What to Hope for?

Hope.  Hope has always been such a strong, secure, happy, motivational word for me.  What do you hope for ... is a challenging and thought-provoking question.  And now in the face of Christmas and presents, I am struck by the fact that the things my children hope for is what I always try to deliver.  However, in order to deliver what they want; or hope for, they have to know what it is they hope for.  There in, for my kids, lies the problem.  They don't always know what they hope for.

Hope is a desire for something you do not see or tangibly have at the time.  During this time our kids hope for video games, big wheels, scooters, soccer boppers (have you seen those?)  and a myriad of other things.  We may hope for happiness, reconciliation with a family member or friend, a healing, a break-through, a get-away, and, as so many things reference this time of year, hope for peace.

As humans isn't it easier to live our lives hoping for things that we have a tangible sense of?  We can visualize a get-away, even a  reconciliation, usually because we have spent thought and hopefully prayer on it.  And our kids can, for sure, visualize nailing their sibling with soccer boppers.  My own kids have clearly described their own visualization of sitting on the couch, watching television in snuggies.  But that tangible hope is exactly the hope, produced by faith, that God wants us to have in his promises for our earthly life and our eternal life.  Remember Hebrews 11:1: "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see."  As I re-read that verse I am struck by the word 'sure'.  How sure are we, and our kids, of God's promises?  Are we rooted in his promises?  Do his promises drive our daily actions, our conversations, our motivations?

Romans 8:24 & 25 says, "For in this hope we were saved.  But hope that is seen is no hope at all.  Who hopes for what he already has?  But if we hope for what we do not have, we wait patiently."  Now, I am not trying to say that we have to wait and hope for all of God's promises, but his promises transcend time and span the breadth and depth of our life.  Additionally, His ultimate promise, the promise of eternal life, is something to hope for and patiently wait for.  Isn't eternal life His ultimate promise?  The promise to live with Him forever?  So as we wait and hope in that ultimate promise we live out our faith with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

The crux of that hope for our kids, and their ability to live a life that illustrates the characteristics of the nine virtues that demonstrate the fruit of the spirit, is that they are rooted in ALL of God's promises.  What promises are our kids sure of?  What do they believe?  What are they rooted in?  What do they believe God will deliver to them just as strongly as they believe in Mommy and Daddy's ability to deliver their tangible hopes?

We have started our family statement of faith and it is a picture of a tree that we all had a hand in creating.  The roots are God's promises, the trunk is love, and the leaves, branches, and fruits are the fruit of the spirit.  What is your family statement of faith?  And what better time to define the promises we hope in than Christmas, when our ultimate hope was born?

By His Grace

I Believe...

I must start by first acknowledging that I am late in posting.  By the strength of God I am finally feeling better and was quite sick with many flu-type symptoms.  But, we continue on faith...

A couple weeks ago, we talked about how our children would answer the question I am... and how we can influence the answer to that question.  As we have been talking about faith in our house, it occurred to me that even more important that the answer to I am... is the answer to I believe...  So, one day last week after a morning devotional, I asked, "What do you believe?"  I expected wonderful, Godly answers.  I mean, come on.  We do talk about God a lot at home, but I was met with blank stares.  Really though, it is a heavy question for a 9 and 11 year old to answer.  So I narrowed the question a little bit, "What do you believe about God?"  Whew, I actually got a couple answers.  Emma said, "That He is always with us."  Cole answered, "That he listens when we pray and that he says yes to all our prayers."

So, yes, He is always with us, but does he always say yes to our prayers?  We, as adults, know that he technically does not, and that it depends on the prayer and His plan for us and the realistic nature of our prayers in His grand plan for our lives.  But, beyond that minorly mistaken doctrine from my son, it hit me that while we pray and discuss and go to church and spend time serving and send the kids to small groups and try to have their lives sprinkled with God daily, what are their roots?

Colossians 2:6,7 says' "So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in Him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness."  While we as parents do 'sprinkle' God into our children's life, at what point are we focusing on the roots in a purposeful and intentional manner?  I totally group myself in this.  What is it that they believe about God?  When we send them to church, do daily devotionals, etc... they get good things, but they are sprinklings.  What if we made an intentional and purposeful plan to influence what they believe, now while they are in our care.  The bible says, if we do that, then it will not depart from them as they grow.  "Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it."  Proverbs 22:6  Way back in the beginning of my blog, I identified the difference between teaching and training and I love that the word used here is train.

Romans 10:17 says, "Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ."  Another version (HCSB) says, "So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes from the message about Christ."  What do our children hear and what do they take in?  I know I can do a much better job of truly discipling my children and talking about what we truly believe.  That Jesus Christ died for our sins, that he was the son of God, that God gave his only son for our sin, that we are called to be different that the world.  If we can really effect the roots of our children's lives through an intentional training in what they believe, then we will affect the Godly men and women that they can become.  Though not by our might, solely by the strength and focus of the Lord, through us, right?  It takes us humbly submitting to Him, and garnering our strength to continue from him, even in the face of frustration and resistance.

