So, it took three weeks for me to do week one's family assignment with my own family! We finally went through it all on Sunday. The kids actually seemed to enjoy it. Well, Kate was off in her own little world most of the time and just kept asking if it was her turn to tell a princess story. But, she is 4, so that explains that. And, in case you were wondering, I did let her tell a princess story after we were done!
Will really got into answering the questions. When I asked him what loving things we can do for each other, he answered "not hitting." Good answer! I asked what else two more times and he kept giving me the same answer. Makes me wonder if maybe I should watch those kids a little more closely! :) Will also did a great job learning the Bible verse. It's a little long, so I am helping him, but we have been going over it every day so far.
Honestly, I'm not sure if it's helping the kids behave. They seem about the same to me (not listening very well, as usual). But I think it has helped my own attitude. It is really hard to have a bad attitude while teaching your children Bible verses or talking about how God has demonstrated love towards us! And I truly believe that learning Bible verses will help the kids in the long run. They may not remember the verses, but they will remember this time we have together and the ideas we are learning will come back to them down the road.
Have any of you tried the family experiment? If so, let me know how it has gone for you. I'll try to post plans for the second "fruit," joy, on Saturday. My kids will be gone this weekend (yeah!), so I won't be doing the "joy" lesson until the following Sunday. Until then, may God bless you and keep you, and may his light shine upon you so that you will feel and know His great love!
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Monday, July 11, 2011
FOTS Family Experiment - Week 1
For any of you waiting on this, sorry! I meant to get this out there on Saturday, but time got away from me.
So, we're starting at the beginning with Love for the first week of the family experiment.
The verse I chose is I John 4:10-11, "This is love: not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another." I chose this verse because it is a really great (perfect really) picture of love and it also will give me a good opportunity to explain some of these concepts to my kids. Adults should memorize the whole thing but if it's too long for your kids to remember, go ahead and shorten it. I'm going to have my kids memorize this portion: "since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another." And, if you prefer, you can always choose another verse for you and your family. Choose as God directs you!
You should also spend time with a story for the kids. The story I am choosing is Jesus and the cross. This obviously goes along with the verse. You could choose another story if you like, but make sure it demonstrates love, goes along with the verse you've chosen, and is from the Bible.
During the family time and throughout the week, ask yourself and your kids "what does love look like?" and "how can we love one another like the verse says?" Some answers might be kind words, sharing, serving, time spent with each other, encouraging each other, showing affection, listening, obeying. I can't wait to hear what my kids will come up with for this one.
Let me know how it goes! And if you choose a different verse or story, let me know the details of what you've chosen!
So, we're starting at the beginning with Love for the first week of the family experiment.
The verse I chose is I John 4:10-11, "This is love: not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another." I chose this verse because it is a really great (perfect really) picture of love and it also will give me a good opportunity to explain some of these concepts to my kids. Adults should memorize the whole thing but if it's too long for your kids to remember, go ahead and shorten it. I'm going to have my kids memorize this portion: "since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another." And, if you prefer, you can always choose another verse for you and your family. Choose as God directs you!
You should also spend time with a story for the kids. The story I am choosing is Jesus and the cross. This obviously goes along with the verse. You could choose another story if you like, but make sure it demonstrates love, goes along with the verse you've chosen, and is from the Bible.
During the family time and throughout the week, ask yourself and your kids "what does love look like?" and "how can we love one another like the verse says?" Some answers might be kind words, sharing, serving, time spent with each other, encouraging each other, showing affection, listening, obeying. I can't wait to hear what my kids will come up with for this one.
Let me know how it goes! And if you choose a different verse or story, let me know the details of what you've chosen!
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
The FOTS Family Experiment
Can you all believe we are finally done looking at each of the fruits of the spirit? What was to take nine months (one fruit each month) turned into a year and a half. I guess mostly due to my not keeping up with it. But I'm glad I stuck with it and I hope you are too. I hope you stuck with it alongside me!
So, tell me, did you notice a difference in your life when you were focusing on each fruit? What did you learn? Did you notice growth, change, a difference in how you act towards others and God? How did your attitude and actions change? I'd like to tell you that I am a totally changed person in whom the fruits are now obvious, but that isn't truly the case. But I do believe that I have changed for the better in some ways. I feel like my faith is stronger as a result of this study. I am by no means perfect in demonstrating the fruits of the spirit, but I do not believe that such perfection can come in this lifetime. One thing I have learned is how dependent I am on God to have any semblance of the fruits in my life. Praise be to God that he gives us the power and the strength to keep going! Praise be to God that he gives us the fruits so that we may reflect and glorify Him in this fallen world! Praise be to God that he keeps us dependent so we must rely on and always turn back to Him! I know I will keep up the effort, though, and keep practicing. Hopefully the good days will outweigh the bad in the end. And I know that by following God in this way, my life WILL be changed for the better!
