I am so glad that I was able to come home last weekend to see many of you! Each time I come home, I am amazed at how much you are all growing and maturing. I continue to pray that your growth wouldn't just be in age or height, but also spiritually.

I subscribe to a daily devotional that I read to remind me of God's truth. If you are interested, you can always buy a devotional book or find a Bible study book to go through the Bible. You can probably even download it on your IPad! I subscribe to John Piper's Daily Devotional, and it's a good, short read. If you have any questions about it, feel free to email me!

In the last two days, the devotionals have been about thankfulness. It has been reminding me that even though America officially celebrates thankfulness one day out of the year, that every day and moment should be an outpouring of thankfulness to God. For everyone, we are usually not very thankful for the things we have. We always want more. We want the newest IPad or the newest game or to watch the newest show. We want better clothes or friends or gadgets. We are never satisfied.

As a Christian, we are called to believe that our God is sovereign and is in control of everything. We are also called to believe that He alone gives good gifts. If we understand that, we must know that any good gift has been given to us by God--not because of anything we have done but because of what He has freely given to us. If we understand that only God gives us good things, we know exactly who to thank, and we realize how much and how often we need to thank God.

However, we often fail to give thanks to God because we often want to glorify ourselves. We think that we have done something to deserve the good and the bad things we have in life. We forget that God is sovereign and is in control. He has a plan. 

And what about non-believers? What happens to them? Many non-believers (if they give thanks at all), thank their friends or families or teachers, and most of the time themselves. They can never give thanks to God because they do not know who God is They do not realize how much God has given them and how much God loves them. However, I have hope and faith that God still works through a thankful heart of a non-believer to seek after where all these good things can come from. Hopefully a heart of thankfulness will spur them to understand who they should give thanks to.

So as a Christian, we have two tasks: 1) Give thanks to God for EVERYTHING because He has given blessings to us without our merit and 2) Share with those who do not believe in God, how amazing and generous our God is so they can know who to thank for everything in their lives.

Until next time,
 

We have finally made it to the end. This is the fourth and last installment of the Bully series that I will be doing for the newsletter. We have learned about what bullies are, what it may look like, and how we may potentially be bullies. The last thing I hope to share with you is about how to respond when you are being bullied.

First, I would like to restate the Gospel in hopes that we can bring it all back to Jesus and learn from His reaction.

Right before Jesus died on the cross, He was bullied. People wanted him to die, spit at him, beat him, yelled insults at him, mocked him, took away his clothes and made him wear ragged outfits that would humiliate anybody, put a thorny crown upon his head that pierced into him, forced him to drink bodily fluids, and made him carry the heavy, wooden cross that he would be crucified on. Jesus had to endure things we may never have to experience in our lifetimes.

Yet how did He react? We have to understand that Jesus has all the power in the world, that He could have easily decided to strike down all the people who bullied him and wanted him to die. He could have done it in an instant. But what did He do instead?

Because Jesus is all-knowing and LOVES us, He, instead, decided to be arrested, be bullied, be beaten, and die on the cross. He knew that He had to die on the cross as a sacrifice for all of our sins. What is the payment for sin? Death. What sort of death can repay a sin? A sinless death. Who can have a sinless death? Only God, the Father and creator.Therefore, Jesus' ability to resurrect and conquer death shows that He was in fact a sinless being and therefore God in man form. He knew that because He was sinless and God, He was the only person who could die the death to repay all of our sins. Even though everyone bullied Him, He loved us so incredibly much that He decided to choose a harder path and endure the bullying to show a greater love. 

This is exactly how we should respond when we are bullied. This does NOT mean that we must die in a physical sense to show them greater love because we are not sinless nor God. Instead we must die in a spiritual sense to our natural desire to prove our bullies wrong, seek revenge on our bullies, or respond in a hateful, unloving manner. We decide to set aside our natural, yet sinful reactions and instead choose to react in a loving, godly way.

Why do we have to do that? Because Jesus died that death so that we could show love to others here on earth. The love we show on earth lasts for eternity and means much to God Himself. 

Think twice before you respond angrily or hatefully to someone who bothers you, makes fun of you, causes harm to you, or hates you. Be safe and protect yourself, but never hate them back!

Luke 23:34 "Jesus said, 'Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.'"

Until next time,
 

 Bullies aren't always the biggest, scariest, meanest person we know.

Sometimes even we can have bullying tendencies. Many times bullying occurs because of hurt from past experiences or even natural personality tendencies. Regardless of why anyone bullies, we have to get to the root of the sin to explain why bullying occurs. Getting to the bottom of our sin not only stops us if we are already bullying but also prevents us from ever falling into becoming a bully in the future. As a sinner, we are all capable of being a bully, and we need to fight against our sinful nature to choose to love people as Christ has loved us.  Here are some reasons/steps to how we may become a bully:

1) Lack of trust in our identity in Christ: When we do not understand that we are completely loved by Christ, we start to find our value in other things. It might be that we find our worth in how well we do at school, how well we play a sport, how many instruments we can play, etc. For parents, you may find that your identity is wrapped around how well your children do in these areas as well. When we begin to find our identity in these temporary things, we realize that our value is easy to lose. There is always a threat that someone will be smarter, more talented, more athletic, etc. than we are. We will never be "good enough" or the "best" at any of these things. When we realize we can never be the best, we try to find ways to make ourselves feel better than we are, by putting other people down. Feeling like we are better than other people allows us to feel more secure about ourselves. This is the start of bullying. 

 2) Pride: As we start to find ways to make ourselves feel better, we also begin to find pride in what we think we have accomplished or what we think we have earned. We begin to feel superior to other people. When we feel we are superior over another person, then we are tempted to look down on them. We build pride and attribute our "awesomeness" to something we have been able to achieve rather than blessings from God. We take the glory for ourselves instead of glorifying God.

  3) Need to be in control: When we build pride over others, we may want to control them. This may come off as if we know better than they do, trying to impose our ideas on them, or making fun of them when they do something differently than we do. Because we want to maintain our standing as better than they are, we want to control them to maintain dominance or superiority. We do not want them to be better than us.    So then what? How can we be saved from this cycle?   Through Christ, of course! We must know that Christ came down because He loved as just as we were. There is no need to feel insecure about who we are, and therefore no need to have pride about where we stand in front of other people, and therefore no reason to feel like we have to control anyone else. Christ redeems us and delivers us from becoming a bully.

1 John 4: 9-11 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 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.

Until next time,