Our Childrens Pastor taught today as pastor was at a youth camp teaching.
Today we focused on, "love is...protective and trusting."
Some things that really resonated in my spirit is "how protective am I of my family, church etc?" Do I protect my husband against gossip? what about my church? worse and worse, do I encourage gossip?
About being trusting, something that really was hard for me, yet makes sense in a kingdom way is, trusting someone even though they just hurt you and you know they will do it again. Tami used the example of Jesus and Judas. Jesus didn't keep kingdom secrets from Judas, yet Jesus knew that Judas would betray Him. As a general rule, do I allow my heart to get trampled on in case it might win a brother into the kingdom? (of course the Holy Spirit will give specific direction for certain situations where complete trust in someone is not wise, but as a rule, do I trust or do I make people prove they are trustworthy first?)
Another thing that was interesting to think about is how we show love to God, the same description fits when showing God love, am I protective of Him? or do I just let others say anything about Him that they like?
Do I trust Him? This is especially hard in countries where we have a lot of "the good things" and even what we consider basic care. We get in the habit of not trusting Him for so much, because we just get it for ourselves, that when big things come along, we don't know how to trust really. And really, how sad must that be to God? He is perfectly trustworty and waiting to prove it to us, yet we ignore Him and worse yet, get into worse trouble because we won't trust Him.
Tami used the story of Daniel and the Lion Den to illustrate the flow of love and trust between God and man. Daniel was protective of God, when a law was made that forbid him to worship God, he broke that law, knowing that God is to be obeyed over man. He trusted God to protect him (or just that he was willing to die for what he knew to be true.)
God trusted Daniel to do the right thing and God in turn was protective of Daniel and saved him in a really cool way.
So, those are my thoughts on what was said today, I thought it was good stuff and had to share. Oh, and the link doesn't have today's sermon, but should pretty soon. (last week was good though too
)