Well, you may think then that this blog is over with the end of the project. I hope that you are happy to hear it is not the end. I want to do a family experiment now. Recently, my church did a series called "Faith at Home." One sermon talked about the fruits of the spirit; another talked about Scripture memorization; a thread throughout was obedience to God and teaching in the family, particularly teaching our children God's truth at home and not just leaving it to church.
I want to get my kids involved in what I've been doing. We talk about Bible stories and Christian concepts often in our home, mostly in those "teachable moments" that pop up during normal daily life. This experiment will be more intentional. I will take one fruit each week, choose a verse for the family to memorize together, and generally discuss as a family what it means to show that fruit in our lives. I will post the fruit, the verse, a story to share with the kids relating to that week's fruit, and some suggestions for family discussion. I'm going to be sitting down with my kids on Sunday each week, but if Sundays don't work for you, choose another day. The point is sitting down as a family and spending the time to talk about each fruit, discuss the verse, and generally learn together. Then spend that week looking at the verse and talking about it. If your kids are old enough to read, then write the verse on note cards or paper and post it all around the house where everyone will see it. If your kids, like mine, can't read yet, then ask them about the verse and talk to them about it often so that it all "sticks."
I hope you will join me in this new experiment. Let's see if it makes a difference in the lives of our families! Stay tuned - on Saturday I will post the plan for our (once again) first fruit, love. Read it, tweak it if you like, and share it with your family! And, as always, I'd love to hear from you! Let me know how it goes and what you think of the experiment. Also, let me know how you did with the FOTS project that we just completed!
So, tell me, did you notice a difference in your life when you were focusing on each fruit? What did you learn? Did you notice growth, change, a difference in how you act towards others and God? How did your attitude and actions change? I'd like to tell you that I am a totally changed person in whom the fruits are now obvious, but that isn't truly the case. But I do believe that I have changed for the better in some ways. I feel like my faith is stronger as a result of this study. I am by no means perfect in demonstrating the fruits of the spirit, but I do not believe that such perfection can come in this lifetime. One thing I have learned is how dependent I am on God to have any semblance of the fruits in my life. Praise be to God that he gives us the power and the strength to keep going! Praise be to God that he gives us the fruits so that we may reflect and glorify Him in this fallen world! Praise be to God that he keeps us dependent so we must rely on and always turn back to Him! I know I will keep up the effort, though, and keep practicing. Hopefully the good days will outweigh the bad in the end. And I know that by following God in this way, my life WILL be changed for the better!
Well, you may think then that this blog is over with the end of the project. I hope that you are happy to hear it is not the end. I want to do a family experiment now. Recently, my church did a series called "Faith at Home." One sermon talked about the fruits of the spirit; another talked about Scripture memorization; a thread throughout was obedience to God and teaching in the family, particularly teaching our children God's truth at home and not just leaving it to church.
I want to get my kids involved in what I've been doing. We talk about Bible stories and Christian concepts often in our home, mostly in those "teachable moments" that pop up during normal daily life. This experiment will be more intentional. I will take one fruit each week, choose a verse for the family to memorize together, and generally discuss as a family what it means to show that fruit in our lives. I will post the fruit, the verse, a story to share with the kids relating to that week's fruit, and some suggestions for family discussion. I'm going to be sitting down with my kids on Sunday each week, but if Sundays don't work for you, choose another day. The point is sitting down as a family and spending the time to talk about each fruit, discuss the verse, and generally learn together. Then spend that week looking at the verse and talking about it. If your kids are old enough to read, then write the verse on note cards or paper and post it all around the house where everyone will see it. If your kids, like mine, can't read yet, then ask them about the verse and talk to them about it often so that it all "sticks."
I hope you will join me in this new experiment. Let's see if it makes a difference in the lives of our families! Stay tuned - on Saturday I will post the plan for our (once again) first fruit, love. Read it, tweak it if you like, and share it with your family! And, as always, I'd love to hear from you! Let me know how it goes and what you think of the experiment. Also, let me know how you did with the FOTS project that we just completed!
Friday, July 1, 2011
Self-Control
Ahhh, self-control. I'd like to believe that I am a self-controlled person, but anyone who knows me really well could tell you the truth. I am amazingly undisciplined at times and with certain things. But this last-mentioned fruit of the spirit is vitally important to our spiritual lives!
According to Scripture, there are many reasons why self-control is important. Here are a few:
- It prevents us from being surprised by the Lord's return. I Thes. 5:6
- It enables us to pray with effectiveness. I Peter 4:7
- It helps us to avoid the devil. I Peter 5:8
- It identifies us as belonging to the day (good) rather than the night (evil). I Thes. 5:8
- If we lack self-control, we are "like a city whose walls are broken down..." Proverbs 25:28
- It is part of what "will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ."
