is one parable. But this is a sequence of parables. Chapter 15 begins with this statement here, "all the tax collectors and sinners were approaching to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and scribes were complaining, 'This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.'" And then we've got this series of parables that follow from this, just in chaplet 15. But we've got this series of parables that comes along, where essentially Jesus is explaining why this is so. So look, when you're interpreting these, find out where the sequence starts, and read that initially, because that tells you the direction of the parable.

Dr. Kelly 16:14
Man, we can say that in so many different ways, that understanding the context into which something is written or spoken is so essential. And if I have a hard time understanding what the parable is about, I can look at like, when we were talking about this parable before, the parable of the guy who's banging down the door, for his neighbor, you know, if you realize that that's come after the Lord's Prayer, it's a hint. And knowing that right after that comes, "they ask and it will be given to you, seek and you find, knock and..." All of that sort of gives us a clarity about what Jesus is talking about. And I think this is true, too in Luke 15, that some of these parables are really short, but you might sort of miss what's going on. But there's a continuity in what the situation was that Jesus is speaking into, and then taking each parable one at a time to sort of unwrap that.

Dr. Watson 17:15
And be really intentional when you start. If you're going to do small group things, or you're going to have breakout sessions where you got a question or two or you just want to have people ask questions, have them direct it toward the significance of the passage. It's okay to give personal testimony out of things like that, but don't let the personal testimony replace what's in the text. Let the text speak. Let that'd be the authority of it. And tell people to speak out of that. Keep them true to the core of the text. The text ought to be preeminent.

Tyler Sanders 17:55
Do you guys want to read this? You want to read a few of them?

Dr. Watson 17:59
Yeah, let's just walk through, we'll do the first one. There's two of them I want to focus on and then I'll kind of generalize with the third one. So the three that follow this thing where Jesus-these tax collectors and sinners are coming to Jesus and the religious elite guys are all really, really upset about it. You know, it's like the homeless people invading Sunday morning services. They're coming in all smelly, making noise, and drunk, and high, and all these things. And so you know, we don't want to spoil the carpet, and so forth. What are the people on TV gonna think? So, Jesus told them a parable. We don't know any dialogue, any other dialogue that might have taken place is left out. It's not important to Luke's point, Jesus moves immediately into this parallel, you can see him just kind of look in there with kind of a cool look on his face. And he says, "What man among you, who has 100 sheep and loses one, does not lead the 99 into the open field and go after the lost one until he finds it?" You know what the answer is? None of them. No shepherd in his right mind is going to put the 99 sheep in danger to go find one. You know, it's almost like yeah it deserved it. But the Father's not like that. And if you're thinking of the tax collectors and the sinner and things like that, they're the one sheep. So Jesus says, this is what our heavenly Father does. You know, the 99 sheep are...yeah. He'll go after that one last sheet. "And coming home, calls his friends and neighbors saying to them, 'Rejoice with me, because I've found my lost sheep.' I tell you in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, than over 99 righteous people who don't need repentance." And that last thing right there, is a shot right between the eyes.

Dr. Kelly 20:04
Yeah, especially for the religious leaders here, right? Because they're not interested in the ones that are lost, they're sort of this is only the club for those of us who are living these righteous lives. And Jesus doesn't dispute that with them at this point, all he does is say, Yeah, but that's not the way the Father deals with things. The Father goes after the one. And I think, you know, it speaks so much to us, too. It's not like, I mean, we don't deal with sheep very much, we don't know about what it would be like to try to keep up with 100 sheep. But certainly, we know what it's like to say, this is just for us and for us only. And whether we're talking about youth groups or senior adult groups, that there's a tendency for us to not want to go out and sort of welcome those people who are not like us into our group. And this parable seems to really talk about the Father's heart being in that way, and how much we need the same kind of word that the Pharisees got, to be welcoming and concerned and desiring to see those that God loves experiencing His love.

