This is an episode designed to address a serious issue for both adults and kids—what does it mean to honor mother and father, and how does one obey their parents “in the Lord” as per Eph 6:1? There isn’t anyone in Christian or Jewish leadership who hasn’t been asked these questions—generally by adults suffering under the weight of abusive and irresponsible parents. So, I thought it would be a good idea to talk to kids about what it does and doesn’t mean–we certainly don’t want kids to be obeying every adult they come across, right? Warning: this could be triggering for your kids if you are a bank-robbing mom wanting them to drive the getaway car, as that was the over-the-top example I used. Any resemblance to any real person is completely accidental, obviously.

If you want to watch me recording a slightly longer version of this live on YouTube, check this out! If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.

Hi! I’m Miss Tyler, and welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you 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, where I now post slightly longer video versions. (Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context without reading an entire chapter every week!)

 The Bible is a big book about love and obedience—about when it is a good idea to obey, a bad idea to obey, who is good to obey and who is bad to obey. We also find that there are times when to obey a certain thing is good and times when it is bad. Learning to obey isn’t like one plus one equals two. Learning who and how and when to obey is all about wisdom. And wisdom is something that God will always give us more of when we ask Him and when we are responsible about how we use it. The Bible has some obedience situations that don’t really exist for most of us anymore—like slavery. When a person is fighting a war, other kinds of obedience are important. In school, your teacher does have a right to ask you to do certain things and expect you to get them done—like homework, treating your classmates with kindness, and being honest instead of cheating. Growing up is about thinking about what we are being asked to do and why we are being asked to do it, asking questions when we need to, paying close attention to who has asked us, and then deciding if what they are asking is pleasing to God or not. Sometimes, what we are asked to do doesn’t seem to matter to God in the slightest—like if someone asks us to get them a cup of water, and we should probably always say yes to something like that, right? It doesn’t hurt them, and it doesn’t hurt us, and it is a kind thing to do. But those are the sort of good deeds that honor God in little ways and cause Him to be able to trust us to do bigger things later. Let’s talk about obedience in the Bible and our lives today—what does and doesn’t count as pleasing to God and/or good for us.

One of the really sad things we see in the ancient world of Abram and Sarai is slavery. And slavery was absolutely normal to them. Before electricity and water pipes and pumps and ovens and dishwashers and clothes washers and dryers and panini makers, life was a lot of work day after day. It was very hard to get things done, and especially if you had a lot of kids or a lot of land and animals to care for. Sometimes, people came to be slaves for one reason or another, and another person would buy them. Once they were bought, they weren’t free people anymore, and they had to do everything the person who bought them told them to do. And if they had children, they were owned as well—they weren’t born free. Some others were captured as part of a war and sold or kept by the person who captured them. The slave owners, who were called their masters, had to take care of their slaves so that they could do their jobs and make their masters more wealthy. Sometimes, the slaves were forced to do terrible things, and they had no choice because they could be beaten or killed, and their families could be hurt too. A slave who ran away would just end up captured by someone else—and that might even be worse! Sometimes slaves could be set free for good service or could buy their freedom. Slaves were often branded by their owners because otherwise, slaves looked just like everyone else. But slaves could also be educated and have specialty jobs, which made it possible for them to earn their own money, especially by the time Jesus was born. Slaves, when Jesus was born, could even be high-ranking government officials and much better educated than free people.

Next week, we will look at the story of a slave named Hagar—we don’t know how she was enslaved or why; we only know some of what her life was like because she was a slave. How people were allowed to treat her, and what they could do without her permission. Enslaved people are a special group when we talk about obedience—because only God should have that kind of power over a human being’s life. It was absolutely normal all through the days of the Bible, but it doesn’t mean that God wasn’t teaching them how to eventually get rid of it. Paul even told his congregations that there is no such thing as a free person or a slave in the eyes of God. And we should definitely look at everyone the same way that God does. We are commanded to love others as ourselves, and if we wouldn’t want to be slaves, then we can know that slavery is a great evil. We can be very thankful that God made rules about how slaves could be treated, which led to eventually seeing that it wasn’t the way the Kingdom is supposed to be.

What about obedience to God? Well, we always have to obey God—totally. And if God tells us personally to do something, then we need to do it. I can think of many times in my life that God asked me to do something that I was scared to do, and He just kept on poking me and bugging me until I did it. But He has never asked me to do anything wrong, sinful, or cruel. He was telling me to do things that I didn’t want to do, that’s all. What He told me to do was a blessing, a good thing, for someone who needed help. And when they found out that I did it because God wanted it done for them, it meant a lot to them to know that God wasn’t ignoring them and they weren’t alone. If I had disobeyed, their lives would have been worse and not better. Sometimes I am embarrassed to do something God asks me to do, and other times I am just straight-up scared. Sometimes I think, “Is this my imagination, or is God really asking me to do this?” BUT, if it is a kind thing to do, then it is better to take the chance that it really is God, right? God isn’t ever going to waste His time telling you to do the things you already plan on doing—why would He? But sometimes, we fool ourselves into thinking He has given us permission to do what we want and pretend like we are obeying Him!

What about doing what the Bible says? Well, we have to be careful with that too. Sometimes, God says a certain thing to a certain person, and they were supposed to do that—but if we read it like it was written to us, then that isn’t the same thing as obeying God. Like, when Paul told Timothy to go to Troas and pick up his cloak and scrolls. When we hear a verse, it’s always important for us to know who it was said to and why. There are all sorts of people out there as you grow up who will use Bible verses to get you to do what they want you to do—either by not giving you the whole story and making the verse mean something it was never supposed to mean, or by telling us that something they were doing back in the Old Testament is something that Jesus would want us doing now. Like when Jesus said, and then Paul said, that men should only have one wife and especially if they want to be elders in the church. And at that time, some men were looking at what the Bible says about divorce, and they were twisting it all up so that a man could abandon his family for any reason he wanted to—even if his wife burned one dinner or got old and he found someone prettier. They said it was okay according to the Bible, but if they had just looked at the commandment to love their neighbor and realized that their wives were their best and closest neighbors, they would never do that. We always have to ask ourselves if what we are being asked to do is kind, loving, and healthy. I want you guys to know your Bibles not so that you can win trivia contests but so that you will come to understand what God will and will not ask you to do. People will sometimes try to trick you, and they will make you feel really smart and important when you do what they want. But really, they are just looking for people they can control and get them to do whatever they want.

Whenever someone says the Bible says something is okay or good but it seems a bit strange, I want you to ask them where it says that. And then I want you to take that verse to someone you can trust, look at it together, and everything around it to make sure that what they are saying is correct. And then I want you to pray about it. But I want you to make sure that you never believe that it is a good thing to have secrets that you keep from the people who love you. If someone says that they are serving God, or a pastor or teacher or whatever, and tells you that what they are telling you is special and only for you, then they might be trying to trick you. Find another grownup who loves you. You don’t have to do what someone says just because they are older–there are times when you just need to get away from them! There is a huge difference between an adult telling you not to play in their yard (which they have a right to do) or in the street (because that is dangerous) or asking you to turn down your music because their baby is sleeping (because that is the kind and polite thing to do), and an adult telling you to do something that is wrong or risky–like if they tell you that they want you to come with them to help them. Strangers who are adults never ask kids for help.