Romans 11:16 (HCSB) says, "Now, if the firstfruits offered up are holy, so is the whole batch.  And if the root is holy, so are the branches."  Firstfruits are the beginnings of anything, the first part of whatever we have, our energy, our talents, our resources.  If we can help our children to give their firstfruits to the Lord, then their fruit will be Godly and they will be able to work out the path God has created for them.  They cannot give their firstfruits to the Lord if they do not know what they believe.  Over the course of this next Thanksgiving week, we are going to start an exercise.  We believe... I am starting a conversation that we will document and we will write down all that we believe about God and his will in our life as a family statement of faith.  This will be an interactive exercise and we will intentionally talk about each point and ground it in scripture.  I will share parts with you, but I encourage you to embark on your own creation of a family statement of faith.

By His Grace

Faith from the Mouths of Babes

"Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see."  Hebrews 11:1

Of course, to begin our month of focusing on faithfulness with our children I had to start with the bible's definition of faith as it leads into what is often termed the biblical hall of fame, Hebrews 11.  But how do we pick this apart for our kids and make it tangible for them?  How do we encourage a strong faith in God, so much so that He is their hope and they are certain of Him and His word?  I have been struggling with this over the course of the last couple weeks.  This seems to me to be the least tangible fruit of the spirit, the hardest to explain.  Then, from the mouth of babes...

The kids and I were doing our morning devotional and we started talking about all the fruits of the spirit that we have been focusing on since June, love actions and how they translate into joy, peace, patience and most recently, kindness and goodness.  I mentioned that we were at the end of the month and that we were ready to add our next fruit of the spirit to our list and talks.  They both looked eagerly at me and said, "What's next?"  I said, "Well, it's a little bit harder one, it challenges us to decide what we believe in, it is faithfulness."  To which Cole said, "Oh, that's easy, we just had a story about that at school."  Well, okay then, let's go to the story that Cole told us.  I scripted from his words exactly.

There were two friends named, Pythias and Damon.  Pythias goes against the king's laws, gets put in jail and gets sentenced to death.  So Damon comes to jail and asks the king if he can let Pythias go to do favors for his mother and sister.  The trip is three days away from the jail to Pythias' mother and sister.  So the king is generous enough to let Pythias go but he gives a time span of two weeks to go there and back.  But Damon has to stay in jail in Pythias' place for the two weeks and is Pythias does not get back in the two weeks Damon is killed in Pythias' place.  And so Pythias hardly makes it back before they kill Damon.  When the king sees the two, the king says, "I have never seen this much faith in two people, I can't kill people like this."  So the king sets the two of them free.

Before I talk about the conversation that ensued, you need to know that I went to Google to learn more about Pythias and Damon, like any good mom would do to find an answer.  I was unfamiliar with the story.   It is a Greek story of friendship, and I would assume that the wonderful Christian school my son attends changed it up a little to reflect a story of faith.  One place you can find the original story is: http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/greeks/literature/damon.htm

What my kids and I were able to talk about is the faith that Damon had in Pythias.  He had no assurance that Pythias would return in time to save him from a death that was not his to suffer.  He had no tangible proof that Pythias would return, only the things he knew about Pythias and what he had learned about him throughout the course of their friendship.  Interestingly, the Greek word for faith is pistis (seemed close to Pythias to me) which when used in the new testament means trustworthy, solemn promise, state of being faithful, complete trust, reliance on the Lord's power.  Damon had to have complete trust to rely on the possibility that Pythias would actually come back.  It was black and white trust.  There is no way Damon would have taken Pythias' place in jail, pending execution, is he did not have a black and white trust in Pythias.  I mean, seriously!

So what do our kids have black and white trust, the ultimate faith, in?  In order to truly act in love actions, employing the fruit of the spirit, we must have complete faith in the God we serve.  Don't we?  Otherwise when we bump up against the world, why would we not react in kind, instead of in love actions?  In order for our kids, and us for that matter, to act in love, we have to believe in who we love and have faith that he is the way, the truth, and the life.  How do we know that we have that black and white faith?  In Galatians 5:6b it says, "...The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love."  So by equipping our kids to employ the fruits of the spirit they are acting out their faith in God.  Drawing from speaking them into what they can be from last week's post, we can also encourage them to act into what they can become, strong men and women of faith.  Faith is believing, pisteuo is the Greek word for believe which is the verb version of the noun pistis.  Faith and belief are from the same root.   In addition to being able to complete the phrase I am... We also need to equip our kids with I believe...  For as we believe, from that we will act.  "For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks."  Luke 6:45 
"Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart." Proverbs 3:3  Action into belief, encouraging our kids to work out their faith and to truly be fruitful works in progress is a constant parenting purpose.  It requires our focus and conversation.  One of the things that we will do during this thankful season and month is to write a Family Statement of Faith, we believe... Stay tuned as we move toward that event.