We only have one youth night left before summer break!
This month’s youth event will be an overnight “lock-in”. The event will be held at Oak Park Church of Christ (11263 Oakfield Drive S.W.) and will be June 19-20 from 8 pm until 8 am. We will be playing wide games, video games, watching movies, having devotionals and having a late night pizza party. Tolan and I have held youth lock-ins before and have had a blast every time. It will be a great opportunity for all of us to hang out and get to know one another better.
The doors of the church will be locked over night, so we will be safe and sound. We will have a designated place for boys and a designated place for girls for sleeping. Parents are welcome to come and hang out, either for the whole night or for part of it.
Please bring a sleeping bag, a pillow, whatever toiletries you will need for the night (toothbrush, toothpaste, etc.), and appropriate hang out clothes (pjs will be allowed as long as they are appropriate for mixed company). Feel free to bring games and/or movies but please label them so that we will be able to ensure their safe return.
Inviting friends is not only welcome but encouraged! Please let me know if you will be coming so that we can ensure that we have enough snacks for everyone.
If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me.
Thanks!
Jennifer Allen (Chapman)
(403) 921-8500
Friday, June 12, 2009
Final Youth Event Before Summer
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Walking with Edmund
Even before he steps through the wardrobe, the youngest brother is itching to be king of his own life, free from everyone else. He's not about to submit to the authority of his older siblings, much less to the mysteriously absent lord of Narnia. But soon he finds himself a prisoner of his own rebellion. What happens when the price of freedom is higher than we can possibly pay?
Seeing Is Not Believing
Let's say your small watercraft has just sunk and you're in need of rescue. Desperately. Floating into your vision comes a lifeboat. The problem is, not only is the boat captained by your annoying older brother but you know that once you're brought on board, you'll have to help row at some point. So you refuse to acknowledge that the lifeboat is even there. You won't swim toward it or let anyone from the lifeboat help you out of the water.
Instead, you start swimming away as fast as your failing arms will take you.
Basically, being able to see the boat means virtually nothing if you don't act upon what you see. You're going down, whether the lifeboat is there or not.
That's exactly the choice Edmund makes as his Narnia adventure gets underway. He steps through the wardrobe on the heels of Lucy but refuses to acknowledge to Peter and Susan that he has actually seen the magical world with his own eyes. He's not willing to admit that he was wrong. And then later, after they've all gotten in together, he doesn't even apologize. Instead, he distances himself even more from all that is good and noble in Narnia, eventually making the break from his siblings altogether.
Edmund refuses to submit to the truth of what he sees.
He uses one excuse after another to justify why he's betraying his family to the Witch. But even as Edmund makes these excuses, it's clear he knows the facts about the Witch's character. He has witnessed her wickedness and cruelty for himself, but he won't admit it. He refuses to believe.
A spiritual principle is at work in this kind of attitude.
Otherwise, Jesus wouldn't have had to say, over and over again in the midst of his teachings, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear" (Mark 4:9, NIV). It's an odd statement at first. If you're not deaf, then of course you're able to hear what's being said. And yet we know exactly what he's talking about. We've all experienced times when our words to friends go in one ear and out the other or when they insist you said something you honestly never said. They had ears, but they didn't truly listen. Hearing something is not the same as accepting it as truth.
The Old Testament prophets dealt with this same problem when they were trying to get across what God was saying to his stubborn, rebellious people. The prophet Isaiah quoted God, saying that the people "listen carefully, but do not understand" and "watch closely, but learn nothing" (Isaiah 6:9). Centuries later, the early wherever they went (see Acts 7:51-60). Frustrated, they often quoted those Old Testament prophets as proof that, if a person's heart is already closed to spiritual things, then it doesn't matter what kinds of miracles that person sees or what truths that person hears. He or she will refuse to submit.
The people of Jesus' own day were the same way, especially the religious leaders. Despite seeing Jesus perform amazing miracles and hearing the truths of the Kingdom from his own lips, they rejected it all. In fact, several of them even grasped the truth but didn't dare acknowledge it (see John 12:42). They were determined to stay spiritually blind and deaf.
So hearing or even seeing something isn't the same as acknowledging that it's true for your own life. There's a difference between seeing and believing. There are also different kinds of seeing for different levels of belief. Take, for example, the disciple Thomas, affectionately known as the Doubter. According to John 20:24-29, he wanted to see the resurrected Christ for himself before he would be willing to accept what the other disciples claimed to have seen. He wanted proof. He wanted to scientifically verify that the Resurrection actually happened, using his five senses. For him, seeing was believing.