Dr. Watson 21:12
Another perspective on that is the relative value of the one sheep to the 99. I mean, you can afford to lose one, you can't afford to have one and lose 99. And so in terms of practicality, you let the one go. But it's clear that the 100 sheep being whole is more important to God than not. At least in terms of this. The second one is the parable of the last coin, "for what woman who has 10 silver coins and she loses one coin, does not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it." I would venture to say that that one coin is worth much more than that one sheep. In the previous one. And so the restoration of value there is to go and find it. Because this may be part of her dowery. This might be the thing, culturally that makes her more desirable as a mate. "When she finds it, she calls the women. Friends and neighbors together saying, 'Rejoice with me because I found the silver coin I lost.' I tell you in the same way, there is joy in the presence of God's angels over one sinner who repents." So one is one sinner...one illustration that Jesus gives in this case is that this is a sinner who has repented and turned back. In the previous, it's that God has gone out to find the sinner and to bring them back. And that's the point of each of these. Each one, Jesus makes these points in there. But what about the parable of the lost son? This is a son who has everything to gain by staying. And he's selfish enough, he's self righteous, he's confident, he's arrogant enough to think 'I'm gonna go get it and I'm gonna go have a ball.' And he goes and he slithers down the slippery slope of life down in to the pit. I mean, he's lower than snakes spit, as far as any Jews are concerned.

Dr. Kelly 23:15
As they say in Arkansas.

Dr. Watson 23:18
That's it. Well, we understand pigs in Arkansas. But you know, he's sleeping with them. He's eating their food. So this guy is as contaminated-in far off country, I'm assuming is kind of like Samaria or something like that. So he has drifted as far away, and he is as ritually and spiritually impure as he can be. And yet he decides, 'I'm gonna go back.' Probably still got the grid under his fingernails, matted nasty hair. Walks in there, and what is the father do? He accepts him. And you have the righteous son who stayed there, is resentful and ticked off that he's accepted him. And so I think, man, what's the point of these three together? You've got to say that there's a related thing that unites these three parables together, what would you say it is?

Dr. Kelly 24:08
That God cares about the one. That God is interested in the individual, in one person, and that it doesn't really matter how lost they are, that God cares about the one.

Dr. Watson 24:21
Yeah, irrespective of what the righteous think, God loves and desires to be reconciled with the sinner.

Dr. Kelly 24:29
Yeah, so good.

Dr. Watson 24:30
With the broken and the lost.

Tyler Sanders 24:31
There's a progression in those three, too, right? There's one of 99, one of 10, and then one of two. And it's still the same...you know, the answer is still the same.

Dr. Watson 24:42
See, I didn't even think of that, man. That's great. And then I think when you get into chapter 16, it's the dishonest manager. There was a rich man who received an accusation that his manager was squandering his possessions, so he called the manager in and asks, "what is this I hear about you? Give an account." And then the guy goes and he talks to the people that...you know, he's trying to settle accounts and says, "Well, I don't have 100. I have 50." He says, "Okay, let's write it off. Pay me the 50 and you're clear." And he's praised for that. So this is another part of it. And then, yeah, but we'll let it stop there. But you can see that these are all around, a theme that develops as you move along. And Luke's organization of these things, you know, let's read them and take seriously the sequence that Luke gave them. It's not necessarily that they were taught in this order. But the sequence that Luke gave them, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, gives us a sense and a progression of the ideas that are really, really fun to see.

Tyler Sanders 25:51
Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Kelly 25:52
So good.

Tyler Sanders 25:54
Yeah, no. This series we see right here, I think having them all next to each other can kind of help illuminate that point, you know, because you kind of see it from a couple different perspectives, couple different angles. What would you say is a good way to start approaching the meaning of a parable, when you don't have that context, or that context isn't as easily viewable?

