A man wrote to the department of agriculture to find out how to cope with the crabgrass that was spoiling his lawn. They gave him a number of suggestions, and he tried them all, but nothing worked. Finally, he was completely frustrated, and sought help again, informing them that every method they’d suggested had failed, and his yard was still filled with crabgrass. He got back a rather short reply which read, “We suggest you learn to love it.”
You can probably relate to that problem of crabgrass if you have ever tried to remove habitual sin in your life. You may feel you have tried everything and nothing works. Change eludes you! The sin remains and maybe even grows!
Unfortunately too often, in a our failures at living a life a purity, we give up and come to live with our sin and maybe even love it.
One of the key struggles in the Christian walk is dealing with the process of change as we struggle to live a life of purity. Lasting change never comes about without a change in attitude, a change in heart. When we hate sin as God hates sin, we will be committed to avoid sin and live a life of purity.
But we also have to realise that we can never change our sinful nature in our own strength. We must cry as David cried, “Create in me a clean heart, Oh God” (Psalm 51:10) and “renew a right spirit within me.”
When God creates a new heart in us, new actions will follow. Only through constant renewal in the Lord will the new actions remain and take root in your life.
* What are some of the areas of your life where sin seems to taking over your lawn?
* What are the attitudes about those sins that need to be changed before you can eliminate them from your life?
* Ask God, as David did, to create in you a clean heart, to change those attitudes to agree with His.
* Ask God to daily renew your heart and strengthen your spirit. Depend on him. Trust in Him. Trust in his strength.
* And when you fail, don’t give up. Confess ask God to renew a right spirit within you!
MORE IDEAS? See “Creative Object Lessons”
200 page e-book that explains everything you need to know when planning your very own object lessons. It contains 90 fully developed object lesson ideas and another 200 object lesson starter ideas based on Biblical idioms and Names / Descriptions of God.
With our days and nights we are each writing the novel of our lives. Each story is unique and has unexpected twists, surprising story arcs and a supporting cast. Every chapter has themes and character development. While the Author of Life started the story, we will write our own endings by the choices we make and the paths we take.
When I was a boy my dad got a new beagle pup from a neighbor of ours. The pup had been born and raised in a barn with cows. So when we got him he immediately moved in at our barn with our fatting calves. During the day you could look out the window of the house and see that crazy pup playing in the barnlot with the calves. And at night you could always find him sleeping in the manger near the calves. We concluded that he must think he was a calf. But as the pup got older a strange thing began to happen. He spent more and more time at the house with the dogs and less and less time at the barn with the calves. You see as he grew up he realized what he was and began to act like it. In many ways this aptly describes the process of Christian growth. As we grow in Christ we realize who we are and begin to act like it.
A game warden heard about a local fisherman that was illegally using dynamite to fish at the local lake. So the next day he decided to investigate and mayby catch the fisherman in the act. At about 6 a.m. he arrived at pier dressed as a fisherman himself and noticed a gentleman climbing into a small boat with a tackle box but no fishing pole.
Materials
Materials
I am fish-sitting for one of the children’s Sunday School classes again. The last time I did this we had one casualty. There’s only five goldfish, but it reminds me of the days when I had three aquariums of various sizes. My prize fish was a Tiger Oscar, with orange and black stripes. I also had a Plecostomas, which was like a little spotted shark with a suction cup to eat all the garbage in the aquarium. It resided in the back of the aquarium during the day, but if you quickly turned on the lights at night you could see it sucking on the glass. The Oscar slept at night so I guess you might say they had different social schedules. I don’t think they liked each other much, probably because the Oscar would have made a meal of the plecostomas if he could have, but he couldn’t quite swallow him. There were also some spotted catfish in the aquarium. Oscar actually tried to eat one of them once and instead received a bad case of indigestion as it was caught in his throat. He almost choked as apparently none of the other fish knew the heimlich manuever. Fortunately, I found him in time and he recovered. Unfortunately, the catfish didn’t recover.