But for others, seeing isn't even close to believing. Lewis wrote about this in an essay entitled "Miracles," in which he described meeting a woman who claimed to have seen a ghost. Apparently, she believed she'd been hallucinating.
Without getting into whether or not ghosts could possibly exist, Lewis uses the example to make an important point: We won't accept supernatural events" as miraculous if we already hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural.”
In other words, whatever we have seen can be explained away if we don't choose to believe it. That's why, when someone recovers from an illness after a bunch of people have been praying, other people will say things like, "It wasn't really a miracle; it was just that the cells in her body started to fight the disease." So why, you might ask, did the cells start fighting when they hadn't been before? But of course the person's presupposition is that supernatural miracles don't happen, so your question isn't really “heard.”
And then there are people like Edmund. They don't even fall into the category of those who refuse to believe what they see. They fall into the category of those who aren't willing to admit they know the truth, deep down. Pride keeps them from acknowledging openly what they don't want to believe is actually real. Why? Because if it turns out to be true, an uncomfortable spiritual reality will have a claim on their lives. It will mean they're no longer masters of their own destinies. It means there's something or Someone out there who is more in charge than they are.
Some of us-or our friends-may fall into the category of seers but not believers. "Do you believe in Jesus?" you ask, and they say, "Yes!" Careful now. Don't let it drop there. Ask, "What do you mean by belief in Jesus?" Because simply believing in the existence of Jesus as a historical figure isn't enough. As one youth worker has said, "Believing in God is not the issue; believing God matters is the issue." We must believe that Jesus' life, death, and resurrection actually have a divine purpose.
Right. But believing he died for our sins isn't enough either, though it may sound scandalous to say so. Think about it: Sometimes when you probe, you find out your friend merely believes that there once was a historical figure named Jesus who only thought he was dying to save us from our sins. Whether your friend thinks Jesus' death actually accomplished our salvation is a different matter. Yikes!
Okay, so probe a little further. Does your friend believe Jesus is the Son of God, the King of the universe? Yes? All well and good. So do the demons, though they refuse to submit to his authority (see James 2: I 9). Yikes again! No, to be painfully blunt, none of our friends' statements of belief really matter unless they can say, in so many words, "Yes, and Jesus is my King too. I've surrendered my life to him. I'm on his side and want to do his will." Until they can say this, there's reason to question if they've really accepted the truth.
Walking with Edmund forces us to consider how honest we are about what our spiritual eyes have seen and our spiritual ears have heard. Have you asked yourself the tough questions lately?
It's not enough to merely acknowledge that the King exists. How will you act on the truth of what you've seen?
We live by believing and not by seeing.
2 CORINTHIANS 5:7
Further In
• Why do some people say they need proof of God's existence before they'll believe in him?
• How easy or difficult is it to explain away things like miracles? Why isn't scientific proof enough to guarantee faith?
• How tempting is it for you to ignore the truths you’ll see in the Bible and not act on them?
The Word on Spiritual Sight
Take some time to read one or more of the following
Bible passages:
DEUTERONOMY 29:2-9; MATTHEW 13:10-17; JOHN
9:35-41; 12:35-43; ACTS 28:23-28; 2 PETER 1:16-19;
1 JOHN 1:1-3
Walking with Susan (Second half)
We all have friends like this: the ones who won’t touch the locker room door handle with their bare hands or sip from our straws. "But I don't have a cold!" you protest, even as your clean-freak friend jumps up to get a drink of her own. Her backpack is full of hand sanitizers and
wipes and antiseptic spray. "Don't touch that," she warns about the daddy longlegs making its way across the biology lab windowsill. You roll your eyes. Is anything safe?
Enter Susan Pevensie. She's usually the first among her siblings to express any kind of fear or hesitation in this Narnia adventure, and it's more than just her need to act according to practical common sense. This caution is born out of her desire to avoid getting hurt. "Is he quite safe?" she asks, upon learning that Aslan is a lion.
For Susan-as with many of us, if we're really honest- "Safety first" is the motto.
Our human nature is prone to such fear and distrust. We start out feeling secure in the arms of our parents or guardians, and then one day (perhaps the first day of kindergarten?) we look out at the world and realize things are not as safe as we supposed. There are bullies on the playground. Our bikes crash. We're even taught not to speak to strangers. Life is not safe, so we learn to be cautious when walking out the front door. And-for those of us whose homes are the troubled places where pain and trauma happen-we learn to be cautious walking in the front door too.
