By Amber Swinehamer

I didn’t grow up going to church. I didn’t grow up reading the Bible. The most experience I had with scripture was from my sorority ritual and the two weeks I spent going to Awana with a friend in elementary school. So when I gave my life to Christ, I really needed something like a CliffsNotes version of scripture to really understand what I was reading. Think along the lines of VeggieTales, but in written form. Luckily for me, when Jesus was teaching, He thought about people like me. Jesus taught by telling parables or stories.

A quick Google search tells me that there are 55 usages of parables in the New Testament. Now I don’t have time to fact-check that right now, but it seems about right. Many of them are repeated throughout the Gospels but include different details. Why did Jesus use parables to teach?

When Jesus was teaching disciples and “fishing for people,” he wasn’t recruiting biblical scholars or people with advanced degrees. He was mostly recruiting fishermen, farmers, tax collectors—everyday people like you and me. Jesus was coming down to our level and explaining things in ways that we can understand and relate to in our lives. He wasn’t just rambling on about sheep, or harvests, or lamps. He was relating things that were way beyond our human comprehension to situations we could understand.

 Now, granted, times have changed, and we’re not all out in the fields harvesting. Still, the parables are in broad enough terms to understand the gist of them, even if you’re not into farming (if Jesus came to me now and wanted me to understand, He may relate something to car pickup lines at school or laundry day … ). For example, in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells us the parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin. One may be easier for a shepherd to understand, and one may be easier for a banker to understand. But both stories relay the message that Heaven rejoices when one sinner repents, regardless of how many righteous folks there already are.

Remember how I said many of the parables are repeated throughout the Gospels? I think this signifies not only the importance of these applications to everyday life, but also serves as corroboration. It’s not like the Gospel writers were working from an outline, so the repetition of the parables as told by witnesses or first-hand accounts serves as proof that Jesus took into account who His audiences were. And the differing details in the writings? Think of it as several separate accounts of a vehicle accident. The writers each include different details based on their perspectives, but the endpoint is still the same.

I am so grateful that Jesus taught using parables. Granted, one reason He did so was to fulfill the scriptures, but the parables also helped relate His divine truths to the everyday lives of the people He taught. The parable of the Lost Sheep is what brought Jesus into my life; so, in my book, He’s always going to be Teacher of the Year—for eternity.

Amber Swinehamer is a stay-at-home mom and resides in Bluffton, South Carolina, with her husband David and two sons. In her free time, she enjoys traveling, live music, Atlanta Braves baseball, and all things Washington, D.C.