The Bible tells us to honor our moms and dads, and that is a good commandment. The Bible also tells children to obey their parents in the Lord. That’s also a good commandment, but what does it mean? What does it mean to honor your mom and dad? When the Bible was written, giving someone honor was about not making them look bad with shameful behavior. If you go out and get drunk, steal a car, crash it, and then dance naked in the street—not only would that be incredibly foolish, stupid, and embarrassing, but it would bring terrible shame to your whole family. Doing your best in school—the best that YOU can do—doesn’t always mean that you will get straight A’s, but it does mean they can be proud of how seriously you are taking your classes. When we are kind to others and look for opportunities to help people, we make our parents look good. Now sometimes people will kinda twist this very good commandment to honor our parents into something really bad. What happens if your parent is a bank robber? Or tells you to be a bully and smack down all the weak kids in the neighborhood to show them who’s the boss? Well, that’s where the second commandment I mentioned comes into play.

In Ephesians 6:1, Paul says, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” And then, he goes on to remind them that the reward for honoring their moms and dads is that their lives will go a lot better. And it is easy to see how a person behaving in such a way as to not make their parents look bad will have a better life than someone who goes around acting like a punk. But we can’t honor our moms and dads by doing what is wrong just because they tell us to. What if you have a mom who robs banks and tells you to drive the getaway car. You would be obeying your mom but not God, who tells us not to steal. That’s why Paul said to obey your parents “in the Lord,” which means that what your parents are telling you to do mustn’t break any of God’s big commandments. And if you aren’t supposed to help your parents break God’s commandments, then that goes double for any other adults!

If a grownup wants to touch you in a way that only your husband or wife is allowed to do once you get married, you don’t obey them no matter what. They aren’t asking you to do that “in the Lord” at all, and they need to go to jail. And if they tell you that it is all your fault, they are liars too. If a grownup does something really bad and you know about it, and they tell you that you have to keep it a secret, then you need to find another grownup you trust and talk to them about it. You don’t have to keep that secret just because a grownup told you to. You need help because doing what is right can be confusing.

It is important to remember that all humans are made to be God’s image-bearers. We were all created to show the world what God is like. All colors, all shapes and sizes, men and women, and even little babies. No one is made more in God’s image than anyone else. No one can tell you that they get special messages from God for you that you have to obey, or else. Only Jesus could do that! God wants to know you and to have you know Him–and He doesn’t need anyone else there. You have grownups who love you and will help you to know and hear Him, like I try to do. But none of us are greater than God, and none of us love you as much as He does. Sometimes, we grownups can be kinda sketchy because we are thinking about ourselves when we should be thinking more about what you need, but God doesn’t do that. God has one goal—and that goal is to make you more like Himself. He wants you to have a lot of joy, and to be able to love people and feel their love in return. He doesn’t want you to be feisty, picking fights, getting angry, and losing your temper all the time. He wants you to learn to be as patient with other people as He is with you—after all, He hasn’t killed you for anything you have done, right? He wants the people around you to be able to feel His kindness, generosity, and gentleness. And He wants people to trust Him because they can trust you. God knows that the more you are like Him, the better the world and your life will be. A person like that brings honor to their parents! Even to bank robber parents in jail!

What happens when we obey someone whom we shouldn’t obey? Let’s look at the stories of David and Jonathan and see what happened to them when they were obedient and disobedient. Sometimes, obedience is bad and disobedience is good, and we see that all over the Bible! If only there was always an easy answer!!!

David was the youngest of like seven or eight boys, and one day the prophet Samuel poured out oil on his head and made him the King of all of Israel. But there was a problem—Israel already had a king named Saul, and Saul had a son named Jonathan, whom everyone supposed would be the next King once Saul died. Now, David could have gone and been really foolish and walked up to Saul’s home and said, “Hey dude, move out! I am the King now!” He would have likely either died or almost died. But David trusted God and went back to the fields to care for the sheep and the goats. Through an amazing series of events, David ends up working as a musician, playing a harp in the court of King Saul. And then, later, David kills the Philistine giant Goliath. David ends up marrying King Saul’s daughter Michal and becomes the King’s son, and he becomes best friends with Jonathan. So, they are brothers now and best friends. But Saul was incredibly dangerous and jealous of David because he could see that the people wanted David to be the King after Saul or even instead of Saul. So Saul sent him on missions over and over again, which should have killed David, but because David was God’s choice, he survived every time.

But then, one day, Saul had had enough, and he started trying to kill David himself. He tossed a spear at David, tried to get his soldiers to arrest and kill him, and David was forced to begin disobeying the King’s commands in order to stay alive. No one was supposed to disobey the King–especially not his own sons and sons-in-law! David ran from the house of Saul and spent many years hiding in caves and fighting the enemies of Israel. David even had two chances to kill Saul but didn’t. David could obey God, but he could no longer obey Saul in the Lord. Saul’s commandments were wicked, and he wasn’t hearing from the Lord anymore, so his commands were bad ones. Although David disobeyed Saul and lived, Saul’s son Jonathan, even though he was a good man who loved David, continued to obey his father, and it got him killed. Jonathan and everyone else in the Kingdom could see that Saul had become too wicked to be King, but they kept serving and obeying him. Jonathan even knew that his father was making dangerous and disastrous decisions. That was a tough situation for Jonathan, but a good rule of thumb is that if one of your parents chucks a spear at your best friend’s head at dinner then it’s definitely time to call 911!!! And I am sure you will never have to face that situation! It’s really nice not to be a member of any of the Bible families, right? I mean, who needs that kind of drama anyway? Saul needed an intervention.

What about times when kids should have obeyed their parents in the Lord but didn’t? High Priest Eli had two sons named Hophni and Phineas. Although Eli was careful to do a good job caring for the Lord’s Tabernacle in Shiloh, his sons were both evil. They were doing some really messed up stuff that I won’t even tell you about. They were also messing around with the sacrifices and not obeying God’s commands. And those goober-heads decided it would be a great idea to take the Ark of the Covenant out of the Holy of Holies to scare the Philistines with it—without asking God first. In fact, God had stopped talking to anyone except the little boy Samuel because Hophni and Phineas were so wicked, and their father wasn’t doing anything to really stop them. He told them what to do and what not to do, and they just ignored him. And so, God told Samuel that the family would die so that Israel would have an obedient and good priesthood again. Phineas and Hophni died when the Philistines stole the ark and put it into Dagon’s temple! And then their father died of shock! The kids didn’t obey their father, but their father wasn’t obeying God because he kept allowing his wicked sons to continue to be priests.

Let’s talk about an obedience story from when Jesus was a boy. Now, we probably think that Jesus always did exactly what his parents wanted him to do without even being told, right? Nope. Oh my gosh, there was this one time when his whole family—his mom and dad and brothers and sisters—all went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover at the Temple. The city was packed with visitors who had come to worship God and celebrate being freed from slavery in Egypt. It was a very joyous and fun celebration that lasted a whole week. But on their way back to their home in Nazareth, Joseph and Mary suddenly realized that their twelve-year-old son Jesus was nowhere to be found. They searched and searched among their relatives, and no one had even seen him, so they had to go back. After three days, they found him in the Temple, and he was sitting with the Torah teachers—he was listening to them and asking them questions that amazed them. They were also amazed at the answers he gave them to their questions! Where had he been sleeping? What had he been eating? Do you think his parents were worried or angry? I can tell you that they were definitely both! They asked him, “Why did you do this to us? We’ve been so worried about you and looking for you everywhere in the city!”