This all seems really good, right? I want to have these things and I want to have self-control, along with all the things listed above that self-control brings. I want to be joyful at my Lord's return, not caught in some disobedience or surprised. I want to pray with power. I want to avoid the devil. I want to be associated with the light. I want to be a secure city with unbroken walls. And I most certainly want to be effective and productive in Christ. It's really an obvious choice. But what is not so obvious is how to get it. I try to be self-controlled and it doesn't always work out so well for me. Thank goodness that God has a plan that is greater than me! 2 Peter 1:3-8 tells us that God has given us all we need to lead a righteous life, including self-control. Yeah!!
We need to start believing - I mean really truly believing in our heart of hearts - that we can be self-controlled. So often we face challenges, like bad habits and certain everyday struggles, fully believing that we cannot really make the right choice. We look ahead and have already decided for ourselves that we cannot overcome a particular obstacle. For example, I know that I need to get up a little earlier every day to spend time with God and His Word, but I have a mantra going in my head that says something like, "you aren't a morning person and you won't really be able to pull yourself out of bed." Perhaps your struggle is with food and you are telling yourself, "you will always have that cookie/cake/chip and won't ever really stick to a healthy eating plan." We need to change these attitudes because they do nothing for us except set us up for failure.
Let's replace these negative mantras with the promises of God from the Bible. First, Phil. 4:13, "I can do everything through Him who gives me strength." In 2 Peter 1:3-8, God promises to give us all we need to lead a righteous life. And there are many more. Assignment #1: find a verse to cling to when you face challenges, then memorize it and repeat that to yourself whenever you think that you cannot be self-controlled. Then tell me if it helps!
Self-control has an enemy and that is temptation. Think about that a second and tell me if that rings true. If we were never tempted, wouldn't self-control be easy? And I believe we each have our own areas of temptation that we struggle with the most. For me right now, it is getting up early as I mentioned above, food, and exercise. I have daily fights with myself over these particular things. I have never, though, really seen these as spiritual struggles until now. If temptation is a spiritual thing, and we know it is from Scripture, and I recognize that my particular struggles are with temptation and my feeble attempts to be self-controlled, then shouldn't I also recognize that these struggles are spiritual in nature? I think God wants us to recognize these battles as spiritual and invite Him into the fight with us.
We must rely on God's strength for our self-control instead of our own. When we try to do it ourselves, we set ourselves up for failure. Phil. 4:13. As Paul says in Gal. 3:3, "Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?" God promises to fight alongside us and it is only through His strength that we can win these battles or make any progress with them at all. I Cor. 10:13. We should come to Him with our failures and weakness, for in our weakness He is made strong! 2 Cor. 12:9-10.
That said, we also need to be proactive about being self-controlled, always with God alongside us and relying on His strength. We can train ourselves to rely on God and be self-controlled. In I Cor. 9:24-27, Paul compares this to training to run a race. We need to train for self-control like a runner trains to not only run but to win a race. Paul says, "I beat my body and make it my slave so that ... I myself will not be disqualified for the prize." There are things we can do to train ourselves in the areas particular to our personal struggles.
Here is a list of practical steps towards self-control.
(1) Be in the Word. I keep coming back to this because it is vitally important! We need to be able to recognize God's voice leading us towards self-control and away from temptation. How can we hear Him if we don't know his voice? We learn to recognize God's voice by reading and studying His Word.
(2) Recognize your own personal struggles. Think and pray about it, then write them down as God reveals them to you. For some of us this is easy; for others this may be a bit more difficult.
(3) Take on one challenge at a time. This is especially important if you are feeling overwhelmed by your list!
(4)Make a game plan. Ask yourself, what one or two things can you do today to move towards greater self-control? Some examples might be: if your struggle is with food, your one thing could be to rid your house of the food that tempts you the most so you just don't have it around anymore; if your struggle is with exercise, commit to go on one short walk today; if your struggle is with organization, tackle one small area today. You get the idea, don't you?
(5) When faced with something that challenges your self-control, in the words of my good friend and teacher, "stop, drop and pray"! It's okay (and a good idea) to pause and wait for God's direction. Ask God in that moment to give you strength and to help you stand up under the temptation you face. He will do it! We know and can believe this 100% because He specifically promises to do this in His word. So claim this promise as your own today! Also, sometimes just waiting and putting off the temptation can make it face. For example, sometimes if I tell myself I can have the cookie or cake that I crave after I do a work out, by the time I'm done with the work out I don't want the treat as much anymore.
See if you can come up with more practical steps to add to my list. Practice these things, go into training. Share you progress with all of us and let's see if these things can really make a difference!
According to Scripture, there are many reasons why self-control is important. Here are a few:
- It prevents us from being surprised by the Lord's return. I Thes. 5:6
- It enables us to pray with effectiveness. I Peter 4:7
- It helps us to avoid the devil. I Peter 5:8
- It identifies us as belonging to the day (good) rather than the night (evil). I Thes. 5:8
- If we lack self-control, we are "like a city whose walls are broken down..." Proverbs 25:28
- It is part of what "will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ."