Dr. Watson 26:17
Read it again, and again, and again. Typically when we read it, and we typically have this feeling; I'm not quite getting this. And when you-first thing you do, don't go run to a commentary necessarily. Pick it up and read it again. Go get a different translation, and read it again. And I can never say this enough, if you want to understand the Bible, you got to read it. Quit taking other people's word for it, and read it yourself. Read it again and again, until it starts to click.

Dr. Kelly 26:50
So good. Yeah, I do think that there's-we're too quick to go look for help with things. And I mean, the best help that God's given us is His Holy Spirit, you know, and as we read through the passage, and read through it again, and take time with it, the Holy Spirit is going to give us an understanding of what's happening, that He gives us clarity, as we're reading. And I think that's huge. I think the other thing, too, is there's two aspects in terms of the way that I look at the context, at least two, that I look at it in terms of the literary form. Where does this fit on the page? And always paying attention to what comes before what comes after, is key in understanding. There's also historical context. And sometimes the parables are best understood when you realize this is being spoken to Pharisees or this is being spoken to the disciples. That sometimes you can kind of get what Jesus is saying when he's kind of, you know, poking his finger in their chest, and saying, 'This is for you.' Sometimes it helps to illuminate what the parable is saying, if I'm able to look at what's going on in that specific situation in Jesus's ministry.

Tyler Sanders 28:05
Illuminates a good word, I think, because in the passage, we just read about the prodigal son, like just the element that he's eating the pig's food. Anyone who's spent a moment around a pig, they've got an idea of that that's gross. I mean like, you don't have to have a ton of context to understand that. But like you were saying, this actually, in a Jewish context, this is a ritualistic uncleanliness. There's like some bigger consequences to or maybe not bigger consequences. I think it's true, but there's also kind of a deeper meaning to, that he's not just eating with any other animal. There's a little bit of more weight to that. And that is helpful to know.

Dr. Kelly 28:49
He's painting a picture of desperation there.

Dr. Watson 28:51
He really is. And he's placing the prodigal son, about as far away from God in a Jewish understanding as you could possibly get. One thing I point out too-and this is one of the things that really makes my heart hurt-I think, because we focus so much on a professional clergy, and we have this wonderful education, I think, in the Western world, we've gotten one seminary trained leader or trained leader for every 256 believers. believe the rest of the world is lucky to have 1 in 20,000. So we are very fortunate in this world to have that, but one of the consequences of that, is that we've taken away people's sense that they need to understand themselves and that they can understand themselves. And that really, really breaks my heart because the same Holy Spirit that invest my life and invest their life. And I really, I really...my hope is that if you will take up the mantle, to be a reader and interpreter and a teacher of Scripture, if you take up that mantle, be confident that God has gifted you with the ability to do it. You just got to do it. Now there are different levels of this too. There's this level that I get up when I'm reading my Bible in the morning that God speaks into my life through the Word. And granted, my education and stuff like that, is a part of that, but that devotional level is not a level that makes it authoritative for anyone's life, but my own. I really don't have the right to go and impose that on anyone else. But as you move further along, when you're teaching Sunday school, you have the absolute responsibility in as much as you can and with the knowledge that you have, in this study that you put in, to communicate the truth of God's Word. God's word. And listen, the higher the education, the more you know, and the longer you spend in the Word, the more accountable you've got to be to the God who gave it. And to the people that you're teaching, much more so than you are to yourself.

Tyler Sanders 31:18
Yeah, that's really good. Before we get to our final section, where we spin the wheel, I kind of wanted to formulate the question we want to do for the wheel. I guess the question would be like...one version of this question, maybe this is too simple, would be how do you teach a parable to this kind of group of people? But maybe let's take a step further back than that, how would you explain how to read a parable?

Dr. Kelly 31:46
Oh, that's good.

Tyler Sanders 31:48
It's a little bit broader. It's not just like how you would teach a particular parable. But if you're kind of training this group of people how they can read a whole set of parables.

Dr. Watson 31:56
You're practicing to become a seminary professor, aren't you?

Tyler Sanders 32:04
Oh, and it's for the seniors class.

