Home Church

In preparation for being on the road, we have been having "home church." We did this occassionally in Minnesota when temps and road conditions got too bad to leave the house on Sundays, and the kids always loved it. On the road, we still plan on visiting lots of different churches. But because part of our mission is to spend as much time as possible growing closer to God, we'll have the benefit of being able to do "church" every day of the week, not just on Sundays.

Dylan loves opening up the worship set with his guitar solos. We just have to figure out a way to get him guitar lessons on the road so he can play "real" songs!

Next, Faith likes to go up on "stage" and sing either an improv song or one that we've learned. We have a memory verse CD where the kids learn entire chapters of the Bible through song, and today that is what Faith treated us with-Psalm 1.

Our reading today was the story of the rich man in Matthew 19. After this young rich man told Jesus that he had kept all of the commandments, he asked Jesus what he still lacked. "Jesus answered, 'If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.' When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth." When talking about this with His disciples, Jesus said, "Everyone who has left their house. . .for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life."

We thought this would be a good lesson as follow-up of our "living-estate sale." Our main prayer for our children (and ourselves, for that matter) is that they are not brought up to be "American Christians." We don't want them to go about their lives like everyone else, doing sports, shopping, building up possessions, and trying to fit God into those activities. Our mission is to let go of all those things and start over, with God first and let everything else fall into place. When Jesus told the rich man to sell everything, he said to do that first and then follow Him. Notice selling everything had to come before following Him.

In our society, it was easy to pass off this story for people in a situation like us. Who, in our country, would consider us rich? We had our electricity threatened to be shut off a couple of weeks ago. But based on the fact that we made almost $2,000 from selling over 2/3 of our stuff and still had an entire car load plus of stuff to drop off at Goodwill, I would say that the story of the rich man applies to virtually 90% of Americans.

The song on my playlist by Third Day, Offering, sums it up well. It says, "Who am I that you should suffer your very life to set me free? The only thing that I can give you is the life you gave to me." That's all I have that I can offer to Him, and that's what I want to do. (See the video above.)