As we attempt to teach our children what it means to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength, one of the points we want to drive home to them is the joy of the Lord's Day. We are so blessed to be able to fellowship with other believers, worship the living God, and learn from His word! One of the little practices we've gotten into to enforce the specialness of Sunday to the kids is giving an "under-the-pillow treat" each Sunday morning. It's never anything big, (usually something like a Hershey's Kiss or a couple stickers) but to them it's a little something that makes Sunday stand out as special from all the other days. Today the treats were Ring Pops, which were something new to them and got a big thumbs up. Don't they look like they are about to activate their "Wonder Twin Powers" in this picture?!
Church was a feast. Justin has been preaching out of Ephesians for the past year (He's very thorough!) and for the last two Sundays he's been on 5:17: "So then do not be foolish but understand what the will of the Lord is." HUGE topic, full of mystery! Last week he talked about the moral will of God (what is revealed in scripture) versus the sovereign will of God (a mystery to man). One of the things he preached about today is the importance of scripture in Biblical decision-making. Scripture gives us the moral will of God; (be saved [2 Peter 1:2-4]; be pure [IThess. 4:3]; be thankful [I Thess. 5:18]; be submissive to human institutions [I Peter 2:13], etc.) and if I'm practicing the revealed will of God, then I'm in God's will! If I'm not practicing it, then I need to stop the decision-making process and go back to get right with God's Word. Obviously, within God's revealed will there may be more than one good option for each decision and one of the methods Justin talked about for weighing those options was to list the pros and cons of each, then to go to scripture and give each pro or con a numerical weight based one how it lines up with scripture. (His example was if you were deciding whether or not to move to a new location, having a strong local church to join would get a rating of five, whereas having a beach out your front door would get a zero since our spiritual welfare has nothing to do with beaches.) You can then add the pros of option A to the cons of option B and compare that number to the cons of option A added to the pros of option B to see a Biblical comparison of the two options. (I really wish I had his nifty little chart to show this. Sorry if it's too confusing.) The point that struck me was that the way we are to weigh the pros and cons is based on scripture, not our personal desires. The Bible is so amazing in that it is so complete for all of life!
"...His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence."
2 Peter 2:3
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