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God’s Rules Interpreted for Kids (A GOSPEL!)

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God is the One who made everything, and he loves everyone. He needs us to do the right thing and stop doing bad things. These are His rules.

  1. There is only One God: Him. No other gods are allowed.
  2. Don’t make statues of God or worship them. God is represented by living humans, not nonliving stone or wood or metal.
  3. Treat God’s name respectfully.
  4. Make sure to take a day to rest to remember what God is really like.
  5. Respect your parents, so you’ll have a long life.
  6. Don’t kill someone, or want to kill someone, value other people’s lives.
  7. (This one is *mainly* for grownups) Don’t share your deepest heart or body with someone other than the person you’re married to.
  8. Don’t take what doesn’t belong to you, but respect other people’s stuff.
  9. Don’t try to get people to believe things that aren’t true; instead help people believe the truth.
  10. Don’t wish you had what other people had, but be thankful for what you have.

Above all the two most important rules which sum these up are: Love God with your entire being, thinking, and doing, and Love the person next to you as much as you love yourself.

And for the most advanced rule followers: As Jesus Christ has loved you, love other people in the same way! (This one requires a bit of study and experience to follow, because that’s how you learn all the ways that Jesus Christ has loved you.)

Why this is important

The reason why all of this is important is because all of us have done wrongs things, and the older we get the more wrong things we will do. Remember that God has to punish people who do wrong things in order to be fair. He will judge everyone in the whole world unless they are willing to ask God to forgive them, to say they’re sorry, and to stop doing those bad things. The punishment for sin is death and God’s standard for who gets punished is if they match up with Jesus’ perfect obedience. I can’t obey God perfectly like Jesus did, and neither can you.

Now, He is fair, but He is also merciful. God sent Jesus not only to set the standard, but also to give his life on the cross to take the place of anyone who wishes for God to forgive them. That way God gets to be both fair and merciful. Those who ask Him to forgive them, He forgives. Not only that, but He also gives his Holy Spirit to those who ask for him, to help them do what is right. Only those who have the Holy Spirit living in them are able to obey God perfectly.

God has a plan for all of this. God wants people to be filled with his Spirit so that He can bring people everywhere back into a good relationship with Him. Then once he’s got all the people who will stop sinning, and start obeying on board, He will burn up this old earth and sky and make a new one where there are no bad things and no people who do bad things anymore. If you ask God to forgive you and give you his Holy Spirit to help you do the right thing, you too will be allowed to be in that New Earth and Sky. And God will build his house on earth with them, and they will all live and reign in the new Earth like Kings and Queens forever and ever. If you don’t, there is an fire that never dies that will burn up all who do not ask God to forgive them, and receive his Holy Spirit. But if you do this, you will be called a Christian.

Now, the life of a Christian is hard, because the rest of the world is sinning against God and doesn’t want to serve God, but if we do what Jesus did, we will show the rest of the people in the world how God really loves them and wants them to repent so they can have a good relationship with Him again.

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4. Noah: Obedience is a Two-Edged Sword

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The gospel is a two-edged sword: - The two sides of the gospel
Photo credit: christiantruthcenter.com

Hebrews 11:7–By faith Noah, being warned by God about things not yet seen, in reverence prepared an ark for the salvation of his household, by which he condemned the world, and became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith.

This hard lesson from Noah gets to the grittiness of a stark reality depicted in both Covenants: some will not be saved. Faith is more than a spiritual exercise: it is the vitality of obedience that prepares us for the day of God’s judgment.

The Warning

Who was Noah anyway? His name meant “rest” and he was named by his father with a hope that “This one will give us rest from our work and from the toil of our hands arising from the ground which the Lord has cursed.” (Genesis 5:29) So he was a child born with destiny, but this is not why God warned him. God warned him because “Noah walked with God.” (Genesis 6:9). God is a good friend. He doesn’t keep from sharing his secrets with those who walk with him. (See the previous post.)

God warned Noah by sharing with him what He saw (the corruption of the world) and what he was going to do about it. (flood the whole earth). He let Noah, who could only see with his two eyes, what God saw in the unseen. This warning is privileged to one who is seeking to know the Unseen God.

