This week we are going to talk about the importance of our commitments and how they shape our character and what they say about us. In fact, it’s one of the most important challenges in the Bible as God tells us to commit to Him, His ways, His path, His commandments, our husbands or wives, our parents, justice and righteousness, etc. Does that mean that we can’t be involved with anything else? Of course not, but we have to be watchful and careful because it is very easy to become committed to things that are harmful to ourselves and others! I have done it myself!
(Parents, this is the seventh in a series designed to help kids deal with identity and gender confusion by showing them that no matter what they like or what they look like or what they are good at, they are still boys and girls. When we try to push kids into filling stereotypical roles, we’re often the ones creating the confusion that they are forced to find a way to live with. I do this without making any mention of sexuality whatsoever.)
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
Have you ever heard the word commitment? It’s a very important word and especially to Christians. When we commit to something, we are promising to not only pay attention to whatever it is but also to work at it. A politician commits to doing what the voters in their district want them to do. The president or Prime Minister of a country commits to doing what is best for their country and also the countries that are friendly with them. A preacher commits to teaching the Bible to others and to showing them how to live their lives for God. A schoolteacher commits to making sure the kids in their classroom know enough to do well when they graduate to the next grade. A coach commits to making his team into better players and good sports when they lose. Moms and dads commit to raising their kids in a loving way.
Depending on how old you are, you already know about the commitments in your life. If you play sports, or compete in spelling bees, or sing in the church choir, or help out with volunteer work, then you know that your life is full of commitments to other people, to your team, to study, to practice, to show up, and to do your best. In families, we also have commitments to help each other out. Older kids help younger kids with homework when they can, everyone does chores, if someone in our family is being harmed, we make sure to defend them. We also don’t tell our friends’ secrets unless they are in danger and then we are committed to helping them.
Commitment is a big word and who and what we commit ourselves to will tell the world who we are, if we can be trusted, and what to expect from us. But not everything we commit ourselves to is a good thing, and we don’t always honor our commitments. Friends sometimes choose to be selfish instead of loving. Politicians are sometimes corrupt and take money instead of voting the way they promised to. Some of them even change political parties after getting elected. Parents and relatives aren’t always good and loving to the kids in their lives. Sometimes, teachers do things they shouldn’t. Some pastors decide not to follow God anymore. And sometimes coaches are mean and make the kids they coach into really bad sports. Fortunately, most people really do take their commitments really seriously but there will always be exceptions who make life difficult for others and make it hard to trust anyone.
What about you? What have you committed yourself to? What are the most important things in your life? If you made a list of what you spend most of your time and money doing, would they look like a good way to invest your life or a terrible way to waste your life? The truth is that almost everyone has made bad commitments in their lives, things that eat up everything else and years later we look back and say, “Dang, I really could have accomplished so much if I hadn’t wasted my time doing so much of that!” For me, that was video games. I was definitely what you would call a major addict. I didn’t want to do anything else. I didn’t want to work or study or anything. I just wanted to play video games. It got so bad that one day I swore to God that I would never play one again and I smashed all my video game stuff with a hammer and I don’t play anymore. Not even Solitaire or Farmville because I can just get ridiculous and life is too precious to look back and see that I got absolutely nothing done for a long time because I was too busy playing. And they never made me happy, they just kept me from being bored. It’s like I had my life on fast forward, and it made it so that I didn’t have to think about the things that were making me hurt so much on the inside. But when I gave them up, God started healing me so I don’t need all that anymore. People spend way too much time doing a lot of things that don’t mean anything in the long run, like watching too much tv, doing drugs, doing too many extra-curricular activities, or so many other things. With the exception of doing drugs, because drugs make it so that your family can’t always depend on you to be sober when they need you, there is nothing wrong with watching some tv or doing some sports or activities. The problem comes when there is no room left for what is really the most important. Anything you commit to today that won’t make any difference in a year or two or ten, you have to be careful about. It doesn’t mean that you can’t have fun or have hobbies and friends, but it does mean that you need to put those things in perspective and always understand what is the most important
The Bible tells us how important it is to be committed to certain things. In Genesis 2 and 3, we learn the importance of being committed to what God tells us to do and also what not to do. God knows best and His commandments were given to us to keep us from harm. Adam and Eve decided to commit themselves to believing the Serpent when they made the choice to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and once they both ate, they were committed to the consequences and they couldn’t go back and change what they had done. Which reminds me of a funny story about the difference between being involved with something and being committed. If you see a plate of steak and eggs, you know that the chicken was involved but the cow was committed. The chicken laid the eggs and so they had something to do with your breakfast but the cow had to die for you to eat that. If Adam had refused to eat the fruit after Eve did, he would have been just involved but because he ate, he was just as committed as she was. In sports, a fan is involved but the player is committed—unless the fan spends all of their time and money going to games and watching games and getting autographs and buying shirts and hats and jerseys and all that—then they are committed too, just in a different way.
