The Bible Societies in Ireland

Children’s Story File

You will need:

• A page of non-English Scripture (can be downloaded from this part of the website);
• Gift wrapping paper.

[The page should be carefully wrapped up beforehand]

We all love to celebrate our birthday. Is there anyone who had a birthday last week? Or is having one this week?
The two Bible Societies in Ireland are having a special birthday celebration – they have been around for a very long time. Imagine being 200 years old!

No birthday is complete without presents. This present:

• Is much older than the Bible Societies.
• It comes from almost 4,000 years ago;
• It is very precious as only very old copies of it now exist;
• The oldest copy is too delicate for us to even touch it.

If I tell you that it is a sheet of paper, can you guess what is written on it? (A single page of the Bible – unwrap it and show it to everyone).

Can you read what it says? It’s a very popular Psalm – Psalm 23. The reason that you can’t read it is that it is in Japanese!

We can only read things that are in our own language. We are very lucky because we have the complete Bible in English, while in many countries, they have just got little pieces of it, or perhaps none of it at all!

Our Bible contains God’s entire story for us to read, so it is important that we read part of our Bible every day. That way:

• We can learn more and more about Jesus and we can be happy that he loves us and cares for us and ……
• We can pray that all the boys and girls around the world, that they will one day have the Bible in their language too.

So we say ‘Happy 200th Birthday’ to the Bible Societies in Ireland!