Dr. Kelly 32:06
Oh!

Dr. Watson 32:06
Yeah, I guess that one falls right in my lap. You know, it's exactly like we said. And with seniors, typically, most of them have been studying the Bible longer than, you know, I've been able to walk and talk. At least much longer than I have. And typically, they are ready for you to say, "It's okay for you to interpret this." First, give them permission. Second, don't give them any excuses not to. Because they're like anyone else, they'll take an excuse not to, not to do the work. But they got to believe that they can. And then once they take the step, just say; Look, instead of looking for multiple deep meanings, step back and say, What does this? What does this parable teach? What's its singular point? What's the main point you see here? And then go give it to your wife. Or go give it to your friend and have them read it and tell you what they say it is. You're gonna be amazed at how both of you probably see right along the same line.

Dr. Kelly 33:11
Yeah, that's so good. I think, with a lot of adults in the church today, I don't know if this was like this a long time ago, it certainly isn't true of every church or every person. But I think there's a tendency to sort of see the Bible in sort of a personal interpretation. As if my private way of viewing this is appropriate. I think maybe it started, when we were all doing the kind of Bible study where you sit around in a circle and say, "so what does this verse mean to you?" And so it's a whole lot of pooled ignorance that everybody is saying, "Well, I don't know, to me it means..." and, you know, you can't say, "No, that's not right." You know, because you've asked, what does it mean to you? "Well to ME it means this..."

Dr. Watson 34:04
So we all get lumped into the nonsense.

Dr. Kelly 34:07
I think helping folks to see that a parable has meaning. And so 'what does this mean?' 'Well, I really like this.' 'Yeah, but what's the point of the parable?' I think that's helpful. Senior adults, I think, in most cases, have a leg up on other folks. But, gosh, we've been doing sort of this juvenalized church where 'everything is about me' and it's not about God as much as, you know, 'God is only there to sort of help me when I'm in trouble.'

Dr. Watson 34:37
Or the community.

Dr. Kelly 34:38
Yeah, yeah. That we've sort of missed the fact that God speaks in specific ways, and that what He said in the Bible was true then, it's true now. And then I can figure out, so what do I do with this? How do I live this? How do I make this reality my life? I think that's true. One of the guys that I'm doing an independent study course for, in our seminar for, in our DMin, is really interested in senior adult learning. And so he's really focused on that. One of the things he says is that all the literature talks about how important it is with senior adults, that they continue to progress in their understanding and learning. And there's a tendency, because the older we get, you know, I'm a lot older than you guys are. But the older we get, the more your cognitive process become kind of crystallized. So that the fast processing, changing from one thing to another, is slowly eroding. That's not to say that we can never process new information, but it's changing as we get older. And the older we get, the more we tend to lean on old experiences and compare new things to old experiences as a way of developing meaning and understanding out of things.

Dr. Watson 36:01
Wisdom.

Dr. Kelly 36:02
So helping-yeah, which is a great way to think about wisdom-but it also calls us to sort of have to sometimes leap past what we've seen before. And calling senior adults to continue to think new ways, and new approaches is one of the things that tends to help them to continue in healthy cognitive function. That they keep sharp and thinking and moving. Because if they're not flexing those muscles that can be problematic.

Dr. Watson 36:34
Wow, that's good.

Tyler Sanders 36:36
Yeah, that's really good. Well, to all our listeners, I usually like to have some kind of little button in there. And I think I've said this one before, but really read the text.

Dr. Watson 36:46
Read the Bible.

Tyler Sanders 36:47
And maybe like, don't stop reading especially if you're doing a parable, but this is probably true for any text you're teaching. But really read it until you get that point crystallized because it is always going to be really hard, probably impossible, to teach a lesson on something you don't understand.

Dr. Kelly 37:07
Although we seem to do that sometimes.

Tyler Sanders 37:10
That's true. That's true. Okay, thank you so much. We'll pick it up next time.