Noah committed to God by building the Ark, but we don’t know if his sons and wife were committed or just involved. Noah had to spend a ton of time for a lot of years being committed to the idea that God wasn’t just yanking his chain, and that after it was all built, God wouldn’t say, “Just kidding! Enjoy your boat in the middle of nowhere!” Being committed to God and His promises is what faith is all about—Adam and Eve didn’t have that faith but Noah did. When Abraham left his home and family and traveled to the Land of Canaan, he had to trust that God would protect him from the strangers who lived there. Abraham wouldn’t have his family around to protect him anymore. Now, sometimes Abraham trusted God and sometimes he didn’t. He trusted God enough to make the trip, but he didn’t trust God enough to not lie about his wife—which got her kidnapped into harems not once but twice! But then, Abraham did trust God enough to believe that God would keep His promises about Isaac even though He asked Abraham to sacrifice him. Learning to be committed to God isn’t something we always get right or something we can do on day one of knowing Him. We learn to be more and more committed. So don’t be hard on yourself if you are still suspicious and don’t know what to think about God. It’s okay. He’s patient and loving.
Because Abraham was so committed to God in so many ways (even though he messed up and wasn’t always the best example), God promised to always be faithful to Abraham’s descendants and was very patient in trying to teach them to trust Him and to be as committed to Him as Abraham was. In fact, when we look at the Bible, we see God talking about commitment in terms of covenant, love, family, and especially in clinging or cleaving to Him in faith. Have you ever seen a baby koala clinging to its mom? Or maybe a baby gorilla? Or baby sea otters? Or baby scorpions on their mother’s back? Aside from being to most adorable thing on earth (except for that last one), that’s also what God wants from us. God wants commitment from us because He is committed to us! Sometimes when people read the Bible they look at the times when bad things happened to the Israelites as a consequence for the terrible things they were doing to God and they believe that God is quick to get angry and loves to hurt people to get even with them, but when we read the Bible in context, he waits decades (a decade is ten years) or even hundreds of years before He allowed their enemies to conquer them—and He only allows that so that they will remember how wonderful He was to them and how much easier life was when they were clinging to Him and trusting Him. In fact, God is so patient in the Bible that sometimes it makes me really irritated! But then, He wasn’t just patient with them when they were being gooberheads—He’s patient with me when I am being a gooberhead too. And whenever His people would realize that they were wrong and would cry out to God, all was forgiven, just like that.
When we are totally committed to God, it means that we keep His commandments and believe His promises. But more than that, it means that we love one another from the depths of our hearts and don’t do any evil things to other people. Being committed to God means becoming “Sermon on the Mount” sorts of people, not all at once but little by little. Being totally committed to God means that we are becoming better image-bearers, people who can show the world what God is like because of how loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, generous, trustworthy, gentle and self-controlled we are. It means that they won’t have to worry about what we are doing behind their backs because they can trust us like we trust God. Being committed to God is hard for a few reasons (1) we can’t see Him and that makes it hard for us to put Him in front of all the things that we can see; (2) it is hard for us to really believe that there is more to life than just what we have now, and we might feel as though we need to do as much as possible to make ourselves happy; (3) life is very distracting and it gets more distracting every year.