What do you think Jesus said to them? Did he say sorry and ask them to forgive him? Well, you would think he’d do that because if you or I did something like that, we’d be in super huge trouble, right? But he didn’t! Instead, he gave them a confused look and said, “Where else did you expect me to be? Didn’t you know that I need to be in my Father’s House?” The House, the Beit HaMikdash, was what the Temple in Jerusalem was called—God’s House. And the Bible says, in Luke 2, that his parents were totally confused by that and didn’t know what to think. But his parents weren’t wrong to be upset that he hadn’t stayed with the family. If it was my kids, they would be SO grounded for a month. But the Bible says that he did go home with them and obeyed them after that. You see, Jesus needed to learn things too—like how not to give his parents a heart attack. He hadn’t been purposefully mean or spiteful, but he hadn’t stayed with the family like he was expected to. He wasn’t sinning against them, but he wasn’t thinking about how what he did would affect them either! He was probably thinking about how awesome it was to be surrounded by people who knew so much about the Hebrew Bible because he came from a small town, and there probably wasn’t much of anyone to talk to. I am betting that he had a lot of dinner invitations from those Torah teachers, so he didn’t go hungry.

You will make a lot of mistakes when you are twelve too, and remember that when it happens, Jesus will totally understand. He was so excited to be at the Temple, that he just stopped thinking about anything else. He wasn’t hurting his parents on purpose. He knew that obedience is important, and I suppose that after that, his parents always told him to stick close to them whenever they went to Jerusalem for the Passover, and he obeyed them.

I love you. I am praying for you. And growing up means learning to understand who to obey and who not to obey. And it can be confusing, but as long as you have people who love you, they can help you know what is wise and what would be a big mistake.

We’ve finally reached the eleventh and final episode of Wonderful You! Today we are going to sum up all of the important aspects of our identity and talk about how God uses them to show Creation who He is and what He is like. But an accurate picture of God takes more than just a handful of people, it takes us all and it is only by working together in love that we can be God’s mirror.

(Parents, this is the eleventh 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.

Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the Miss Tyler Bible, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked a bit to make it a bit clearer for kids.

For the past ten weeks, I’ve been teaching you about all the different parts of your identity, who you are in ways that are special and different from everyone else in the world. Although we all have things in common, no one has everything in common. There is only one you in the whole world, and there has never been anyone exactly like you and there never will be—even if you are an identical twin! That makes you very important because it means God can use you in ways that He can’t use anyone else. You have talents that many people don’t have, and experiences that other people haven’t shared. You know things that other people never will. You like things that other people hate and hate things that other people love. You know people that I will never meet. Even if we were both in the same room looking at the same thing, or watched the same movie, or saw a crime being committed, we wouldn’t see what happened the exact same way. Maybe you would catch a detail that I couldn’t see because you are taller or shorter or were standing in a different part of the room where you could see better. Maybe because you read certain kinds of books or have certain talents, you might understand something about what we are both looking at better than I do. I might make a mistake about what I think I am seeing because I don’t know as much as you do about it. And everyone in the world is like that—God didn’t get a printer or a photocopier so that He could make us all exactly the same. Even people who grow up in the same house are entirely different—and that’s a wonderful thing.

Have you ever heard the idiom, “the whole enchilada?” It means “everything.” Like, if someone is offering you a baked potato from the potato bar at a restaurant and they ask what you want on it and you want every topping they have so you would say, “I want the whole enchilada!” They won’t come back with an enchilada for you, but your potato will be loaded with butter and sour cream and cheddar cheese and chives and all that. Dang, now I am hungry. I need an enchilada, and a baked potato.

When God looks at you, He doesn’t just see who you are now. He sees who you can be if you follow Him. He sees everything that you have ever experienced, your talents and abilities, what you do and do not like, where you go, what you do, how you treat people, who you know and who you don’t know. And He knows just how to get you from who you are right now, to who He knows you can be and who He wants you to be. When He sees you, no matter what you have done or how you feel about yourself, He doesn’t see you as a total failure but as someone who will be incredibly spectacular as you keep working to become more and more like Jesus every day. God sees you as special right now, someone He loves. Someone Jesus loved enough to die to protect from sin and death. When Jesus died, He was investing in your life. Do you know what that means? Investing in something?

An investment is when we take whatever we have, usually time or money, and spend it so that we can be a part of something. People might invest in a house to live in, but even after they have paid for the house they still have to pay attention to it and fix what is broken, which takes time too. Sometimes, they will need to do work on the house so that it is what their family needs. They might need to add on extra rooms if their family gets big enough, or fix the roof if a tree falls on their house, so many possibilities—we just never know all that we will have to invest or our time and money when we buy a house to live in! Some people invest in the stock market, hoping that the money they put in will make more money but sometimes they lose money. Maybe they invest in a new car, so that they can get to work more easily. Some invest in silver and gold coins, hoping that they will be worth more someday. But when we invest, we don’t know what will happen. We don’t know if we will make money or lose money. We don’t know if our really nice neighbors will move away and some awful people will live near us instead. We can try to invest wisely so that we don’t waste our money, but we never know for sure if we have made a mistake until it is too late to fix it. But with Jesus, it isn’t like that at all.

When Jesus gave His life to save you, He knew just what he was getting in to. He knew that you were going to have good days and bad days but He didn’t care. You see, Jesus really does know who you can be if you follow Him and so, everything He went through was worth it. And He won’t give up on you either, no matter what. What you do might not make Him happy all the time, but not everything I do makes Him happy either. God saved you from the power of sin and death for a good purpose. It wasn’t so that you could just do whatever you want without any consequences, without bad things happening if you do bad things to cause them. God made you so that the Kingdom of Heaven, God’s Kingdom here in earth with his followers doing what He wants and loving people—He wanted the Kingdom to be better than it is right now and so He made you to help Him make it even bigger and better. He created you so that the world would be a better place and not a worse place. And it is the responsibility of everyone who loves Jesus to do that.

Of course, the first way we work on it is to learn to stop doing the things that we know are just awful. Bullying, teasing, name-calling, fighting, stealing, lying, cheating, all the things that show the world that we don’t really love other people and we are no different from people who don’t know about Jesus at all. When we come to know Jesus, He changes us from the inside out and we want different things, and we grow to want to treat people with kindness and love. I am not saying it is easy because there are still people who will be really mean to us (even people who say they love Jesus) and sin against us and we will not want to be loving toward them all the time, but God can change our minds about that too. In fact, whenever we do anything to be more like Jesus, God will help us—even if we don’t know it. But when we are being mean—it isn’t God helping us to do that way. Satan wants us back in his Kingdom and he will always be helping to make that happen. But he can’t do it unless we follow him back there! We have to make that choice—and some days that’s exactly what we do before God turns us around and says, “Um, no, you need to turn your butt around and pronto.” Isn’t that what God did with Cain? “Dude, if you don’t get a grip on your attitude and quick, bad things are going to happen.” Cain made the wrong choice but we can make the right choice.

Imagine the things you will do and the places you will go and the people you will meet—just because you are you. Your interests will take you to places many others won’t bother going. Your talents will put you in situations and jobs in companies that most people have never even heard of. You will live in certain places, towns, and neighborhoods that most people will only ever see on a map. And when you are in those places, you will have opportunities that no one else will have. You will talk to people about things that no one else can talk to them about. You will see ways to be kind, helpful, and loving that no one else will see. And the reason why is because, when God was making you, He said something like, “This kid is the whole enchilada. They are exactly who they need to be so that the world can be a better place. All I have to do now is wait for them to grow so that I can teach them how to be the amazing person I know they can be. My Kingdom needs this kid!”