And we treat faith the same way. We want God to be "safe." We want him to place us where there will be no risks, where our comfort and security are givens, where there are guarantees about surviving our experiences unscathed. We want to be able to give to those in need without having to wait on buying that MP3 player for ourselves (to give an example). We want to have all the adventures of a mission trip in a third world country without the possibility of getting lost, injured, or assaulted. We don't want this faith stuff to hurt.
But God makes no such promises. He does promise that he is good (see Psalm 136) and that he has our best interests in mind (see Jeremiah 29:11). But he never said anything about being safe.
C. S. Lewis himself admitted, "I am a safety-first creature. Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as 'Careful! This might lead you to suffering:" When it -comes to loving God and doing what he says, our fears of feeling pain and losing control often keep us from committing entirely to him. We especially don't want God to start digging around in our business in case he finds something unholy that he needs to remove. We kind of like our unholy things, our private sins and fears. Getting rid of them would be painful. So rather than step into the sacred adventure God has for us, we retreat.
There's a story told in Matthew 14:22-33 about a time the disciples were out on a boat in a storm, on the brink of sinking. Suddenly, they saw Jesus walking toward them over the waves, in the midst of the wind, rising up and down with each crest. The disciple Peter, ever the bold and brash one, called out and asked to be able to walk out to him. And Jesus said to come. So Peter gave it a try. But then he focused on the wind and the waves and lost his nerve. This whole walking-on water stuff suddenly didn't look so safe after all. And sure enough, he started to sink-pretty quickly, we can imagine. But Jesus reached out his hand.
Jesus never promises that following in his footsteps will be safe, that we will never come to any harm if we obey God the way he did. Jesus' own footsteps led him to suffering and even death. In fact (and we don't really like to think about this), he promises that suffering will be part of our journey: "Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows" (John 16:33). But then he adds, "But take heart, because I have overcome the world." As Mr. Beaver says about Aslan, "'Course he isn't safe. But he's good."
People who've gone through a difficult loss or trauma often say that their faith is shaken. This may be true of you at some point or another. You lose a loved one or are the victim of violence, and you feel knocked out of the safety of God's protective arms. You question his goodness. The spiritual foundation that you thought was so solid seems more like thin ice. But as Jesus said, "Take heart." Just because your faith is shaken doesn't mean the faith is shaken. The eternal truths of the Kingdom aren't altered or affected by the experience that shook your beliefs.
That's because God's holy character is fixed, immovable. As it says in Hebrews 13:8, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever." What you're experiencing is what happens to a sapling when it's blown in a mighty wind. Your faith is shaken because your branches are tossed in some storm of life, not because your roots are torn and pulled up by an earthquake. If you stay put, if you cling with all your might to the good foundation of God's holy character, the storm will pass.
Susan eventually becomes Queen Susan the Gentle, no longer concerned for her own safety but full of compassion for the well-being of others. As a grown woman, chasing down the White Stag in the woods with her brothers and sister, she does express caution when one of them makes the suggestion that they follow wherever this lamp-post leads. But after some discussion, she agrees to go wherever the adventure takes them.
What a contrast between this Susan and the one we see at the beginning of the story! She's now willing to take the next step in faith rather than fear. Not only has she learned to trust her siblings but she puts her trust in Aslan, the one who has led them on all their adventures so far. She's willing to go beyond the comfortable world she knows because she has faith in her king.
We must take each step in this Kingdom with
faith, not fear. Do you trust your King?
God has not given us a spirit if fear and timidity, but if power,
love, and self-discipline.
2 TIMOTHY 1:7
Further In
• When is "safety first" an appropriate attitude toward the dangers of life?
• Why is it not always the appropriate attitude toward following Jesus?
• What are the "unsafe" things Jesus sometimes asks us to do? Why does he ask us to do them?
• How will you trust in God's unshakable character when things aren’t going so well.
• What are you going to do about it?
The Word on Safety
Take some time to read one or more of the following Bible passages:
PROVERBS 3:21-26; LUKE 12:6-7; 12:32; 2 CORI TTHIANS
1:6-7; HEBREWS 10:35-36; 1 JOHN 4:16-18
Saturday, May 16, 2009
A little update
Because of the Kid's Sunday and the long weekend, we will be missing a couple of weeks of lessons.
I've just posted the first "Walking with Susan" lesson and I'll post the next early this week.
I hope you are all having a wonderful weekend and I will hopefully see you tomorrow!
