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Life Lessons: Spiritual Dryness

My mom travels a lot this time of year. When she’s gone, I water her plants for her. Because we’re having the hottest weather of the year right now, I got to thinking I better put a lot of water on her flower beds. By being generous with the water, it can absorb deeper into the soil so it doesn’t all evaporate when the day is at it’s hottest.

As I’m doing this, it occurs to me how that’s a great illustration of an important spiritual principle. When I’m spending time with God in his word, through prayer, worship, service, etc, I can can have a quick, shallow visit with him. When I don’t allow myself to be saturated with him through the process, I get a shallow experience that evaporates when life heats up.

This is a valuable illustration for teaching my small group students about connecting with God on a deeper level. However, it’s definitely something that helps me think through my own connection with God, as well. I like the idea of being saturated as I spend time with him. I can tell the difference when I’m not.

Give To Ceasar What Belongs To Him

Now tell us what you think about this: Is it right to pay taxes to the Roman government or not?” But Jesus knew their evil motives. “You hypocrites!” he said. “Whom are you trying to fool with your trick questions? Here, show me the Roman coin used for the tax.” When they handed him the coin, he asked, “Whose picture and title are stamped on it?” “Caesar’s,” they replied. “Well, then,” he said, “give to Caesar what belongs to him. But everything that belongs to God must be given to God.” His reply amazed them, and they went away. Matthew 22:17-22 (NLT)

This idea has been ringing in my head lately. I’m seeing this as applicable beyond money and taxes. The preoccupations we have with worldly issues can rob us of what God would do in and through us. How silly is it for us to get all worked up about what we do or don’t have? Give to Caesar what belongs to him so we can be free to serve God.

We get weighed down by credit card debt, promising so much of our time that there’s none left for daily time with God, getting worked up about what’s unfair, etc. Returning things we get from the world, but don’t need, frees up our resources to live the way God intended. That’s the opposite of the prosperity gospel, but with the same result. Our lives are richer as we unburden ourselves of what we don’t need from the world.

In youth ministry, we have an amazing opportunity to help students learn this early. Being unencumbered by the world is as important as any message we could ever teach about being disciples Christ after salvation. Having one makes room for the other.

Perspective and Humility

When I took a look at the graph of my blog stats today, it reminded me of the need to keep perspective and be humble. We should never be too proud of our accomplishments in life or too down on ourselves on the off days. We’ll have our share of ups and downs. My pastor, Rick Warren, says, “Learn the lesson of the whale. When you’re at the top and you’re ready to blow, that’s when you get harpooned.”

Notice I left the numbers off that show how many hits the points on the graph represent? Not sure if that was to be humble or to make you think I get more hits than I really do. Hey, I’m a work in progress. 🙂

Life Lessons: God Never Changes

A friend of mine, Charles, works for a food distributor. One of his best and oldest clients canceled its coffee order. The complaint was that the coffee had changed. It didn’t have the same flavor it had over the years. Customers were complaining about the flavor.

Knowing nothing had changed with the coffee, Charles paid a visit to the client armed with a container of his coffee. They made a pot and served it. Floating atop the coffee was a film and some suds that shouldn’t have been there.

Charles asked if they had recently changed the detergent they use for their dishwasher. The answer was yes. A quick read of the directions for the detergent revealed they had been using too much of it. The detergent wasn’t fully rinsing off the dishes, causing the film and suds. The problem wasn’t caused by the coffee, but by the restaurant making a change.

Application for teaching:

– God never changes. When things go wrong in our lives, we can be sure that God did not mess up or change.
— We need to evaluate how we’ve changed or strayed. Maybe we haven’t been faithful to his guidebook, the Bible
— He could be moving us in a new direction for our benefit or the benefit of others

– We can be sure that when we stray away from God’s plan for our lives, we won’t get good results. When we get back in line with God’s design, life has a way of working out
– We can also be sure that when we are living God’s way and life isn’t what we’re expecting, God’s got something better in store than we had imagined

Life Lessons: Running To Win The Prize

I’ve struck up a pretty good relationship at the gym with the elliptical machine. We get along great. It’s easy, low impact and a great way to burn a lot of calories in a short amount of time.

What I love about running on the elliptical instead of on a track is that the machine tells me anything I want to know; how fast I’m running, how many calories I’m burning, and how long I’ve been running. I can even tell the program how difficult or easy I want the run to be. It will raise or lower it’s incline based on what level I choose. Best of all, there is a TV built into the top of it so it will entertain me as I run. Based on how customized and entertaining of a workout I get, I am amazed everybody doesn’t do this. I get bummed out when I can’t do it.

