Gideon Sunday Children's Sermon

Sunday October 24, 2010 was celebrated as Gideon Sunday in many churches in East Texas. We thank our local Gideon camp for sending a wonderful speaker who brought the Gideon Report to First Presbyterian Church--Marshall.

So instead of the sermon, I brought the Children's sermon.

When the children came forward I asked one little girl to read from my bible the first sentence: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

She did such a wonderful job, that I handed her another bible and asked her to do it again. She looked at me and laughed, she said that she couldn't read what I had handed her. I told her to give it another try, but she could not. Well, considering I handed her a copy of the Hebrew scriptures I could hardly blame her for not being able to read it. Shoot, it took me long enough to be able to read it.

Then I gave her another bible and asked her to read it. She said she couldn't read that one either. I asked her if the letters were more recognizable and she said they were, but she still couldn't read it. Since I handed her a Greek New Testament, I didn't figure she could. But she did notice that a lot of the letters were closer to what she knew.

So I handed her one more bible, this one a Santa Biblia. While it was more and more familiar, she still couldn't read that.

I then told all of the kids that it is wonderful that we have bibles in languages that we can understand, and this is one of the things Gideons do, they distribute bibles in many different native languages, from Arabic to Vietnamese. This way people all around the world can see and read the word of God in their own language.

Then we thanked God that we had bibles in our languages and that because of the Gideons, bibles in many languages are shared with people seeking the word around the world.