Part 2: Walking with Susan
She’s not prone to believing in other worlds, and she sure doesn’t feel safe once she gets there. But Susan has a knack for asking the honest, practical questions we all long to know in this kingdom quest. The trouble is: Are the answers what we want to hear?
As Edmund points out from the very beginning (and it would take an annoying little brother to bring this up!), Susan is trying to fill a parental role in the absence of their mother and father. Who is she to tell them its time for bed? Then once they get to Narnia, she’s the one who suggests they take the coats with them to stay warm. She’s also the one to worry about such concerns as what they’ll find to eat along the way.
In short, walking with Susan means we’ll be taking the most practical, sensible route.
And that’s okay, up to a point. Her common sense is often helpful, and the others are glad to have her along. But even before the children enter Narnia, we see some cracks developing in Susan’s sensible exterior, particularly when it comes to approaching the Professor about what to do with Lucy.
Susan uses what she probably feels are very grown-up arguments against believing Lucy’s story. The possibility of there being another world just doesn’t seem plausible. But before we get even four lies into the discussion, we realize that Susan’s common sense is no match for the Professor’s logic.
The basic principles of logic dictate that a statement cannot be both true and false at the same time (the law of contradiction) and that a statement must be either true or false (the law of the excluded middle). We see these laws at work in the trilemma posed by the professor. Lucy is lying, or she is crazy, or she is telling the truth. She can’t be some combination, and she can’t be none of those things (whoa...). The laws of logic dictate that she must be one of them. Which is the most likely?
Notice how practical common sense about the supposed impossibility of other worlds doesn;t come into the equation.
As susan discovers, some truths are not necessarily the most obvious or sensible at first glance. They often require uncommon sense. To give an everyday example: You would think that the chances of finding two people at a party who share the same birthday would be pretty slim. After all, there are 365 days in a year. But oddly enough, the rules of statistics tells us that the chances are better than 50 % in a group of more than 23 people. Just because something isn’t obvious doesn’t make it nonsensical. There’s a pattern, a rhyme, a reason to it.
And the same is true with the Christian faith. Even though at some point we must admit that logic only goes so far in explaining everything about what we believe, we certainly have a very plausible case for believing what we do. Not only do we have the authority of God’s word to rely on but we follow in the footsteps of many intelligent people who’ve accepted Christianity on the basis of some very powerful arguments in its favour.
Blaise Pascal was a seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher perhaps best known for the triangle that bears his name. But he was also a Christian, albeit a struggling one (aren’t we all!). His gambler’s interest in the mathematical principles of statistics and probability lead him to pose a wager to his atheist friends that can be (very) roughly summarized like this: “Fine. Let’s say you’re right and I’m wrong about the existence of God. Well then, in the end, we all lose. Death is the winner. But let’s say that I’m right and you’re wrong. Well, then you’ve still lost, while I’ve won infinite happiness in heaven for eternity. “
He was no fool. If there’s only one option that leads to a winning outcome, why bet on anything else?
C.S. Lewis followed squarely in this intellectual tradition in his defense of the Christian faith. As we’ve already discussed, the climate of Oxford academia seemed incompatible with his forays into Christian apologetic. But even in this community that saw Christianity as intellectually foggy, Lewis was able to make faith not only plausible but highly probable. “At the end of the day you may not agree with him,” says one scholar, “but Christianity is no longer the source of mindless beliefism. He believed that there’s a reason for accepting these things and you can’t just write it off.”
Lewis’ argument in favour of Jesus’ claim to be God (as we discussed in the previous chapter) is perhaps the most famous example. Note how he argued his position from the standpoint of logic rather than from practicality or common sense. Common sense would tell you that a regular, Joe Schmo human being can’t also be a holy, perfect God. But uncommon sense tells a completely different story, and one that can’t be quickly or easily discounted.
Nicodemus faced just such a conundrum in his midnight visit to Jesus (see John 3). We’ve already mentioned his struggle to grasp what Jesus meant by the statement “unless you are born again, you can’t see the kingdom of God” (verse 3). Nicodemus scratched his head: “How can an old man go back into his mother’s womb and be born again?” he asked (verse 4). But Jesus wasn’t talking about physical rebirth; he was talking about spiritual rebirth. Think like a logician: if our sinful nature is what keeps us out of the Kingdom, then we must get rid of that sinful nature in order to enter it. And if our sinful nature is something we’re born with, then only death of some kind will free us from it. Therefore, if we’re going to participate in the Kingdom, then we must experience the death of our old sinful nature and be given a new nature. We must start over somehow. To use a famous metaphor, we must be born again.