This all seems really good, right? I want to have these things and I want to have self-control, along with all the things listed above that self-control brings. I want to be joyful at my Lord's return, not caught in some disobedience or surprised. I want to pray with power. I want to avoid the devil. I want to be associated with the light. I want to be a secure city with unbroken walls. And I most certainly want to be effective and productive in Christ. It's really an obvious choice. But what is not so obvious is how to get it. I try to be self-controlled and it doesn't always work out so well for me. Thank goodness that God has a plan that is greater than me! 2 Peter 1:3-8 tells us that God has given us all we need to lead a righteous life, including self-control. Yeah!!
We need to start believing - I mean really truly believing in our heart of hearts - that we can be self-controlled. So often we face challenges, like bad habits and certain everyday struggles, fully believing that we cannot really make the right choice. We look ahead and have already decided for ourselves that we cannot overcome a particular obstacle. For example, I know that I need to get up a little earlier every day to spend time with God and His Word, but I have a mantra going in my head that says something like, "you aren't a morning person and you won't really be able to pull yourself out of bed." Perhaps your struggle is with food and you are telling yourself, "you will always have that cookie/cake/chip and won't ever really stick to a healthy eating plan." We need to change these attitudes because they do nothing for us except set us up for failure.
Let's replace these negative mantras with the promises of God from the Bible. First, Phil. 4:13, "I can do everything through Him who gives me strength." In 2 Peter 1:3-8, God promises to give us all we need to lead a righteous life. And there are many more. Assignment #1: find a verse to cling to when you face challenges, then memorize it and repeat that to yourself whenever you think that you cannot be self-controlled. Then tell me if it helps!
Self-control has an enemy and that is temptation. Think about that a second and tell me if that rings true. If we were never tempted, wouldn't self-control be easy? And I believe we each have our own areas of temptation that we struggle with the most. For me right now, it is getting up early as I mentioned above, food, and exercise. I have daily fights with myself over these particular things. I have never, though, really seen these as spiritual struggles until now. If temptation is a spiritual thing, and we know it is from Scripture, and I recognize that my particular struggles are with temptation and my feeble attempts to be self-controlled, then shouldn't I also recognize that these struggles are spiritual in nature? I think God wants us to recognize these battles as spiritual and invite Him into the fight with us.
We must rely on God's strength for our self-control instead of our own. When we try to do it ourselves, we set ourselves up for failure. Phil. 4:13. As Paul says in Gal. 3:3, "Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?" God promises to fight alongside us and it is only through His strength that we can win these battles or make any progress with them at all. I Cor. 10:13. We should come to Him with our failures and weakness, for in our weakness He is made strong! 2 Cor. 12:9-10.
That said, we also need to be proactive about being self-controlled, always with God alongside us and relying on His strength. We can train ourselves to rely on God and be self-controlled. In I Cor. 9:24-27, Paul compares this to training to run a race. We need to train for self-control like a runner trains to not only run but to win a race. Paul says, "I beat my body and make it my slave so that ... I myself will not be disqualified for the prize." There are things we can do to train ourselves in the areas particular to our personal struggles.
Here is a list of practical steps towards self-control.
(1) Be in the Word. I keep coming back to this because it is vitally important! We need to be able to recognize God's voice leading us towards self-control and away from temptation. How can we hear Him if we don't know his voice? We learn to recognize God's voice by reading and studying His Word.
(2) Recognize your own personal struggles. Think and pray about it, then write them down as God reveals them to you. For some of us this is easy; for others this may be a bit more difficult.
(3) Take on one challenge at a time. This is especially important if you are feeling overwhelmed by your list!
(4)Make a game plan. Ask yourself, what one or two things can you do today to move towards greater self-control? Some examples might be: if your struggle is with food, your one thing could be to rid your house of the food that tempts you the most so you just don't have it around anymore; if your struggle is with exercise, commit to go on one short walk today; if your struggle is with organization, tackle one small area today. You get the idea, don't you?
(5) When faced with something that challenges your self-control, in the words of my good friend and teacher, "stop, drop and pray"! It's okay (and a good idea) to pause and wait for God's direction. Ask God in that moment to give you strength and to help you stand up under the temptation you face. He will do it! We know and can believe this 100% because He specifically promises to do this in His word. So claim this promise as your own today! Also, sometimes just waiting and putting off the temptation can make it face. For example, sometimes if I tell myself I can have the cookie or cake that I crave after I do a work out, by the time I'm done with the work out I don't want the treat as much anymore.
See if you can come up with more practical steps to add to my list. Practice these things, go into training. Share you progress with all of us and let's see if these things can really make a difference!
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