The Obedience

Noah’s internal response to God’s wrathful declaration, is not depicted as sarcasm, terror, doubt, or some vain imagination. Reverence is the word that Hebrews’ author uses. Reverence is submission of the heart to the obedience of God. Reverence is worship of God as the one who is worthy when your world is not yet but soon will be very literally falling apart around you. Obedience is the material offspring of a Reverent heart. As total as one is so total is the other. Obedience is only 100% if Reverence is 100%. And what are we told of Noah in Genesis 6:22: “Thus Noah did; according to all that God had commanded him, so he did.”

The implications for the believer today are staggering. Anything that draws the heart away from total reverence of God is also drawing the person’s body away from total obedience to God.

This is the life of Faith: Walking with God doing what He gives you to do.

The Sword

“By which he condemned the world.” This is not vindictive as a way of saying, “Noah was looking down with grim satisfaction at all the sinners floating away.” No. This means Noah’s obedient actions were Noah’s proof that the world needed to be judged. Another way of saying it, because he did right, by the same rule everyone else had done wrong. Obedience is the sword that swings both saving those with faith, and condemning those without it.

This is the burden of Faith. Faith is 100% for God, and brings salvation, and is the just condemnation of the world who refuses to be whole-heartedly for One whom they cannot see. The tragedy was world-wide in Noah’s day, and one day again the tragedy will be world-wide once again.

Application:

  1. Cultivate healthy reverence for God by examining your thoughts and affections toward him, and let every thing that is important to you be laid down on the altar of faith.
  2. Walk with God. Let your relationship with God be the basis for all else in your life.
  3. Obey him 100% in whatever he calls you to do. It is your salvation.
  4. Be real with believers and unbelievers about God: there is no middle road: there is only fully obedient and saved, and not fully obedient and condemned.
  5. Pray for those who are weak or lacking in faith that they may have a heart to trust in Him who is unseen.
  6. Establish relationships of trust with others and let them see your own faith in action.

We will talk more about “the righteousness which is according to faith” as we talk about Abraham.

1. Us: The World and the Word

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Hebrews 11:3~ “By faith we understand that the ages of time were created by the proclamation of God, so that, from what was not visible, things that are seen came to be.” (Translation mine)

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Photo credit: http://hopeworkscounseling.org

Faith accounts for the unseen reality which is the basis for the seen reality. Faith does not just think there is something to the Unseen, it simply understands that the Unseen is real. We have already discussed this, and now let us look at the nature of faith.

Principle: It sees the Visible in terms of the Invisible. How are we supposed to make sense of the world of time in which we live purely by observation of the visible world? Even if those who claimed to have done so actually could, they would negate so many concepts that are unseen yet obviously real: such as meaning, love, happiness, even words. There is an invisible dimension behind everything, and faith sees it.

The Bible teaches us how to see the Seen world in terms of the Unseen.

Faith recognizes the designer in the design, the creator in the creation, and his word behind the thing. It is easy to think of Words giving us access to understanding things: a bridge between us and the world around us. This is not untrue, but words can also give access to the Person behind the Words behind the thing referred to with the word that is formed in your mind and heart. As words give access to the Seen reality, so words also give us access to the Unseen reality. Just as Paul wrote in Romans 10:13 “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the proclamation of Christ.”

This is also why faith can be trained by learning the Words of God, which we have in the Bible. The Gospel of Christ is the power of God bringing us to Salvation, because the very Gospel of Christ is woven into the fabric of the way God made the world. Paul wrote also to the Romans 1:20 that, “since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.”

Faith gives a person the ability to see the world through God’s eyes.

Application:

  1. Read the Scriptures, listen to them on audio, and let the word of God, the SAME word that created the whole world, be your access to seeing the Unseen realm, and also the world around you.
  2. Learn to see the world from the Word of God’s point of view. It’s like how Neo saw the Matrix. God’s Word in the Bible is the same Word for understanding all of the Seen world. By this I do not mean the “Bible Code” or DaVinci anything. I simply mean that a person’s words are a result of who they are, and God has revealed who He is in the words that He used to create the visible world.
Matrix as it is
Photo credit: scifi.stackexchange.com

The Boy and the Stick

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It’s hard to imagine a boy so happy with a 1-inch thick crooked dead tree-dropping, but for this boy, it was a key to unlock the world! It was a gun to fight off pirates, a boomerang to throw at game. It was a sword to rescue damsels. It was for drawing pictures in the dirt. He didn’t have anything else in the world, but with this stick, he felt like a king with a scepter in his hands.