Of course, God could snap His fingers and make the world better but that is never how He has chosen to do things. Instead, He made people in His image. But that doesn’t mean that God is a human, or a man or a woman, because the Bible tells us that God is spirit and has no body. So, he has no DNA or anything like that. He created DNA! It means that we are supposed to look like Him in how we act, how we treat the world around us and one another. It means that He wants us to learn to be wise like He is, and good. God is generous with the people who love Him and the people who don’t. Have you ever wondered what the world would be like if it only rained on the land of the people who worship God? Or if the gardens of cruel people wouldn’t grow any food? People would be forced to worship God just to survive, and so it would be a choice between eating and dying! They wouldn’t really love God, they would just be trying to stay alive. God wants people to love Him because He deserves love, not because He has to force them to do it. He isn’t buying our love or bribing us with stuff. We love Him because He is wonderful and good. And when people see us, God wants it to be like they are looking at Him in a mirror.

God has chosen you (and me too) to make the world better. But He won’t snap His fingers and force us to do it. He wants you to see that what He is doing in the world is good so that you will want everyone to know Him. Your identity, who you are, is a big part of how He gets that done. You may be a boy who loves to dance ballet and paint beautiful pictures, and so you might end up in an art gallery in a city in India where someone comes up to you and asks about your painting and while talking you find out that they don’t know about Jesus, and you teach them about the Gospel and that God’s Kingdom is already here with us because of what Jesus did. No one else will have that opportunity but because you are the exact person you are, God can use you to teach someone He loves but who doesn’t know Him yet. Maybe that person doesn’t think that women should be listened to, so it is a good thing you are a man! Or maybe, you are a girl who likes to catch frogs and climb trees, and maybe someday you will be climbing a mountain and you hear someone calling for help.  And down in a deep crevasse (which is a crack in the ice, like a small canyon) you see that another woman has fallen in there. You use your ropes to haul her out of there, put up your tent, place her in your sleeping bag and make a fire to keep her warm and alive, and you feed her before taking her back down the mountain. If you were a man, she might be scared to trust you, but because you are a woman, she feels safe with you and when she finds out you are a Christian, she wants to know all about it. But if you weren’t exactly you, you wouldn’t be there and you wouldn’t meet her and maybe she would have died. If you aren’t you, then all sorts of things that are supposed to happen just might not happen.

Who you are is a combination of all the things we have been talking about for all these weeks. Your talents, abilities, and interests and the choices you make about what you do with them is a huge part of who you are. Whether you are a girl or a boy is also very important because people will react to men and women differently. Sometimes God has something that needs to be done by a man and sometimes He has something that needs to be done by a woman. It’s like my cats—they will not let my husband clip their claws, at all. They don’t trust him to do it and we aren’t sure why, but they will lay nicely on their backs while I do it. Maybe it’s because they find my voice more comforting or I am more gentle about it or maybe because my hands are more delicate and my fingers are thinner so I don’t accidentally hurt them as much. When that job needs to be done, it goes to me and not him. In some cultures, women aren’t permitted to talk to men who aren’t family members, and so God would send a man for that job. Women and children who have been abused sometimes can’t talk to a man and feel safe, so God sends women to help them out. It isn’t about boys or girls being better than one another but about God loving a person enough to send the exact right person for the job He wants done.

What about if you are in a wheelchair? You see the world from a very different angle and you have different experiences and another person who is in a wheelchair or maybe has leg braces is going to feel a lot more comfortable around you than with me because they will feel understood. There are things that you will understand that I wont, and you won’t say the things that I don’t know are really dumb. Or how about if you are from another country so you know how to speak more than one language? If someone needs help, and I can’t understand them, then I can’t help. But if you are there and you understand, even if you can’t help, maybe you can tell me what they need and maybe I can help! The Kingdom of God is all about working as a team according to our gifts.

Your memories are also very important, they will help you to talk to and understand people who have been through things that are similar or the same. I can talk about being a refugee all I want but because I have never lost my home or had to leave my country, I don’t understand. So, my help won’t be as good as the help of someone who has also lived through that—but they can teach me to be a better helper! And then I can help! But I wouldn’t know how to help if someone hadn’t taught me how. Your memories can help others out in so many ways! You just never know until it happens and then you say, “Oh wow, I have been through that before and I know just what they need to do!” When someone is in trouble, it is the best thing in the world when someone knows how to fix it. In fact, whenever something is broken and I don’t want to buy a new one, I go onto YouTube and search for a video where someone is fixing it. When they make a video, they are giving me one of their memories about how to fix it! Your memories help you and they can also help others. Isn’t that just amazing? Can you think of times that you have helped people by remembering things?

All of these things I have been talking about—your talents, gifts, abilities, knowledge, memories, and experiences, and even what you look like—are exactly why you are needed. Only you can be you. No one else will ever be able to replace you or be you. They have different talents, gifts, abilities, knowledge, memories, and experiences than you—even if you have lived in the same house and even if you are twins. They aren’t helpful in the unique ways that you are helpful. It doesn’t mean that you can’t both do chores around the house, but it does mean that your puzzle pieces won’t fill in the same places of the puzzle. They are going to be needed and more helpful in certain ways and you will be needed and more helpful in others. Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking that everyone else is needed for the really important stuff but that what we can do isn’t important at all! I have a story to help you understand why that isn’t true.

So, what if the greatest Bible teacher in the world (who would not be me) is walking down the street and she meets a man who needs to know about Jesus, but he is also really hungry. The problem is that she has no money and nothing in her pockets for the man to eat. She would love to tell him about Jesus, and it is important for him to know about Jesus but he is so hungry that he won’t even be able to listen to her and he might even get angry. She looks around, very upset, wishing that she lived closer, but then she saw a corner store down the street. She walked in and explained the situation, but the store owner wouldn’t give her even a moldy apple because he figured that they would never leave him alone if he fed even one of them. So, he turned her away. She went back to the man and he looked so weak and she was starting to cry when she saw a teenage boy who looked really tough. He was eating a huge sandwich as he walked down the street. Feeling very desperate, she walked up to the young man and explained the situation to him. He nodded and smiled and reached up to scratch his neck—and when he did it, his jacket moved and she saw he was wearing a cross around his neck. He tore his sandwich in half and told her to take it. And then he thought about it again and just gave her the whole sandwich. The teacher thanked him and then took the sandwich back to the man, who ate it, and then she told him about Jesus and they prayed together. He was strong enough after the sandwich to go with her to the men’s shelter that her friends ran and they worked with him so that he could get healthy, and get a job with a company run by a woman who could always be counted on to help people in need and a place to live in a house run by a man who really cared about giving people a second chance, and the teacher would come back to check on him and invite him to Bible study.

Now, in this story we have a lot of different people—men and women working together to make the world more like the Kingdom of God. And we might make the mistake of trying to say that what some people did was really important and what others did was less important. But if even one person hadn’t done their job (like the grocer), then none of the story would have happened. Everyone was every bit as important as everyone else. Take just one person away and the man would still be in big trouble. Each one of those people, because of their lives and where they were and what they could give, played a role that no one else could play in the life of that man that Jesus died for too. That’s what it means to be a community. It takes us all to do God’s work, and it is wrong to think that what we have to offer isn’t worth much. When the man received the sandwich, that was exactly what he needed because without that sandwich, none of the rest would have happened. And the teenager who gave up his lunch probably didn’t even think it was a big deal. What you can do is important too, even when it seems like nothing.

