Sunday School number 9

This weekend we went to Holland Michigan, so we went to a new church plant there. We were visiting a friend who is the worship leader there and he needed my help singing with the worship team. So, this week, I spent an hour at worship practice, an hour and a half at Sunday service, and an hour in Sunday school (three and a half hours in total). In Sunday school the lesson all about Noah. I was immediately interested because Noah is usually a lesson that you would hear in children’s church or something. The lesson was opened with a scriptural search for the reason for the flood. We read Genesis 7:1, where God tells Noah that he and his family are the only ones righteous enough to escape the flood. Noah was the only man who pleased God. This opened a discussion on the righteousness of Noah – people questioned what he had done, and what the earth had done to come to be destroyed. We found and discussed how Noah was the only one who was walking with God and how scripture says earth was filled with violence. After this we started talking about how Noah’s faith was strong through the process of building the arc. Three parts of Scripture tell about the faith of Noah – he spent over 100 years building the structure, he built the huge boat on land (obviously implying that he trusted God that the flood waters would reach it,) and he was the only person that listened to God and followed His instructions. From this evidence we concluded that Noah probably was made fun of quite frequently. He would have had many reasons to give up, but he stuck with it. This is the kind of faith we should have – we should walk with God, follow his instructions, and then stick with them, no matter what people think or say about us. This opened another discussion of how we should do this – obviously, first we have to be faithful, listening and following through, but most of the time, just thinking to ourselves that we are going to do something, it doesn’t actually happen. Therefore, we must not only surrender our lives to God, but also have an accountability system. We should have people in our lives that we can discuss such things with, so that they can also hold us tight to the promises we are making to God. After we discussed this for a while, we said a prayer of commitment to these ideas, and had a little bit of time to hang out before church started. What can we do to please God like Noah did? How can we have a faith as strong as Noah? Why does the church think that everyone went to church as a kid and knows all of the typical “kid stories” and what can we do to change that?