I typically run for an hour and 5 minutes. I love watching the time tick downward toward zero. I see other people cover the numbers with their towels so they can trick themselves into thinking time has flown by. I like to look for patterns in the numbers. It’s just a way to kill time. I look for things like 12:34 or 33:33. Some people cover the numbers with their towel. I think this is because seeing the time ticking slowly down makes it seem like time is dragging.

Of all the numbers patterns I look for, 777 calories is my favorite. When I reach it, the crowd cheering me on in my head goes bizerk. People on the side of my imaginary road are handing me cups of water. They’re screaming in amazement. News choppers overhead are recording my every step. It’s quite a scene. I figure God likes 7’s and 777 is a lot of calories so I kind of take a split second to celebrate that milestone as I head toward the finish line.

777, however, isn’t the finish line. It’s just a milestone. It’s an important milestone, but there’s more distance to cover before the race is done.

How I can use this illustration in my teaching:

Life Lessons: Rose Parade Craziness Vs. Jesus’ Chill-out-ness

When I was in college, my fraternity held our biggest fundraiser at the Rose Parade every year. We’d camp out at a house or church for a few days taking turns reserving a large spot along the parade route. On New Year’s Eve, we’d deliver about 100 chairs to the location & set up camp for the night.

The next morning after setting the chairs in rows, we’d sell the seats to passers-by. Each row had a different price. Realistically, the price was whatever we could get for them. I was always amazed people came loaded with cash to burn for a good seat. It was such a rush; so many people, tons of money changing hands. Everybody was happy. Before leaving, people would give their business cards to me asking if they could reserve seats for the following year. The answer? YES!

One year with all the flurry of excitement in full swing an angry man got in my face and yelled about how unfair and unconstitutional it was that we would take public property and make money off of it. Without missing a beat, I yelled back at him, “Sit down!” Not realizing what I had said, the angry protester went on with his argument. To which I replied with an even louder, “Sit down!” Finally realizing he had just been given a free seat, he quietly took his place and I went about my business.

The next line out of my mouth was to the crowd huddling with eager eyes behind our little theater. “Okay, who wants to purchase the few remaining seats to help us raise money for a Mexico orphanage?” While the Mexico orphanage part was true, it was meant as a sword of guilt to pierce the man’s self-righteous and indignant heart. We sold the rest of the seats, made a financial killing, helped some orphans and shamed a stingy man.

This is how I could use this story:

Life Lessons: Turn on the Navigation System

I live by my navigation system. However, it tends to talk too much. It tells me there is a left turn ahead, then tells me again as I get closer, then as I approach the intersection, it tells again to turn left. Sometimes I turn the volume all the way down. Other times I turn it off. When it’s mad at me, it will wait until I’m passing the street to tell me to turn left. If it does that again, it may wish it had wings when I throw it out the window as I turn left.

Tonight I should have turned it on. I was heading from the grocery store to the house where I teach small group. I was taking a “short cut” through a neighborhood where I’ve only gone a couple of times before. I mistakenly thought it would be easy enough without the navigation system. As I approached a cul-de-sac it quickly occurred to me that I should turn it on for the short trip to the house.

As soon as this realization came to me, the life lesson was immediately apparent: I often have God either turned all the way down or even off when I think I don’t need him. It’s not that I intentionally shun him, I just get busy with my day and don’t give him the control of my life he deserves.

My navigation system is the most awesome piece of equipment I own. It’s got all the directions I could ever need to get me where I need to go. How much better and accurate are God’s plans for the direction of my life. I need to make sure I have him on and turned up daily so I can rely on his direction.

Lesson Helpers: New Testament, week 1 (Worry)

Be sure to catch the two side notes in #4 below… I can see those being especially transferable to other ministry settings

Tonight we began a 4-week series on the New Testament. The goal of this lesson was to help students see 4 lessons we can learn from what the shepherds experienced when the angel told them to head to Bethlehem. Since we didn’t make it past the first point, I don’t have much to say beyond that.

This week for our large group time we prayed for one of our students who had brain surgery this week. This was great on a couple of levels: 1. Because the student is shy, students outside her small group don’t know her well – this gave her some exposure so they’ll get to know her better when she comes back, 2. holding hands and praying for one of our own as a group was a great lesson on prayer itself.