Our lives are about what we do when we have the opportunity. Will we be kind or cruel? Generous or greedy? Will we think we are better than everyone else or will we know that people deserve to be helped when bad things happen to them? What we do tells people who we are, and when we tell them we are Christians, what we do tells them what they should think about God. The teenager with the sandwich told the world that God is generous. The teacher told the world the good news that God came to us through His Son Jesus to rescue the world from evil and death. The people who ran the men’s shelter tell us that God is looking out for us and has a place for us even when we don’t think He even cares. The woman who hired Him tells us that we have a purpose, we are useful, and needed to get the job done. The family who run the boarding house where he lived tell us that God is very concerned about the things we need. And when the teacher came back to check on him, she tells us that we are not abandoned and are worth remembering. You see, it takes every single one of us working together to show the world God’s identity—to be His mirror. Our identities work together to give the world an image of what God is like. When Jesus was here on earth, He did that perfectly and He never let God down. We make mistakes and sometimes we make God look bad by doing things we shouldn’t, but that doesn’t mean we give up. The most important part of your identity comes down to how you use it to show the world what God is like. That’s what being an image-bearer means. That’s why you were created and why you are different from everyone else who has ever lived. We need you to show us something about God that we can’t see without you. I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to really think about how you help the world to see God.

God has amazing plans for your life, even if you don’t know it. And you have the ability to do whatever God wants you to do—but you have to make good choices and prepare yourself. God’s plan for you, what you can be, is called your potential. Whether or not you make the choices to be all that God wants you to be is up to you. This week we’ll talk about what you can do to prepare for your future so that you can be the amazing person God designed from the beginning!

(Parents, this is the tenth 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.)

If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.

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.

Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the Miss Tyler Bible, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked a bit to make it a bit more clear for kids.

You are an amazing fireball of potential!

Human beings change, all the time. In fact, the skin on your body right now won’t be there next month—it will all be brand new skin! Isn’t that wild? Where does all that old skin go? Wouldn’t it be hilarious if we were like snakes and we shed our skin once a month and there were like dried out people husks all over the place? But fortunately, that isn’t how God made humans, as our skin comes off very slowly every single day so that we don’t usually notice. But, that wasn’t the kind of change I was talking about. Every day, we are changing from the people we were into the people we will be. Tripping and falling is normal for a toddler, but if you are racing in the Olympics, it is very out of the ordinary because an Olympic athlete has tremendous control over their own body—a lot more than me. My arms are always bruised from banging into things! In the same way, the people we are when we are babies changes a lot by the time we are in school, and we change even more when we go out and get jobs and do all the stuff that is part of the normal life of grownups. We can’t stay the same person forever because we need experience and abilities to do those things that only adults have—they couldn’t do those things when they were kids either. No one can.

When you are little, you cry and scream when you want things because you can’t talk yet, but when you learn to talk, you are expected to become a person who uses their words to tell people what you need or what you want because you aren’t babies anymore. As you get even older, you develop the ability to understand that being told no isn’t the end of the world. You learn to wait. You learn patience. You learn self-control. You learn to care about other people and not just yourself. You learn that in life we don’t always get what we want and when you get to be my age, you will look back and be really glad that you didn’t get everything you wanted. A lot of what we want when we are kids isn’t healthy, good, or even reasonable.  Wouldn’t it be awful to be a baby forever? Or a toddler forever, or a five-year-old forever?! Or even a teenager forever? Did any of your parents faint when I talked about you being a teenager forever? Part of being a human being is the challenge of growing up and becoming big and able to do things for ourselves. It’s about our bodies and our minds growing stronger, discovering what our talents are, and coming up with plans and goals about what we can do with our lives.

Right now, you can’t control everything about your life because you haven’t seen enough of the world to make wise decisions and there are a lot of things that you legally can’t do yet. Ten-year-olds can’t drive the car but if they are tall enough they can drive a riding lawn mower. Or ride a bike. Just because you can’t do everything doesn’t mean that there isn’t a whole lot that you can do. Some things, you might already be better at than a lot of adults. There is a really good chance that you can paint and draw better than I can because I am really awful at it and always have been. The one thing in your life that you do have control over is how you act and how you treat others, and you and only you can decide that you want to get better and better at doing things that make God happy. Things like driving the car and having your own place and having a job seem really cool now but they aren’t the biggest part of what makes you, you!

And who you are will change throughout your whole life. You will never be stuck so long as you keep growing and changing. Nothing in your life lasts forever. Tomorrow can bring new opportunities to do better, and to learn something, or to accomplish something, or learn to treat people more kindly. So, I guess my question right now is, when you think about what you will do with your life as you get old enough to make your own choices, what are the important things that you want to focus your life on? It’s okay if you don’t know yet. When you think of your future, are you thinking about what kind of job you want? Not everyone gets married and has kids but everyone has to eat, and we all need to serve God—but it is up to each person to decide what that is going to look like. Some choices are ours to make and some aren’t. Maybe we are too small for some things or too big for others. Maybe we want to be singers but can’t even carry a tune in a bucket. We might be too clumsy for sports or for dancing. Personally, I wanted to learn languages, but God had to finally tell me to focus on something else because He didn’t make my brain smart in that way.

An important part of planning our futures and shaping our own identity is by being honest with ourselves about what we are and aren’t good at. Is it something we can get better at? Or not? When it comes to how we treat others and how we love God, the answer to that is always a great big yes. We can always do better. I am in my fifties, and I am still learning to do better. And when it comes to getting to know more about what we like and what we are good at, we can always do that too. With all the years I have spent studying the Bible and history and theology and all that, I still learn something new every single day. No matter how much I know, there are always people out there who know a lot more than I do. The same is true for whatever it is you want to do.

My son Matthew is a grown up now, but he has wanted to be a police officer since he was two years old. As he got older and his plans didn’t change, we had to start looking at what he would need to do and what kind of person he would need to become so that he would have the knowledge he needs and so that he would be able to be a police officer that God can be proud of. So, it’s very important that he understands what it is to be fair, helpful, kind and able to control his temper. He has to be the kind of person who cares more about saving others from danger than being safe himself. But no one starts out being that kind of person! That’s something you have to work on your whole life. Although other people can usually get away with not having to be that brave, Matthew doesn’t get to run away or look the other way if one person is hurting someone else. He also has to understand that not everything that police officers do is going to be right, so he needs to be wise about what he does and doesn’t do and about how he looks at people who are different and about the assumptions he makes. And he doesn’t only want to be a policeman, but someday he wants to be a detective so he is in college getting his degree in criminal justice and criminology. No job in the world is just a job where we can do what we want. All jobs take special knowledge and need people who are behaving properly.

Hopefully, you have people in your life who know how to be honest with you but also know how to encourage you. Oftentimes, the people around us can see our talents and strengths better than we can—and sometimes all they can see is what they want us to be. When I was growing up, I lived near a very famous family for a while with a whole lot of kids and the parents wanted them to be movie stars and they would move all around whenever one of the kids was working on a movie or a television series. One of them went to school with my brother Travis and another one went to school with my brother Adam. And the one in between their ages has even won an Academy Award. But they never had a choice with what they were going to do with their lives. I didn’t ever even meet either of them, so I don’t know if they wanted to act or that’s just what their parents made them do. But I have also known young people who were in sports that they hated, but because their mom or dad was good at it, they had to. Or sometimes there is a family business and so someone becomes a lawyer or a doctor or a soldier or a preacher or a rabbi just because that’s what they were told they were going to be. And so, they didn’t get to make their own choices about their identity, and sometimes they end up being really good at that thing but are miserable doing it. I think the worst example are the people who only became ministers because they were expected to—but God is the one who decides who is and is not going to be called to do that.