When I was your age, video games were pretty rare, there was no internet, ten television channels, no VCR/DVD/Blu-ray to watch movies at home with. Books were all printed on paper. Telephones were attached to the wall and most families only had one number. And I am only in my fifties! The world has changed so quickly! You guys have so much available to you but you aren’t any less bored than we were when I was a kid. Sometimes I think that if I had just known God when I was a kid, like you guys do, that things would have been a lot different—but maybe not. A lot of Christians only think about God on the weekends. But He wants us to think about Him all the time because, when we do, the world becomes a much better place.
But thinking about God isn’t enough. Being committed to God means that everything we do should be about how He would do things if He was here. The world should look like there are two billion Jesus’s walking around, but it doesn’t because most people who talk about Jesus don’t really live their lives anything like He did. Instead, we look like a lot of other things instead, things that we can see. We dress like movie stars because we want to look like them, and if we find out they are doing something, or support a certain cause or believe something, then we might follow them thinking that being the same way and doing the same things will make us more special than we are for following Jesus. But in a thousand years, no one will remember the movie stars and the things we did to be like them won’t have changed the world but people will still remember Jesus and the things we do to make His Kingdom on earth will make people’s lives much better. Being committed to Jesus is the same thing as being committed to loving our neighbors and doing good for them.
You can be committed to Jesus and play professional sports. You can be committed to Jesus and be an actor. You can be committed to Jesus and be a doctor or a lawyer or a firefighter or a police officer or a janitor or an engineer or a teacher or a farmer. You can be committed to Jesus and do absolutely any job where you are not harming people. But you can’t be committed to Jesus and be a liar or anything else that makes other people’s lives terrible. Whatever it is that we chose to be committed to in life, we have to do it in such a way that people know we really do belong to Jesus. There are some jobs that are impossible to do while following Jesus. There are things that we can never do and still be committed to Jesus. And I know it can be confusing because in your life you will come across people who say that they love and serve God who do such horrible things to other people that you wonder if they actually mean that they are serving Satan. And sometimes they will do these things and even use God as an excuse.
In a speech he delivered at Munich on April 12, 1922, Hitler said: “My feelings as a Christian point me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s Truth was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and of adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before—the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.” (Pendergrass, Kevin. Blinded by the Bible: Rethinking Our Relationship with Scripture (p. 51).)
Hitler said that he was committed to Jesus but he isn’t describing the Jesus we see in the Bible—the Jesus who commands us to love one another. He never told us to fight, He told us to turn the other cheek, to be meek, humble and to never exalt ourselves. He told us to take care of the people who can’t take care of themselves. Jesus never told anyone to kill people, not ever. Jesus died to save the Jewish people, just like He did everyone else. All of His followers for at least the first ten years were Jews, and the only reason that people like me know about Jesus is because of the Jewish men and women who traveled all over to tell people about Him. Many of them died, but Hitler is just one of many people to claim he is committed to God when really he was committed to hating people and used God and the Bible to make himself look okay. I want you to understand that when people hurt others and call themselves loving, they aren’t committed to living in the truth, they are committed to hatred and lies. That’s why it is very important that you know God personally so that people can’t trick you. Just because someone is a grownup, a pastor, a priest, or has gone to church every week for their entire life and can quote verses, it doesn’t mean that they know what it means to follow Jesus. Just because they hurt and hate people, doesn’t mean Jesus does.
