Giving Credit to God

Just saw Pastor Mark Batterson's blog posting for today over at evotional.com titled "Altars to God or Momuments to Self" and wanted to share an example from this morning's PCA Elementary chapel that this brought to mind.

At PCA elementary, the grades 4-6 students meet from 9:45-10:20 am and then the grades K-3 students meet from 10:40-11:20 am. Our chapel this morning was on the topic of forgiveness, and they (again) were (stuck?) listening to me speak. Two weeks ago we talked about "What does it really mean to say I'm sorry" and last week we talked about "confession."

So this morning in the G4-6 chapel I tried to sequence everything well, connecting our talk about forgiveness to the previous two chapels, trying to make the talk interesting and challenging, and also teach them good biblical interpretation skills, though rather "subliminally" as we looked at Ephesians 4:32. It just went so smoothly and I was so encouraged!

Then after recess we had the K-3 chapel... and everything seemingly went wrong. All the things that seemed to work well about the G4-6 chapel seemed to flop with the younger kids and a couple other unforeseen situations happened. But then just as we neared the end and I wondered what, if anything, was happening in their hearts, one rather talkative boy speaks up a bit too loudly to answer a friend's question (not my question which had just been answered by a girl two seats away from him!) and says in reference to Jesus answer to Peter about how many times should I forgive someone (Matthew 18:22), "it doesn't just mean 77 times, it means you're supposed to forgive all the time." Nailed it! Couldn't have said it better if I tried!

So I'm ready to close in prayer and yet one girl has her hand up... even though I haven't asked a question. Hmmm? Do I leave it and just pray? Okay, I'll take a chance... so I acknowledge the girl's hand. "Do you have a question?" I ask. "No, just a comment," she says, and the proceeds to tell the following story.

"My birthday was last Sunday and my brother was mean to me. The next day he came and asked me to forgive him but I told him I'd think about it and get back to him later. But the next day I realized that was wrong and that I needed to forgive him, even if I didn't want to, because Jesus forgave me." Again, nailed it! That's what I was trying to get across in my talk, but you said it way better!

As Christian educators/leaders, we always want to be prepared. And yet when anything good and of eternal value happens in the lives of young people (or adults!)... its not me who does the work, it is the LORD! Give credit to whom credit is due! Thanks for that reminder today, God!