Sometimes, we parents, teachers, and relatives really have good intentions, but we push too hard because we are worried about you guys. Sometimes, we didn’t accomplish certain things, so we want you to. Sometimes, we forget that when you grow up, you have to live with the consequences of the choices you do and don’t make—and not us. We sometimes have a hard time remembering when we were your age, how our opinions weren’t really taken seriously and although some of our ideas were very silly, it would have been nice to at least be able to talk about them. Sometimes, we didn’t tell grownups because we figured there was just no point. My son Andrew, when he was growing up, every month or so he would want to do something different with his life. And so, we would talk about it. And we would have some good conversations. And then he would latch on to another idea, and we would talk about that. Come to find out that all of this bouncing around was because he didn’t really understand all the options available to him and now, he is seeing the possibility of being a stay-at-home dad! Because I know him so well, I know he would be better at that than any of the other things he has been interested in—except for welding, he’s an amazing welder. So, guess what? I bought him some cookbooks and we are having serious talks about parenting and taking care of a home.

If you are a boy, have you considered all the types of jobs that used to just be done by women? Like being a schoolteacher, a nurse, or a librarian? One of my best friends spent time in the Navy and now he is a really great nurse! If you are a girl, have you considered all the types of jobs that used to only be done by men? Like construction, being a forest ranger, or a firefighter? My mom was an EMT and a firefighter for many years. Dads can stay home and moms can work. My son Andrew’s girlfriend is very ambitious and clever and is getting her college degree so that she can go into business, and because it is important for him to not have his kids in daycare, he wants to stay at home with them if they get married and have kids. And there is nothing wrong with either of those things. God gave them both the talents and the temperaments to do those jobs well.

But more important than your job is how you commit your life to God and make plans to become the kind of person whom He is proud to call one of His image-bearers. No matter what job you end up doing, no matter where, He wants people to see what He is like while you are doing that job. And that takes a lot of prayer, planning, and hard work. When we have Jesus as our Savior, Master, and Lord—when we make Him the boss of us—we can’t just do whatever we want however we want it. Because we have been given a new life, a new life that lasts forever and even after we die, and new hearts, it becomes our job to make the world into a more loving and wonderful place for everyone else. Now, I can tell you that the people around me got a better life just because I was being less of a jerk than before—and I am always needing to keep growing in love, joy, peacefulness, patience, kindness, trustworthiness, gentleness, and self-control. But as we become more loving, we start to notice that things are very bad for other people and the Spirit of God tells us that we have to help them.

For Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, that meant leaving the safety of his home in New York and traveling south to help Black Americans march and protest for their rights to be treated the same as White Americans. You see, he grew up in Germany and was even arrested by Hitler’s Gestapo and sent to Poland, and he had to escape from there to America. So, he knew exactly what it was to be hurt just because of the color of your skin or to have people want to kill you just because of who your parents were or how you look. He wasn’t planning to be a Civil Rights Activist in America, but he did work very hard on being an excellent person who loved people and loved God. Because he worked on himself and did what he could to prepare for his future, when he saw Black Americans being persecuted and oppressed, he knew just what he needed to do. God had been preparing him, all his life, to be able to help others. He had no idea what God’s plans were, but because of everything he had experienced and because of how God made him so brave and loving, when the time came, he was ready to act!

When Rabbi Heschel was born, like you, he was an amazing fireball of potential. No one knew exactly what he would do or who he would become. He played with other children, went to school and learned about the Bible. He ate his vegetables and brushed his teeth and played with sticks and did all the normal kid things. And as he grew, he changed. He changed because of experiences—like being a child living in Germany during WWI, growing up after the war when everyone was very poor, learning about the world as he got older, going to the synagogue every Sabbath, and going to the university. His identity changed in many ways as he grew older but also stayed the same. He was always Jewish, from the day he was born until he died. Because he was Jewish, he saw things in a certain way and did things that not everyone does. He dressed differently. He worshiped the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He was also German, but that changed when the Germans began to hurt and even kill people for being Jewish. When he died, he was an American. He became educated and was a Rabbi, a religious leader, and the writer of many wonderful books. He was married and had a family. And when he was an older man, he marched with Dr Martin Luther King Jr to help make things in America right for everyone.

His identity, who he was, was based on all of those things together and based upon the choices he made as he lived. But as a kid, he wasn’t all that different from any of you. He started out with potential but unless he made certain good choices, he wouldn’t ever be all that he could be. The world would be a very different place if he decided to race cars instead of studying to become a Rabbi. If he had built model planes instead of writing books, my life would be very different because he has taught me a lot. If he had decided to be selfish and stay safe at home, white Americans wouldn’t have seen the very white Jewish Rabbi arm in arm with some of the great civil rights workers of the day; Black people and White people working together as equals so that what happened in Germany wouldn’t happen here too. At the end of his life, Rabbi Heschel was a great many things but if you asked his mom or his dad when he was born how they thought his life would turn out, they couldn’t have guessed at very much of what actually did happen. He had potential, just like every child does, but without making choices to be a certain kind of person, we’d never even know his name.

Of course, there are other people with a lot of potential who don’t do right things. They make evil choices and do terrible things and sometimes the whole world suffers. The Bible is full of people with amazing potential who were selfish, cruel, murderous, liars, and worse. Each person who chooses to do bad could have chosen to do good. For some people it is harder than others to make good choices if their homes are not safe places to be, but when people grow up, they can see that there is more than one way to live their lives. Someone who was hurt growing up can decide that they never want anyone to feel as bad as they felt, or they might decide that it is good to be the one doing the hurting instead. But when we are born, along with the potential to do bad and to live selfishly, there is always the choice to do good to others. When we choose to do bad instead, we are wasting lives that God meant to be a blessing to everyone around us. I wasted my potential for a lot of years, more than half my life. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I had made different decisions but it just doesn’t matter because there are no do-overs. All I could do, once I figured out that I was wasting my life, was to start living differently.

I gave some things up. I started doing other things. I began to look for small ways to do kind things for others. I thought about how I could do things differently to make people’s lives less stressful. I taught my dogs not to bark all the time so that my neighbors could enjoy being in their yards. I played my music more quietly. I put my cart away at the store so that the cart returners wouldn’t have to go and get my cart from across the parking lot. I started small because of something that Jesus said once, in Luke 16:10–“Whoever is trustworthy with small things is also trustworthy in big things, and whoever isn’t honest about little things is also dishonest about big things.”

The verse is all about potential, and our potential changes when we make decisions that are good or bad. Someone who lies about breaking a cup sure won’t tell the truth about putting a dent in the car. But someone who is honest about crashing the car won’t even think twice about admitting that they broke a cup because that is much easier to admit! And when they do the right thing, when you do the right thing, your potential builds in the right direction and you become more like Jesus. When you become more like Jesus, the lives of everyone around you get better and better. A lot of talking about potential and doing something about it, to make sure that you are all God made you to be, comes down to whether you care about others. When we don’t care about other people, it won’t matter to us to steal, or lie, or hurt them. And if that happens then we will develop the identity of bad people who do bad things—it won’t matter if we think we are actually good people because what we do will tell the truth about who we are. But, if we understand our potential to become more and more like Jesus, and if we decide we want that because we love and care for others, then we will live entirely differently and we will keep changing for the better, so that our potential becomes our truth, our reality. We can become the people that God knows we can be when He looks at us, and when He created us.

Every amazing adult started off as a crying baby, who grew into a clumsy toddler, who learned their ABC’s and 123’s, who helped their parents around the house, made mistakes, had friends be mean to them, failed tests sometimes, maybe got fired from a job—you know, lived entirely normal lives. What made them live up to whom God wanted them to be was learning about what God wants and then making decisions to do it, little by little, year after year. They learned to be trustworthy with the small stuff and so God trusted them with the big stuff later. But we all start in that exact same place and go through the same sorts of experiences as children, and we all have choices to make, and futures to plan, all while listening to God and paying attention to the opportunities He gives us, always trying to head in a good direction without taking shortcuts that would lead us into trouble. So, all of those amazing people? They were pretty much just like you at one point. I love you. I am praying for you. And I can’t wait to see where your potential and your good choices will lead you!

