I pray that God blesses you and your family this season. I pray God protects you and your family and provides for you guys abundantly; even more than he has done in the past. God is good! Amen.

I am so incredibly glad that you got to experience God’s powerful word this week at Church on the Rock! I am hopeful that God has impacted your family through the hard and diligent work we do here at Church. If you do not walk away from church unaffected by God’s word, we have done a severe mis-service to you and your family. Our experiences with God should be life altering!

Rodger’s message was based on focus – where we focus our lives and what priorities we place in them. Our message to the kids this week was based on the lesson. We need to focus on God and worship him throughout our lives.

This is a HUGE lesson to teach your kids. As a teacher, I would easily get upset when families allowed their children to place their priorities on video games or friends FIRST, rather than church or school. This is a lesson I learned at a child, and am very thankful that my parents forced me to learn at a young age. Habits and routines get much harder to break at an older age, near impossible!

Let me encourage you to teach your children that not only does God come first before school or football, but is actively invited throughout these activities. Because it is not only a matter of God being first, he needs to be a part of all aspects of our life!

Let me put it into perspective: If I prayed for my Children’s hall Monday through Friday, but never sought God during church on Sunday, do you think he would show up in a way that we could only give credit to him?

If your son is playing a football game as a wide-receiver, catches the ball by his pinky, jukes down the field in a miraculous way through 3 defenders, then makes a huge touchdown, who would you give credit to? Him? His coach? Or God? Perhaps it was all three! When God is invited into our lives to say, instead of to visit when we come to church on Sundays and Wednesdays, things like that happen! But only when we give that glory to God.

I boiled this story to one main point: I will Worship God! The kids are extremely proud to be able to recite the main point by word and motion. Ask them to do it for you! Along with our main point, we looked into 2 Kings, chapter 17, verse 39 for our scriptural encouragement: “You must worship only the LORD your God. He is the one who will rescue you from all your enemies.” These scriptures are a very integral part of your children’s walk with Christ. Let me encourage you to go over these scriptures with them, so that they can have a better understanding of God’s word.

Through this teaching, I pray that your children didn’t leave our church without being affected by the word of God. For you, let me share this little devotion from Elevate Church (www.leadershipforkids.tv/)

The Exodus is such an inspiring story that it is known across the entire world even by those who have no connection to Christian or Jewish faith. But a few of the details of the story could apply to us even in our modern culture. The Israelites are enslaved by the nation of Egypt. They are laborers and their sweat and toil is nearly unbearable.

Moses comes and requests that they be able to leave to worship God and Pharaoh responds by increasing the work and cutting supplies. Pharaoh thinks that they will abandon thoughts of worship with the crushing demands of their new schedule. This should sound familiar. We too are weighed down with impossible schedules and dwindling supplies of time and energy. When we attempt to set aside time for worship, the world looks at us as time wasters and tells us that we are missing out on the important things of life.

So we become our own taskmasters. We fill our schedules and calendars with every extracurricular activity, every club, every sport, every trip, concert, or outing. But it is time to realize that this type of schedule does not make us free. It makes us slaves. Many believers have allowed their families to become slaves to a schedule that keeps them from making God and His Church the center of our lives as it should be.

Set yourselves free from tyrannical forces that want you to give up the ONE day that God asks you to give to worship each week. Follow the Israelites and walk away from anyone or anything that pushes you to constantly give up worshiping God at church. When you do, God will walk with you, just like He did with the Israelites. And walking with God and worshiping Him will lead you to a new kind of life, just like it did for the Israelites.

“And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near.” Hebrews 10:25 (NLT)

Pastor Jared, Kids’ Rock Children’s Ministry