The "Devoted" Five
We continued our talk about the Holy Spirit tonight. We talked about the Israelites's sin in Exodus 32 with the making of the golden calf and how God was so angry with the people He didn't even want to go with them on their way to the promised land anymore. We talked about Moses's stand to not go anywhere without God's presence and how we too should refuse to go anywhere without God's presence (the Holy Spirit) leading us (Ex. 33:1-3, 15-16).
To illustrate this, we brought a glove, just a plain old glove. We talked about what the glove could do. Can it pick things up, hold things, use a pen to write? Not by itself! Alone, a glove is just a limp piece of material shaped like a hand, but unable to do anything a hand can do.
Then Tara put her hand inside the glove. Now the glove could pick things up, hold things, write with a pen, make a fist, walk on two fingers, etc...
To God, we are like a glove. And God's Holy Spirit is like the hand that fits into the glove when we become Christians. Without God, we are limp and lifeless, useless and empty gloves. Once we have the Holy Spirit inside of us, God can begin to do wonderful things with us and through us. When God's Holy Spirit is within us we have a far greater ability to love others and to understand right from wrong. We can genuinely and with the right motives, exhibit the fruits of the Spirit as found in Galatians 5:22-23. It's like we have this supernatural power when we have the Holy Spirit inside of us (Acts 1:8a).
We went outside then and planted some giant sunflower seeds along the fence next to the educational building. It'll be a reminder to the kids of last week's lesson about following God wherever He goes just as the sunflower follows the sun wherever it goes.
This was also our week to celebrate with pizza for dinner and rewards for those kids who took on the challenge of daily devotions from last month, completed them, and returned them by the deadline we set for them. The kids who received their rewards were quite proud of their handmade candles from us in their favorite colors. A special thanks to Jennifer Smith for helping out with this project too!
