Read Psalm 103
In 1995, I became the full-time kids’ pastor at East Coast Christian Center. As we ministered to kids in the local community, we noticed a lot of need. A man in our church who had three daughters in the youth ministry purchased an old city bus for the youth ministry. After awhile, the youth ministry got too big to use it anymore and it sat at his house. One of his neighbors, who attended another local church, approached him about picking up kids from the local housing projects and bringing them to their church. The neighbor asked if he would be interested in doing so. Alan, the man who owned the bus, jumped at the chance. He started a bus ministry and began bringing kids from the housing projects to this church.
About six weeks passed. One Sunday morning after making his route and pulling up to this church, the Senior Pastor was waiting out front for the bus to arrive. He informed Alan that they could no longer handle these kids and that he needed to take them home. Alan, not one to back down on a commitment to children who it seems have had everybody else in their lives abandon them, thought, “I know, I will take them to my church.”
It was my first day of kids’ church and Alan arrived unannounced with 45 kids from the housing projects. It was the longest two hours of my life. It became the start of a huge discipline problem in our kids’ church. I knew I did not want to send them home and put myself and the church on the long list of people who made commitments to them only to quit after it got hard. But what were we going to do?
They had no relationship with me and in their eyes I was equivalent to the cafeteria lady or the PE coach. (Because those who can’t do – teach; and those who can’t teach – teach PE.) What were we going to do? We didn’t want to reject these kids, but at the same time, we had church families keeping their kids out of kids’ church because of the riots and gang warfare. Not a good tool to get visitors to come back a second time when their child was in a knife fight after the flannel graph lesson.
One evening while visiting my mom (she had HBO), I watched the movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Dangerous Minds. In the movie, Michelle, who played a high school teacher in a predominately black school in Los Angeles, also struggled with behavioral problems. A light bulb went on in my head when in one scene, she visited some of her students in their homes in the housing projects, not because they were in trouble, but because she wanted to let the mothers of these kids know just how wonderful they were. When she did this, the students began to rise up to the level of her belief in them. In the meantime, not only did the students’ grades go up, but the behavior problems disappeared.
So, I began to visit kids every Friday afternoon. Sometimes I would ride my bike down there, other times I would drive. At first, I would get stopped by the police. They thought I was either a white boy lost in the wrong neighborhood (not good) or I was there to buy crack (also not good). But after awhile, they got to know me and encouraged me. Actually everybody got to know me, including the crack dealers, who were most of these kids’ big brothers, sisters, aunties, and even their moms. They liked me, as well, because they would say, “If you can keep them from doing what I am doing, power to you.”
It got to where every Friday afternoon the kids would be waiting for me. I would play with them, encourage them, and be excited for their grades or sporting accomplishments. I would brag on them to their moms and even listen to their moms’ issues and give them some counsel if the timing was right.
After this, our discipline problems all but disappeared. There was something we learned after that: rules without relationship equals rebellion. To those kids, kids’ church was just a bunch of rules. But once there was a relationship, the rebellion disappeared.
That’s what this Psalm says about the country of Israel. Read vs. 7 again:
“He made known his ways to Moses, his deeds to the people of Israel”
The people of Israel only knew God by what He did. He parted the Red Sea, He fed them with manna, He supplied them with water… but they still rebelled against Him. Even though they knew who He was, they did not know Him the way Moses knew Him. Moses knew Him by His ways. Moses knew Him because he spent time with Him.
It is the same with us. We can know God by what He does or we can know Him by who He is. By the way, think about this in light of your teenager.
Just by doing these devotions this month, you are purposing to know God by His ways.