Head hurt yet? Feel like you’re going over the edge? So does susan when she hears the Professor’s uncommon sense. When she realizes their host is being perfectly serious, her final, most desperate question boils down to practicalities: “But what are we to do?”
Sometimes it feels like you’re being asked, like susan, to put aside you’re common sense and get a little crazy when it comes to this Kingdom quest. And yet making the leap isn’t necessarily making a leap into the dark, though it may feel like it. Its making a leap into the light. Things that didn’t make sense before actially seem clearer, more logical, once you give it a shot. You’re not dismissing common sense; you’re recognizing that it doesn’t necessarily take you far enough.
C. S. Lewis, perhaps better than anybody in the past 100 years, argued that we don’t check our brains at the door when we become Christians. Sure, the Christian faith may seem to have a lot of holes in it sometimes. You won’t be able to argue every point and win (and you certainly can’t argue someone into the Kingdom, as we discussed before). But your faith is defensible, as defensible as any other worldview out therem and far more pplauseible and even probable than many.
Believing in God’s Kingdom is not always “sensible” or practical, but it is plausible. Will you make the leap into the light?
Don’t let anyone capture you with empty philosophies and high-sounding nonsense that come form human thinking and from the spiritual powers of this world, rather than from Christ.
Colossians 2:8
Further In
- When is it helpful to have common sense- a practical response to solving a problem?
- In what ways does the Christian faith seem implausible or simply unbelievable to you?How will you live according to the uncommon sense of the Gospel stories?
- People often argue that faith just isn’t practical (e.g., :I just don’t have time for church” or “I don’t have enough money to give to the soup kitchen”). What’s really at the heart if their objections?
- How can you show that faith in the God of the bible is both reasonable and plausible?
- What are you going to do about it?
The Word on Uncommon Sense
Take time to read one or more of the following Bible passages:
Proverbs 3:5-6; 1 Corinthians 1:18-27; 4:1-4; 1Timothy 6:20-21; 2 Timothy 2:23-26
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Sunday May 3- Walking with Lucy
You can't argue people into the Kingdom of God; you can only share your own experience and invite them to come and see. Have you extended the invitation to your friends lately?
Come and see what our God has done, what awesome miracles he performs for people.
Psalm 66:5
The movie clip from Sunday:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fu7sHD0gdEc (We only watched the first minute on Sunday)
The bible verses we looked at are: Psalm 66:16-20; 145:1-7; Luke 24:9-12; John 4:39-42; 1 Peter 3:13-16
(Look them up here : http://www.biblegateway.com/ )
We discussed the difficulties we sometime face when we try to talk to our friends about God and our faith and how to explain what we believe to our friends.
Next Week: Part Two: Walking with the Professor.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
May Youth Group
Part One: Walking With Lucy
She’s the youngest in the family but the first to find a way into Narnia. Following in her footsteps takes a dose of curiosity, a pile of courage, and a whopping amount of childlike faith. Are you game?
Video Clips:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed_qmcoQNaY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEjRjFyP_gM
Never Too Old
You’ve heard their snide comments before. Yeah, you know who I mean: those LOTR junkies who sneer at people for liking the Narnia stories. “Dude, Tolkien’s stuff is so much deeper and more complex,” they say, punctuating the comment with some quote in Elvish. And then they add, “Narnia is for kids.”
Oh, really? Then why was it written by a grown-up? Tolkien himself maintained, “If fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read by adults.”6 Lewis agreed: “It certainly is my opinion that a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.”7 So if the Narnia stories meant anything to us when we were kids, they can still mean something now— possibly even more. We’re never too old.
Check out Lewis’s inscription to his goddaughter, Lucy Barfield, on the inside page of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He indicated that at some point she’d probably grow out of the book, but then she’d grow into it again. In other words, we all go through a stage when we think we’re too cool or too grown-up for all that “kid stuff.” But then we reach a point when we’ve matured in humility enough that we can regain that sense of delight and wide-eyed wonder.
Even so, there will always be those who consider such behavior childish. In Lewis’s day, the Oxford don was surrounded by other scholars who could act very superior and snobbish when they wanted to, which was most of the time. Anything written in plain, everyday English— especially for children—was considered beneath them. In their minds, Lewis wasn’t supposed to be writing stuff like that. He was supposed to act responsible and grown-up and write scholarly works that only smart people read. (He did that too, but that’s not what he became famous for.)