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To open the lesson, I had a student read the verses (Luke 2:1-20) off of my iPhone. I love finding ways to incorporate technology into our group. The first point in the lesson was to discuss worship vs. worry. We never made it beyond this point because the discussion was so strong. The guys had a lot of great input. It was one of the best discussions we’ve had.

How I would rate the night on a scale of 1-10:
1. Effectiveness of the opener: 9 ~ Students had an opportunity to look beyond themselves to pray for somebody in our group they didn’t know very well. I can’t wait for her to come back to see how reaching out to her changes the way they interact with her. We also have them coming next week with cards and other things they’d like to send to her.

2. Effectiveness of the small group time: 9 ~ To start the discussion, I went through a Top 10 list of fears I found on the Internet. Then I had the students share what they were afraid of. I had created a short list to direct their thoughts, but forgot to read it first. Most of the fears they listed were irrational. It worked out okay, though. The fears I read to them were: 1. Making the right choice about college, 2. Getting caught, 3. Death… It was great to see their expressions of agreement as I read through the list.

Some of the guys shared stories of out-of-control situations where they were very afraid and how they gave it up to Christ. We spent a lot of time talking about what it means to “give it up to Christ”. It’s so easy to say those words, but I made them go practical with what it looks like and what it means. They came up with some great answers.

We concluded our small group by laying hands on one of the small group members and praying for his dying cousin. He was pretty worried about her. It was a perfect night to pray for his worry, her health (both physical and spiritual), and the whole family. This was a great way to end a lesson about worry; with another opportunity for students to pray over somebody. I think God had that planned out.

I had a great night planned. However, this was much better.

3. Overall grade for the night: A

4. Two side notes:

A. One of my students has been wanting to play some songs on his guitar for the whole group. He’s partnered up with another small group member. I had them play for our small group to get the feel of nervousness out. It also gave me a chance to audition them (without telling them it was an audition). I’m glad I did this because it gave me a chance to encourage them to take a few more weeks to learn their songs better before performing. This saved them some embarrassment and gave them something to work toward.

B. I had an atheist friend of mine (Alex the atheist) help me prepare for this lesson. I’m convinced he will become a Christian one day. It was funny, we were having lunch yesterday so I decided to bring my lesson and go over it with him. In the lesson (points we didn’t get to), we were supposed to discuss sharing the Good News with others. I was able to get an atheist’s viewpoint about what it is Christians do that makes the message unattractive. This activity was great prep for my lesson. Alex gave some great insight I may not have considered. However, it was also great ministry at the same time. My friend got a load of the gospel and I’m guessing he got a good feeling by being helpful. A few times he’s offered to help me with ministry-related tasks. I always tell him that the staff really wants you to be a Christian if you’re going to do ministry. I told him I might bring him to small group some day to do a segment called, “Ask An Atheist”. He liked that idea. It’s very exciting to see him open to being helpful and getting exposed to the truth of scripture that we Christians too often misrepresent through our human shortcomings.

(Alex gave permission for me to write about this and to use his name. I’m also sending a link to him so he can read this blog post.)

Life Lessons: Watch My Words

Back in the day (about 15 years ago) I was at a gas station with my roommate. While he gassed up the car, I went inside to grab a soda. In line behind me were two belligerent drunk guys. They were loudly insulting those around them and laughing it up. I think being drunk must have made them think they were funny. For my part, I nervously waited in line making sure I didn’t look their way or respond to their tirade.

However, when people want to make everybody around them miserable, sometimes there’s no escape. That was the case for me that day. They started in on me, but I wasn’t getting sucked in. I think that made it worse because their insults got louder and worse the more I ignored them. They continued shouting them at me as I walked across the parking lot to the car.

The car was started, we were about to leave and all was good… so I thought. As we were about to pull away, I had enough. I rolled down my window and shouted across the parking lot, “Drink another!” I had reached my limit of undeserved abuse.

Suddenly we weren’t pulling away anymore. Instead of driving down the street to safety, my roommate decided that we should sit in the parking lot for a while while he yelled at me. So now I’ve got a roommate and two drunk guys making me wish I was in another state. As the drunk guys get closer to us, my roommate decides he’s had enough and finally decides we can leave.

Two learnings from that day that I can use in ministry:
1. If I’m going to yell “Drink another” to rude drunk guys, I’ll make sure I’m the one driving the car (tongue-in-cheek application)
2. My words, under any condition, should represent Christ well

This is a great story I can use in teaching on James 3 on taming the tongue or when teaching on controlling anger.