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Ultimately, we decide who we are, and that decision is made by what we choose to do. If we choose to be promiscuous, or lazy, or competitive, or angry, or joyful, or forgiving, or vindictive, those all decide who we are. Our pastor concluded by saying that God loves us even if we have made stupid choices and that the first step toward making good choices is asking Christ to forgive us and enter into our lives. He then prayed a prayer of repentance and asked anyone who wished to, to pray along.

After the prayer, anyone who had prayed that prayer for the first time or who had ever prayed that prayer was asked to move to the other side of the room. Everyone got up and moved. This left me with mixed emotions. I am sure that there were kids there that moved, not because they had a new relationship with Christ but because their friends moved. I am also sure that there were a few kids that were genuinely moved by the evening and have started a new a precarious relationship with Christ. How do we as adult leaders make sure totake the time to meet the needs of the new Christians when we can not even be sure who they are?

I am praying for the youth in my small group. They have shown tremendous growth this year and I hope that they continue to grow. I believe that God is working on each one of them and I love them a great deal. My prayer is that God protects them from evil as he grows within them.

Oh God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come; our shelter from the storm blast, and our eternal home. Be with these youth tomorrow as they go to school. Wrap your arms around them and guide them in the decisions that they make. Help them to learn that they need to live for something greater than themselves, they need to live for you. Give them hearts of hope, purity, and love. Help them to see the consequences of their choices so that they might learn to honor you with their lives.

Thank you God, Amen

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Is our worship of God dependent upon God taking care of us? For Jacob it seems that this was the case; it was necessary for God’s care of Jacob to precede Jacob’s worship of God. I would argue that this is not a normative relationship between man and God. We are not to ensure that God cares for us before we worship God, rather we are to worship trusting that God does care for us.

 

Perhaps it is unfair to compare our present situation with the situation of Jacob. We live in a time when God has already cared for us in the life and death of Jesus Christ. Jacob was living in a time when God was only promising a future blessing; we live in a time when God has fulfilled that blessing. We can live each and every day knowing that Christ has come, died, and risen again so that our sins against God might be forgiven. Jacob had no such assurance, so his reaction to God’s promise was different from what our reaction should be.

 

One thing that it might be beneficial for us to copy from Jacob is setting up a memorial of God’s blessing. Jacob took the rock he had used as a pillow and made it a monument to God’s promise. In this way there was a lasting and tangible reminder of God’s intervention in Jacob’s life. Whenever God intervenes in our lives it would be beneficial if we took the time to establish a lasting, tangible reminder of this event to remind us of God’s presence when we feel far from God.

 

Practically speaking it might be odd to setup a stone alter whenever God speaks to one of us, but what about planting a tree or a bush, or building a piece of furniture, or sewing a table cloth; so that whenever we saw the tree or the chair, of the cloth in our everyday life we would be reminded of the presence of God.

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