There are boundaries everywhere—and they are very important. You have boundaries too, even if you don’t know it. Good boundaries keep us safe and tell us what is and isn’t ours. Where we make our boundaries is a big part of deciding who we are and what we are and aren’t willing to put up with! When we do certain things, it leaves less time for others, which make other kinds of boundaries. Body boundaries are also very important because what we want to have happen to our bodies matters a lot.

(Parents, this is the ninth 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.

Today I am going to teach you about something that you maybe haven’t heard of before and that is the importance of boundaries. You may think of a boundary as the fence around your yard, or maybe the edges of the playground at school or the local park. A boundary tells us when one area ends and another area begins. Boundaries can be for protection, which can be a good thing, or they can be put up as a way to keep people separated, which can sometimes be a really bad thing. Whether a boundary is good or bad depends on the context. If you have ever visited someone in the hospital who was really sick, they have boundaries set up to keep out people who have a cold or the flu. Those boundaries protect the sick people from getting even sicker. That’s a smart boundary. About sixty years ago, it became illegal here in America to tell people who weren’t white that they weren’t allowed to sit in the same places as white people could—on buses and in schools and restaurants and bathrooms. And they were finally allowed to drink from the same water fountain. Those were evil boundaries. It made sense to them at the time because of segregation laws—they thought that white people were just too good to be with black people. Even in churches—can you believe it? It seems crazy to us now because we can see that we are all created equally in God’s image—and because God is spirit, He doesn’t have a skin color. Jesus did, he was brown skinned, probably like if you took everyone in the world and combined their skin color it would probably balance out to look something like Jesus’s skin. So, when those people set up those wicked boundaries, they would probably be making Jesus go to a different church and wouldn’t even sit down with Him for dinner. They thought Jesus was white, like them, but that just doesn’t make any sense when we think about where Jesus lived.

Even though some people have some messed up boundaries, good boundaries are still are important to our lives. They can keep us healthy and safe from danger, but they can also be used to hurt others. Boundaries can be helpful, harmless, or harmful. If you have allergies, then you have to create a boundary between yourself and certain things—some people need peanut and strawberry boundaries. Sometimes they can’t even touch those things, but with others it is enough of a boundary just to keep them away from their mouths. When someone is sick, we try to keep our distance as much as possible so that we won’t get sick too. Except for moms, of course, because when someone is sick we spend a heck of a lot more time with them. When my twins were really sick when they were kids, I would actually sleep in the same bed just so that I could hear them breathing or so if they had to throw up I would be there to clean it up and change the sheets. But if I wasn’t their mom, no way should I be sleeping in their bed with them. That would be weird. But I imagine with my grandkids it would be the same. I don’t have any grandkids but it’s a good guess.

There are things I hate to eat, and so I make a boundary to try to avoid eating those things. That’s a harmless boundary—but if I was starving to death, I bet I would eat them anyway. There are types of music that give me a headache or I just don’t enjoy—and so I program my radio so that those stations don’t play. You can learn about what I do and do not like by checking out my music and movie and tv boundaries, what I will and will not watch. There are religious books that I will and will not read depending on my own boundaries—my beliefs. There is only one God that I worship because my boundaries don’t allow for me to believe in all the gods of other religions. And those boundaries are just fine, as long as I don’t hate people who do like things that I don’t like or can’t have or think that I am somehow better than they are. Most times, what we do and do not like depends more on where and when we grew up than with our own personal taste. A lot of times, we mistakenly think we have made our own choices when we really just like what we grew up with and got used to. We like those things that make us feel more comfortable.

When I was in school, I was always in a particular grade, and not in two or three at the same time. When I was in eighth grade, I learned eighth grade subjects and not Kindergarten subjects. When I was in college, my major determined where my boundaries were for the classes I took—lots of Chemistry, Physics, and Math and not very much art or music. If I took too many art and music classes, it would have taken me forever to graduate! When my kids were in High School, they went to a technical careers school, which meant less math, science, English and history and a lot more computer programming and welding. Those were the boundaries that we chose together for what they would focus on. If you take music lessons or play sports, then those things create boundaries in your life—when you spend time on those there isn’t as much time for other things. If you go into the military (like the army, navy, air force, or marines), then they are going to really set some major boundaries on just about everything in your life. In fact, when you are in basic training, they will set boundaries on when and where and how long you sleep and exactly what you will and will not do when you are awake, and how you dress and what you eat and probably things I can’t even think of because I never did any of that. Those boundaries will make you a soldier instead of a civilian, like me.

Are you beginning to see how important boundaries are and how they decide who we are going to be? What if you joined a club that not just anyone can join? That can be a good thing or a bad thing. It is good to have places where men can just be with other men and women can just be with other women, as long as those places aren’t there to hurt other people or to exclude them from opportunities. But what about groups like the Klu Klux Klan or the Nation of Islam? Both groups will say that the skin color of their own members is superior to anyone else’s color. And they can even be violent, although it has always been easier for white supremacy groups to get away with killing people. Those groups are always wrong because they insult the image of God in people who look different and have different experiences, often because of how they look, but are otherwise exactly the same. The Body of Christ, all the people who love Jesus, are every different color under the rainbow and speak so many different languages and because God is spirit, we can’t represent Him unless we all do that together. We can’t love Jesus while rejecting people who are a different color, or come from a different country, or have different customs.

How about the boundaries we have—what/who do we keep in and what do we keep out. Who do we trust and who do we not trust? The worst boundaries are created from things that people have no control over and the best boundaries are created because of the things people do when they have choices. I wouldn’t want to only hang around with rich people, because some rich people are cruel and untrustworthy—just like poor people. Or if I only wanted to be with people I thought were pretty enough or athletic enough or smart enough. Problem with those kinds of groups is that they have what are called very shallow standards—because none of those things tell us how much like Jesus someone is. The people I love to hang around and whom I trust are the people who are most like Jesus. And if you read the Gospels, you will see that Jesus was willing to hang around with anyone who was willing to hang around with Him. The people who were poor, and uneducated, and sick, and all the other people that society thought were just worthless and embarrassing—Jesus sat right down and ate with them, or fed them, or healed them, or told them that the Kingdom of Heaven belonged to people like them! They were used to hearing that all those things were their own fault and that if they were good and righteous only good things would happen to them. Does that make any sense to you? It doesn’t make any sense to me and evidently it didn’t make any sense to Jesus either. In the book of Acts, Peter learned that God is no respecter of persons—which means that He doesn’t have the same standards that we have. Paul said God doesn’t care if a person is born a Jew or a Gentile, if they are rich or poor, or if they are enslaved or free. And those were a huge deal when Jesus lived with us.

Today, if Paul was to rewrite what he wrote about how God looks at us, He might say, “In Christ Jesus, there is no high class or low class, there is no black or white or brown or whatever, there is no attractive or unattractive, intelligent or unintelligent, famous or unknown—or whatever else we can think of.” It doesn’t mean that people aren’t all of those things—it just means that God couldn’t give a flying fig about them because that isn’t how He judges our lives. God doesn’t care about your fast ball but how much you look like Him in how you treat others. The famous people to God are those who love others the best. The rich people in God’s eyes are those who know Him best and teach others about Him. The beautiful people in God’s eyes are the ones who look the most like Jesus. And the really smart people are the ones who realize that brains aren’t enough and ask Him for wisdom instead, so that they know how God wants them to behave. All the things that we think are important, don’t really matter at all in God’s Kingdom. It’s an upside-down Kingdom. The least here will often be the greatest there and the greatest here will be the lowest there because God has the right standards while we are totally distracted by the wrong ones.