One day the boy was walking by a garbage can and saw a stuffed animal someone had discarded. The boy plucked it out and made it his friend. Later that year his parents made more money, and at Christmas he got a pair of roller skates, and for his birthday the next year, he got a cool remote control car. Well, this boy was so happy with his new toys he left his stick by the back door of his house behind the window sill in it’s secret hiding spot.

The boy got older, and his toys got more sophisticated. He eventually he had grown old enough to get a job, so he could buy more expensive toys: A Four-wheeler, a computer, a phone. And by this point you’d think the boy with the stick had everything he wanted. Nope. He was an adult, he had the car he wanted, the friends he wanted, and was dating a girl, but he always wanted more. Only when he had more, would he be happy.

Then one day the unthinkable happened: He was the victim of identity theft. All his money was gone, and he went back to his parents’ house empty handed. They gave him his old room, with his old toys. none of them seemed to matter anymore. He went outside and sat on the back doorstep and suddenly remembered what was to his right as he was looking out into the woods: his secret hiding place. In a moment of nostalgic curiosity he looked and saw it: his old stick he played with as a boy.

It’s hard to imagine an adult so puzzled by the memories flooding back at holding a simple 1-inch-thick crooked dead tree-dropping, but the feelings came back and this time he knew what they were. He walked back into the house with his old stick which by now had rotted through, so it would break easily, and took it to his bedroom. After a little while, he settled into the feeling he had forgotten with every new toy. He remembered.

The key to the world isn’t owning everything, but truly appreciating the one thing that is truly yours.

Now, the world was his once again.

“To a Mature Man”: Stage 5–Community

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Now, dear brother, He who has been born a human, taught of God, reborn of the Holy Spirit, and proven in his heart to be for God, has come out of the Preparation stages and into the Kingdom stage of the Christian Walk. There will be some overlap in the following 4 stages.

While he still needs to remember his humanity, keep learning, and being filled with the Spirit, and spending time alone with God, the man of God now has all the resources he needs to take his stand among the other believers in the body of Christ.

The First Stage where the action really starts is in the Community. Both Israel and Jesus gives us an example of this.

Israel

Last stage, we examined how Jesus and Israel both had time in the wilderness. Israel came out of the wilderness with a Covenant, and crossed over into the promised land to take possession of it in Joshua. This is the beginning of Israel’s Kingdom stage: inheriting the land. Israel however, did not succeed in the wilderness, or in their inheritance of the land, because they did not fully drive out the people living there. They did not make a clean separation between themselves and all the nations, and so the nations became a snare to them.

Jesus’ Example

Jesus on the other hand, came out of the wilderness, he was filled with the Spirit’s Power, and because he was in-tune with the Holy Spirit, he knew what he was empowered to do. Because he knew the Scriptures, he knew what his mission was. Because he was humble, he committed to do it completely. He taught in the synagogue, and started in his home town, but his home town rejected him.

His mission was this:

THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD IS UPON ME,
BECAUSE HE ANOINTED ME TO PREACH THE GOSPEL TO THE POOR.
HE HAS SENT ME TO PROCLAIM RELEASE TO THE CAPTIVES,
AND RECOVERY OF SIGHT TO THE BLIND,
TO SET FREE THOSE WHO ARE OPPRESSED,
TO PROCLAIM THE FAVORABLE YEAR OF THE LORD.

Notice that after he shares this mission, the people in the synagogue were oooh-ing and ah-ing at him, until he started to tell them that they did not have the faith to align themselves with God’s mission. As a result of this they cast him out of the synagogue.

The World and the Mission

The Mission of the Church will unavoidably divide the church from the world. The Peace Corp, United Nations, etc all have their own ideas of good things to do, but this mission is rather specific. The Holy Spirit anoints his man to do specific things: preach good news to the poor, set captives free, give sight to the blind, let the oppressed go free, and proclaim the time of God’s acceptance. This is the mission Jesus was about, and this is also what the church is to be about.

Now that the believer is empowered, he must join God in his supernatural work along side other believers, but to do so, will also mean a decisive break from the “dis-empowered” community. The one who has the Spirit of God will be operating under a whole different set of objectives, values, and principles. Paul told the Corinthians that the community of Christ must be set apart from the world, “Come out from their midst and be separate. Do not touch what is unclean, and I will welcome you.” (2 Corinthians 6:17) The one who bears the Spirit’s power will also be led by a spirit different from that which motivates even the most humanitarian organizations. The supernatural work must be done, in the community of faith.

