Let Me Get You Caught Up

It is a real struggle to balance family, work (I am a teacher), and church responsibilities. It seems like I am playing catch up to often and don't do any of the three real justice. One thing I am grateful for is the growth of the youth group. Creating a a lesson (as if I create it, I just have to listen and trust) is imperative when we have 30-40 youth on a Wednesday night with a good 3/4 of them not attending a church the rest of the week.

My wife and I divide up the duties. Basically that means I come up with the theme for the month and the "whole group" lesson. She takes care of the paperwork, games, announcements and things like that. I appreciate my role because it is very focused and I feel like I can concentrate on it.

The month after school started to see a much larger turn-out for youth than normal. Last year a big night would be 20, it wasn't long before we started having 30 this year and we needed to change how we were doing things.

The first thing we did was meet with the youth committee. My wife Dianna had a great idea where we would involve adult "helpers" with the youth and we would have a main lesson (done by me) and then break out sessions so students could explore the message in a smaller, more manageable group.

Because of the disparate people that have been attending the Wednesday night group I felt (God made it pretty plain to me :) that I needed to focus the group on community so that became our first month's theme. I used the book of Nehemiah and the story of the remnant returning to Jerusalem from captivity in Babylon to emphasize the building of a community.

Last month I chose the theme of commitment and used the story of Nebuchadnezzar as well as the story of Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah (better known as Shadrach, Mesach, and Abednego) to emphasize how we need to commit to God. Nebuchadnezzar saw several miracles but finally had to be driven insane before he accepted God as his God. The story of the fiery furnace was an excellent example of the power of commitment by the three Jewish men.

This month the theme is sacrifice. I started tonight's lesson using an article sent to me by a friend. The article, written by an atheist, lambasts followers of all religions for blaming God for the bad and waiting for God to bring the good. I used this as a seque to talk to the students about how God has not let us down, but we have let him down.

Matthew 22:36-40 (New International Version, ©2010)

³⁶ “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” ³⁷ Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’^[a] 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹ And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’^[b] 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

If you notice, we are to love God and through that love our neighbors. Because we do not love Him as we should, the neighbors don't get the love they should either. My emphasis was we need to sacrifice more of ourselves to loving God and our neighbors.

My plan (God willing) is to continue the theme of sacrifice over the next few weeks and talk to the kids specifically about the sacrifice Mary, Joseph, and Jesus made just to get to the Christmas story. As I told them, we look at Christmas as a celebration of the Christ's birth, but we need to really examine the reason behind the birth.