Unforgettable Childhood

Sunday night we moved to the letter “B” in our ABC Journey through Scripture. Immediately my thoughts went to Matthew and the Beatitudes, but for a 3, 7, & 9 year old, that is a little bit too much. Especially because my oldest is in the process of memorizing both the 10 Commandments and the 23rd Psalm.

So my husband and I decided on Matthew 5:8.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”

We asked each of the girls to tell us some of the blessings in their lives. To be honest with you, this was not the discussion did not go as planned. The girls really struggled with coming up with blessings. It was frustrating. It made us realize this was a conversation that we really needed to have as a family.

I told the girls what my Bible commentary said about the word Blessed. It said, “To Jesus, Blessed means the experience of hope and joy. . . To find hope and joy, the deepest form of happiness, follow Jesus no matter what the cost.”

We moved on to being “pure in heart”. We asked the girls this question:

What does it mean to have a pure heart?

They  really didn’t have any answers so we turned to 1 John 1:7.

“But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.”

We talked about the statement, “the blood of Jesus”. We asked the girls if they knew what that meant. Madelyn said “Jesus died on the cross to cover our sins”. Her older sister said, “Not cover our sins, He died to take away our sins”. We explained to the girls that it means both things.

We asked the girls this question:

Why do you think if we are pure in heart we will see God?

They were not sure so we asked them this question:

Do you think that if we are sinning do you think we will see God?

They agreed that we won’t see God if we continue to sin. We were trying to get them recognize that they do see God at work in their lives already. We asked them:

Can you think of examples of God working in our lives?

This made the verse start to make sense to them. They thought of examples of God healing people that they have prayed for. That seems to be the easiest way for them to see God’s work in their lives and the lives of others.

We ended our devotional time with a prayer. Each of us prayed about something we are thankful for. After this time together we realize that we all need to take more time to see God working in all the details of our daily lives. It also made us realize we have so many things to be thankful for.