One of the major pitfalls is the approval of humankind. Notice that right before Jesus is separated from the community, “And all were speaking well of him, and marveling at the gracious words that fell from his lips.” (Luke 4:22) The approval of man almost limited him to merely, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” There is a reason why a Prophet is not welcome in his own hometown. If the Christian allows himself to be pinioned in places where he is not able to realize the Spirit’s full power, he will be chained to the will of man. The Spirit will not support the works of mere man but he will support the works of God.

Another major pitfall is to so remove oneself into a community of believers who have no contact with the outside world: the abandonment of humankind. Jesus when he was in community still ate with (meaning shared close hang-out time) tax-collectors and people know to be sinners. Jesus remained aligned with his mission which was to be as salt in the world, not as salt in a salt-shaker not in the world.

The Church and the Mission

That being said, the Christian is in a community of empowered believers now, and so the same Spirit in him is the same Spirit in the community of faith. This means that he will, for the most part, not be acting alone. He is a fellow citizen of a kingdom of priests. One grain of salt does nothing, but together all the grains are able to bring the flavor.

This is where the Christian must be: he must plant himself among the body of Christ where the Holy Spirit plants him, so that he may be nourished by the body, and may nourish the body in turn. The Spirit will make clear to the individual, and to the church what each person is to do. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty to live this out.

Application:

  1. One step along this stage, is joining a group of believers to live with them and worship with them. Since God has called us to peace, let us follow the Holy Spirit’s leading in the Body of Christ.

2. Another step is to find out one’s mission. We can examine one pattern given in Acts        13:2-3.

While they were ministering to the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for Me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” Then, when they had fasted and prayed and laid their hands on them, they sent them away.

If a person does not know what God wants them to do, then “minister to the Lord, and fast.” This means spend as much time in fellowship with God and communing with him, depending on him, until you both are ready to work together on whatever He wants to work on. He will show you what to do. You can go to your pastor or your church leaders to fast and minister to the Lord with you. Perhaps they can have jobs for you to do in the body, but in the meantime, continue seeking the Lord for what He wants you to do, and once he has shown it to you, and the church, go and do it.

3. A third part of this stage takes the form of separating from the world’s system of doing things. To be honest, this one is possibly the hardest to apply in this stage. Part of the purpose of Stage 4 is to prepare you for this. Many times joining ourselves with the world–the human systems of culture, government, family and spiritualism– will lead to compromise of our beliefs. Example: I worked at a pharmaceutical company for six years, in which I let them know I don’t work on Sunday. However, there were times when that conviction was not upheld, and I still had to come in to work so as to maintain a fairness to all other employees who didn’t want to work on Sundays. I was spiritually anemic there, because the Holy Spirit requires total obedience, yea holiness itself in the believer in whom he dwells. It did not surprise me when He told me it was time to leave my job.

That being said, the Holy Spirit may be leading you to join with a group of people who are bound up in the cultural sins, and practices of those who do not fear God, as an example of dependence on him. Bottom line: Let the Holy Spirit lead you in your work. He is your bread and butter not your job.

A believer remains in this stage until the Holy Spirit has specifically shown him what he is to do. Until then, let him do what Paul said to the Thessalonians:

“Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you.”~2 Thessalonians 4:11

Summary:

  1. As Jesus took his stand within the community, but still did not join himself to the world to accomplish his mission, so the Christian must do the same.
  2. Seek the Lord for the specific mission He has for you.
  3. Be about the church’s business doing what the Body of Christ is doing.
  4. Be lead by the Holy Spirit to the place he wants you plugged in and salting the earth.

The Parable of the Dandelion: The Gospel in the Old and New Testaments

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Old and New Testament

The Bible Gospel is like the dandelion.
In the Old Covenant the Gospel blossomed showing God’s goodness in His people
Whose radiance and scent were meant to draw all nations to God’s good salvation.
In the Gospels He shows His glory and Beloved He was questing for in Jesus Christ
Whose pedals stripped, and  whose seed came forth unto eternal life for the many
In the New Covenant the Gospel seeded, for the Holy Spirit to blow to all people
So that the whole world may be filled with the knowledge of the Glory of God.
It’s the same God, the same Gospel, and the same seeding, flowering plant.
This is merely a pot to help locate, cherish and nurture its growth.