A lot of really great people committed themselves to support Hitler and the work he wanted to do to make Germany great again after World War I left them very poor and ashamed. But being committed to Hitler changed them. As he started to talk about hating people who were Jewish, black, disabled, and gypsies, they started thinking bad thoughts about them too. And when those innocent people were arrested, a lot of Hitler’s supporters who had once been good and even went to church—well, they acted like it was perfectly alright to do that to people. We can’t listen to and support anyone who is cruel and hateful and mean without becoming those things too. Those kinds of words change us into people who will do terrible things. And even when we do terrible things, we still think of ourselves as the same good people that maybe we were once, before all the hate and lies turned us away from God’s path of loving Him and our neighbors. If we want to be loving people, then we have to be around loving people and act like them and not like people who only claim to be loving but do evil things to others.
Of course, terrible things like that didn’t just happen in Germany, but in America, Britain, France, Belgium and many other places. It still happens because people don’t pay attention to who and what they are committing themselves to. We can even make the mistake of hating our enemies instead of fighting against the bad things they do without hurting them. William Wilberforce is one of my all time heroes. He lived in England during the 18th and 19th century when slavery was still legal. Even though they didn’t have many slaves in England (they just had servants that they worked to the bone and didn’t pay particularly well), English planters did have a lot of slaves in places like Jamaica working in the very dangerous sugar cane fields, and they had to work very hard, were forced to eat fish guts, and often died on the job from being cut or burned. All so that people could have cheap sugar in their tea. But when William Wilberforce became a Christian, God changed his heart and he started working with abolitionists (those are people who work to end slavery). William Wilberforce fought very hard for twenty years and even though the people who approved of slavery were very cruel to him and the other abolitionists, William never treated them hatefully. He knew that slavery had poisoned their minds and their souls and so he fought against slavery but not against people. He hated slavery, but he didn’t hate people. He committed his life to making sure that there were no slaves in England or in any English colonies. He changed people’s minds and now most of the world hates slavery. That’s what it means to commit yourself to God when you see something that is wrong. You do what you can, where you can, for as long as you can but you do it without hating anyone or lying or playing by the Devil’s rules. For every Hitler in the world, there are William Wilberforces as well, showing the world what the Kingdom of Heaven really looks like.
What do you think you will commit your life to? Who will you commit it to? How will you combine your God-given talents with your time and your money to make the world more and more like the Kingdom of Heaven? Or will you make the choice to live for yourself and just try to have fun? That’s a choice that only you can make. We can do what is right and still have plenty of time for fun and happy times, but if we devote ourselves to fun and happy times, there will be no time to do what is right and we will forget what is right. That’s what selfishness does. Selfishness is what we call it when we live to do what we want and only for ourselves without caring about anyone else or helping them. A selfish person hurts others because they are too busy doing what they want to do, even when it hurts other people. Of course, no one sees themselves as selfish because when we are focused on ourselves, we become really good at lying to ourselves about what we are doing and why it is wrong. To live without caring about anything or anyone else is exactly how Satan gets his work done through us. When we only love ourselves, we become the most dangerous people in the world and we can’t love God or our neighbors.
And it would be a real shame if we didn’t have as much fun as possible, if this life wasn’t all there is. If we just died and there was nothing after it, then committing our lives to pleasure would make some sense. Some sense, but not a lot because living selfish lives can sometimes be enjoyable, for a while, but it never gives us a sense of accomplishment and none of it means anything. I could devote my life to eating every wonderful thing on earth, but I only remember the taste for as long as the food is in my mouth. So, that is like chasing the wind and trying to catch it in a bottle. Or I could go back and try to have really high level characters on online video games, but if the internet was destroyed tomorrow, I would have nothing to show for all that time and no one would know or care. I could spend all my money on fashion and fancy furniture but if my house burnt down, it would all be gone and pointless.
But if I devote my life to following Jesus and serving others—like you guys—then what I do makes a difference and nothing I do is wasted. And I can still eat tasty foods and I can still have some nice things, but I am not committed to them and so they are just there as nice treats. They aren’t my life and so if I lose those things it really doesn’t matter.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I hope that you figure out what and who is worth committing your life to. Your life is precious to me, and to God. You are all so important, and I know that the world can be a better place just because you are in it and faithfully following God in the work that He has for you and only for you.