Praying For Self-Control

By Nick (My Experience As...)

Because I want to!!!

As the parent of young children I am very aware of what self-control, or rather a lack of self-control, is all about. My oldest son, currently six, is a prime example. He will get into trouble for doing something he knows he shouldn’t. Being a good parent I sit down and talk with him. After all discipline is rooted in teaching and teaching is rooted in communication. 

We will talk about what he did and how it was wrong.  He will understand the reasons for why he should take a toy from someone or whatever the offense was. He’ll understand how it feels if someone does that to him and even feel sympathy for how he made the other person feel. Then we will get to “why?” 

Click to read more ...

Praying For Faithfulness

By Jason, M.Ed., M.A.R., Headmaster

Oh, to be Faithful!

Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you;
    bind them around your neck;
    write them on the tablet of your heart.
So you will find favor and good success
   in the sight of God and man. - Proverbs 3:3-4

How do you measure the greatness of a man?  Some are great athletes; others are great geniuses.  One man can hold an audience spellbound with his amazing oratory skills, while another has built a successful company from an idea on a napkin to a billion dollars in revenue. 

I talk to a lot of parents in my line of work, and I enjoy asking them what goals and aspirations they have for their children.  Sometimes I'll phrase the question like this: "What kind of an adult do you hope your child will grow up to be?"  I get many different answers of course.  The most common response is that most parents want their children to be happy and successful.  What parent doesn't, right? I certainly don't want my three children to grow up to be miserable failures.  But what do our children need to remember to keep in front of them if they want to be truly successful, successful as God defines it?

Click to read more ...

Praying For Perseverance

By Jason (Connecting to Impact)

"Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us." (Hebrews 12:1)

We live a society that has become transfixed on happiness at all costs. Everything seems readily accessible and easily replaced. The value on people has receded just as the value on things has.

Relationships with family, friends, spouses, and others are all judged and weighed through the lens of what we gain from the arrangement. Church becomes yet another place to be a consumer instead of a contributor. And even if they do want to contribute, they may not find something that immediately interests them and walk away.

Our kids have to have perseverance. It’s not just because that’s a nice value to promote, the Bible tells us a lot about enduring and overcoming. As Hebrews 12 goes on to say, the hardships we endure can be counted as discipline. Discipline doesn’t make us happy, but we need it to be all that He has called and made us to be.

As I said in the post about our kids and work, if these are important values, we certainly have to model them, but we also need to pray them consistently for our children.

"Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer." (Romans 12:12)

Click to read more ...

Love Is...

By Nick (My Experience As...)

Love is the Greatest

1 Corinthians 13

 ¹ If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. ³ If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.

 ⁴ Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud ⁵ or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. ⁶ It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. ⁷ Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.

 ⁸ Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever! ⁹ Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! ¹⁰ But when full understanding comes, these partial things will become useless.

 ¹¹ When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. ¹² Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

 ¹³ Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.

If you have been a Christian for more than five seconds this is probably a familiar passage. My wife can quote it by heart, and often does.  Not in the “you need to learn what love is so you can treat me right” kind of way (I probably deserve it but she gets the passage and know that would be missing the point). No, she tends to remind me when I’m getting bent out of shape on something trivial with someone else. She’s pretty compassionate like that.

I think this is all a lesson we want our children to learn too. I pray for my kids to know what real love is, so when they start dating (around 30) they won’t be fooled by someone telling them how much they “love” them.

Click to read more ...

Praying for Biblical Self-Esteem: I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough... Or Am I?

By Jason, M.Ed., M.A.R., Headmaster

In the 1970's, Robert Schuller of the Crystal Cathedral wrote a national best-seller called Self-Esteem: The New Reformation.  In it, he made the rather audacious claim that the recovery of self-esteem would transform the church for the 21st Century, just as the Reformation led by Martin Luther had transformed the church in the 16th Century.  Self-Esteem became the cultural rage of the Me Generation in the 1980's and 1990's.  Saturday Night Live made fun of this obsession with their character Stuart Smalley, portrayed by now-Senator Al Franken from Minnesota, who would look in the mirror and affirm himself with the words: "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough and, Gosh-Darn-it, people like me."

Self-esteem is a tricky thing.  Studies in the 70's had shown that students who performed poorly in school usually had very low self-esteem, while high-achieving students had high self-esteem.  Schools responded by developing self-esteem programs.  Oddly, other studies since have shown that one population group has exceptionally high self-esteem: death row inmates.  It seems they all valued their own worth much more than that of their victims.  Today, American students have nearly the highest self-esteem of any group of students in the world, even though they perform well below most industrialized nations on standardized testing.

Click to read more ...