Last Practicum Post!

This week, we went to a church plant in Holland, Michigan because we were visiting a friend and he needed our help that Sunday. So, for this week, we spent 3.5 hours for our practicum at a different church. (1 hour for Sunday school, 1.5 hours for worship service, and 1 hour for worship band practice).

The Sunday school lesson was focused around Noah’s Ark. For the first point, we went right to Scripture to find out why the flood happened in the first place. Genesis 7:1 states that Noah was righteous in his generation in the NIV. Other translations went as far as to translate this passage as “you [Noah] alone are righteous” in the entire world. The earth was also said to be filled with violence, which triggered God’s judgment. After discussion about these points with the class, we started talking about the most important aspect of the story, Noah’s faith. There were three major things that stood out in the story that revealed the strong faith of Noah. 1) He built the ark for about 100 years, 2) he built his enormous boat on land, and 3) he was the only person on earth who listened to God, so we interpreted into the text that Noah must have been mocked and ridiculed by other people. Though a class discussion, we determined that we need to have faith like Noah’s and how we could obtain such faith in our lives. We can do this by being faithful to God and God’s will through persecution or ridicule. We can do this by listening to God even when his tasks seem as ridiculous as building a huge boat on dry land. We can do this by completely dying to ourselves and living for God, just like Noah did when he devoted his entire life to God’s will. However, such measures, as we discussed in class, can only be done if we let God change us, depend on others for accountability, and completely die to our will and self.

Questions:

1)    1) What is the meaning of “dying to self” in your opinion?

2)    2) What are some other life applications we can use through the story of Noah that you know?