Along with children’s books, he also wrote stuff about the Christian faith using words that ordinary people could understand. Apparently, he wasn’t supposed to be doing that either (even Tolkien was fairly annoyed with him about that, especially when Lewis dedicated The Screwtape Letters to him8). But it bothered Lewis that the theologians and ministers weren’t writing about God and faith in a way that the everyday person could grasp. If the theologians didn’t get their act together and write at a readable level, then who would? Lewis would, that’s who. Because, he insisted, somebody had to.
So, for his childlike attitude toward both fantasy and faith, Lewis was looked at askance by the academic community. Needless to say, it was a painful road. No wonder he could write so convincingly about Lucy’s experience after her first journey to Narnia!
Of course, it’s no accident that the youngest child in the Pevensie family—the one who’s the most curious and open and willing—is the first to get into the otherworld. And as a result of her simple faith, she’s not only disbelieved by the others, but she’s picked on for insisting it’s not just a game, particularly by Edmund (who, incidentally, is trying very hard to be grown up). She’s penalized for having a childlike attitude and loses the trust of those closest to her. Yet eventually, after their adventures in Narnia have reached a peaceful conclusion, Lucy is called Queen Lucy the Valiant. Apparently, childlike faith and perseverance are attitudes Aslan honors.
They’re attitudes Jesus honors too.
Frederick Buechner writes, “When Jesus is asked who is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven, he reaches into the crowd and pulls out a child with a cheek full of bubble gum and eyes full of whatever a child’s eyes are full of and says unless you can become like that, don’t bother to ask.” From Jesus’ perspective, it takes the humility of a child to grasp what the Kingdom is all about. Those who think they are too grown up or cool for all that simple faith business are missing the mark. The disciples included. When a group of parents tries to bring their children to see Jesus, the disciples shoo them away because they don’t have VIP passes. But Jesus welcomes the children and says, “The Kingdom of God belongs to those who are like these children. I tell you the truth, anyone who doesn’t receive the Kingdom of God like a child will never enter it” (Luke 18:16-17). Particularly those who are trying so hard to be grown up.
In one of his New Testament letters, the missionary Paul wrote, “When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11). Note how he didn’t say, “I put away childlike things.” There’s a difference between the humble, childlike faith that Jesus says we must have to enter the Kingdom and the self-centered, childish attitudes that keep us from experiencing the wonder of what God has in
store for us.
Plenty of adults are childish about their faith. There’s nothing more ridiculously juvenile than people thinking they have to be grown up and serious when it comes to living the Christian life. Sure, there are times when we need to be serious about things like worship. Passing notes about the music leader’s mullet is just plain childish. But delight and awe in the presence of God—true worship—isn’t. Someone with a childlike attitude can still take faith seriously without putting on a long face and shushing everyone else.
All our attempts to be grown up and cool are really just evidence of childish selfishness anyway. We don’t want our pride to be hurt. We don’t want to earn the disrespect of our peers. We don’t want to be picked on for being shallow or simple. So we cop an attitude of cool and hope it passes for smart. But it’s probably time to shake the whole “I’m too cool for that” demeanor and follow Lucy into the wardrobe. Otherwise, we’ll never reach the Kingdom at all.
Entering the Kingdom requires childlike faith. What will it take for you to be a kid again?
I tell you the truth, unless you turn from your sins and become like little children, you will never get into the
Kingdom of Heaven.
Matthew 18:3
_________________________
Further In
• What attitudes, habits, or enjoyments should you hang on to from childhood, and what should you grow out of ? Why?
• Why is childlikeness an important quality in the Kingdom of God?
• What are some childish attitudes that come between you and your ability to take delight in
what God is doing in your life?
• How willing are you to be a kid again when it comes to trusting in Jesus? What holds you back?
• What are you going to do about it?
The Word on Childlike Faith
Take some time to read one or more of the following Bible passages:
Isaiah 11:6; Matthew 11:25; Mark 9:36-37; Romans
8:15-17; 2 Timothy 3:14-15; 1 John 3:1-2
Walking Through The Wardrobe
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Sunday April 26
Put your hope in the author of our story, his promises will not fail!
The movie clip from Sunday:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2owcC_hExXg
The bible verses we looked at are: Deuteronomy 31:6; Psalm 121; 130; Proverbs 23:18; TJeremiah 29:11-14; Romans 15:4; 2 Corinthians 4:16-18; 1 hessalonians 1:3 (Look them up here : http://www.biblegateway.com/ )
We discussed what our darkest moments have been, how cool it is that God is the author of our lives and how we can remember that in order for a story to be a good one, there needs to be ups and downs.
Next Week: We begin Walking Through The Wardrobe.