Springfield, IL March 17, 2010 (AG News): Ruthie Edgerly Oberg has spent the vast majority of the past 18 years as a stay-at-home mom raising kids - but she says that now that the children are getting ready to "launch out," she is too.

Oberg, who has been ordained with the Assemblies of God for several years, has started a YouTube and Facebook project called "Devotions from History," featuring 3-4 minute devotion clips. The devotions can also be found on AGTV.

"Devotions from History is a daily (Monday through Friday) video blog that takes a historical event from each day and brings out a principle for Christian living from that event," Oberg says.

According to Oberg, Facebook and e-mail loop subscribers are approaching 700 in just a few weeks. "The feedback has been very encouraging," she says.

She has always shared stories from history with her children as part of family devotions - then had the idea to share the devotions with others who might be interested.

"One day I took the main point of that day's story (Claudius becomes emperor - January 25, 44 AD) and put it on my Facebook status. A friend responded that she would love to hear more and so I remarked that she should come for breakfast every morning and join the fun," Oberg says. "That got me thinking - why couldn't I record these stories and share them with others?"

That afternoon, she set up her Webcam and posted the first devotion video on Facebook. After several encouraging responses, she kept posting new videos each daily.

Oberg says she has always loved the stories of history, particularly that of the Christian church. The inspiration she found in reading Foxe's Book of Martyrs as a young girl provided her with encouragement and created a thirst to learn more about history.

“Yes, we must learn our Bible stories but we must also remember, especially as Pentecostals, that the working of the Holy Spirit through the events of time did not stop when the book of Acts closed," Oberg says. "It continues on throughout history."

"It seems to me that, as a movement, evangelicalism has become so fascinated with current culture that we are losing something important by giving up our past. In our need to minister in a changing and fluctuating world of postmodernism we are looking to pop culture for so many of our lessons - our sermon series tend to come from "Spiderman" and "The Matrix" - but we are neglecting a treasure trove of heroes and illustrative principles that can be found simply by pulling out a good history book and immersing ourselves in the stories of our predecessors and how God worked in and through them," she says.

"These were real people who knew a real God and it made a real difference in history. What a loss it would be to raise a generation that, like those that followed Joshua, "did not know the Lord nor the deeds that He had done" (Judges 2:10). We lose these stories at our own peril by not telling them."

Oberg says she also tries not to limit the devotions to just Christian history to avoid the danger of isolating God only to the religious world. "I want people to know that all of history is 'His story' and we have something to learn from the lessons we find in studying our past," she says. "His guiding hand can be seen in everything from the reign of Thutmose III to the founding of the Girl Scouts."

To view Oberg's "Devotions from History" videos on her YouTube channel, go to

http://www.youtube.com/user/ruthieoberg. Videos can also be found by searching "Devotions from History" on Facebook and on AGTV. (Becca Hodge)