What about our bodies? Do we need body boundaries? You betcha! As much as possible, we need to stay away from people who hurt our bodies. We shouldn’t have friends who hurt us, or touch us where they shouldn’t be touching us. We should always be aware of how precious our own bodies are, and the bodies of other people, and be very careful about who we let get close to us, who can touch us, and where they can touch us. It isn’t for anyone else to decide if they get to touch you, that’s your decision because your body belongs to you. Sometimes, doctors will need to touch you to make sure you are okay. But if something makes you uncomfortable, your boundaries mean that you can say no! You can ask them to explain to you why they think they need to touch you and if you don’t like the answer, it’s okay for you to feel that way. Just because I meet you and I would like a hug doesn’t mean that you have to hug me! Your body belongs to you and only to you. Someday, you might get married and then your body will also belong to another person because it will be their job to care for you and your job to care for them—but never to hurt in any way. You will still be you and they can’t just do whatever they want because your body is still your body and you are the only person who has to live inside it. And the same for the person you marry, their body is for you to love even more than you love your own body. When we can trust one another like that, to always care and never hurt, it’s safe to share our bodies with them in ways that we can’t trust with anyone else.

When Jesus was arrested, and beaten, spit on, and crucified, His body boundaries were being invaded in the most terrible ways. No one was right to do that. When people tried to kill Paul with rocks, they were wrong. When people killed the prophets and when Cain killed Abel, they were not respecting boundaries. Our lives belong to God and when someone takes our life wrongly, they are stealing from God. And when we steal things, we are always stepping across boundaries and taking something from their side and bringing it over to our side. No matter what it is. If someone  steals your bike, they are taking something from inside your boundaries (which include the things that belong to you) and putting it inside their boundaries. Like if you move your fence to make it look like you own more land by taking the land away from your neighbor.

Do not move a boundary marker (fence), and do not help yourself to the stuff of people who can’t defend themselves, for their Redeemer (God) is strong, and he will take their side against yours. (Pro 23:10-11, MTV (Miss Tyler Version))

Oh man, you do not want that. Boundaries are very important to God. Your boundaries are important to Him—He doesn’t want anyone hurting you or stealing from you. But everyone else’s boundaries are important to God too and He doesn’t want us doing evil things to anyone. No matter what. No matter if they are a different color or come from a different country or are a boy or a girl or ANYTHING. Not even if they are our enemies. It’s like Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “You have heard people say, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who hurt you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven. Because he gives sunlight to the evil and the good, and sends rain to the righteous and the unrighteous (so they can both grow things and eat no matter if they are God’s friends or His enemies). If you love the people who love you, why should you be rewarded for that? Even criminals do that much, right? And if you are only kind to your brothers and sisters, what’s the big deal? Don’t even the people who hate God do the same? God wants you to love people the same way He does.” (Matt 5:43-48, MTV)

God has the right kind of boundaries and He has a lot of them, but what He doesn’t have are boundaries that keep people away from His love. As far as God is concerned, there are only two kinds of people—the people who love Him and the people who don’t. And He wants the people who love Him to always love Him but He also wants the love of the people who don’t even know about Him yet. God has the kinds of boundaries we should all have—flexible ones. Just like in our lives, sometimes people who are on the inside of our boundaries have to be pushed outside if they are not safe people to be around, if we can’t trust them. Just because someone is on the inside of our trust and friendship boundaries doesn’t mean they can do whatever they want. And we can’t just do whatever we want when we love God either. He tells us that we have to grow to love others too, and if we don’t behave in a loving way toward others it’s because we don’t really love God either. And on the flip side, just because someone starts out on the outside of our boundaries, doesn’t mean that we can’t let them come closer if they prove that they are safe people to be with.

Think of it like a social media account like Facebook. There are people who are in the friend zone, people who are not friends but can follow you, and people who are so dangerous to be around that you block them. Based on how people behave, we decide how close they can get, right? And sometimes, people who behave for a while suddenly get nasty and after trying to get along with them for a while and trying to be loving, we have to make a decision of how much access we want them to have to us and to what we are thinking. Maybe we unfriend them and make the posts we don’t want them to see only visible to people we trust, who are on our friend list. Maybe we still let them send private messages to us to give them a chance to apologize when they are safe to be around again because people do change sometimes. But what if they send threatening messages or harass us? Then we have to decide if we are going to make it so they can’t send messages at all anymore. And for the worst cases, sometimes we have to block them so they can’t see us or talk to us at all. I had to do that a few weeks ago with some people who are actually lying about me and trying very hard to hurt me. I can’t make them stop, but I can decide to keep them out of my life while they are being destructive. Things like that will always happen and only you can decide whether someone will be inside or outside of your trust boundaries. Choose very wisely, and be merciful and forgiving when you can, but make sure that you know where your boundaries are so that other people can know when they are going too far.

But, like God, just because someone is on the outside of your boundaries doesn’t mean that it is okay to hurt them. If they have committed a crime then call the police for sure, or get an adult to help you. But when God sends good things, He doesn’t just send them to the people who are behaving themselves. He is a loving God and so He blesses His Creation. He doesn’t starve the people who don’t love Him or who are mean to you, just like He won’t do that to you if you start behaving like a gooberhead. Just think what would happen if everyone who believes in Him was rich and everyone who didn’t was poor. What do you think would happen??? Everyone would believe and love Him but for entirely the wrong reasons. Did you know that’s what Satan said about Job? That the only reason Job loved God was because God gave Job so much stuff. Satan was telling God that He was having to buy Job’s love! But Job loved God no matter what he did or didn’t have. And so there are many poor people who love God with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength and who love their neighbors for all the right reasons and not because they are getting paid to do it. But there are plenty of terrible people out there who have a ton of money, talent, good looks, popularity, smarts, children, houses, or whatever not because they love God but just because they were born into the right family, or had the right genetics, or their bodies work better than others—but not because God loves them more. I am super smart, not because God loves me more but because God gave that to me so that I could teach you. All of our gifts are for others more than for ourselves, if we are trying to be perfect like God is perfect.

When Jesus was talking about being perfect in this way, it was all about how we treat our enemies. God doesn’t play favorites by only giving good things to people who are good. Neither should we. God also doesn’t go around smiting everyone who is being bad. We shouldn’t either. God’s boundaries are about justice and mercy, but mercy seems to win more often than not. Justice is important to God—and justice is a word that means caring about fairness, peace, and respect. Because God sees everything and knows everything, justice can look different to Him than to us. When we want to get revenge when someone hurts us, sometimes God sees the reason behind what happened and wants to guide that person into better decisions—and if we take revenge, the person who hurts us might never see that they were wrong. If we do something worse than they did, then they will probably just figure that we deserved whatever they did. So we have to be very careful, when someone messes with our boundaries, to be very careful about how we treat theirs. Because, you know, sometimes we mess with other people’s boundaries and we would want them to be kind to us so that we can see that we are wrong.

Sometimes, God uses the legal system to give justice, and so when a person commits a crime we need to leave it to them to deal with it instead of making things worse. When the legal system isn’t working, we have to be very careful and band together to change things so that we will have a more just world that is more fair. If we are truly loving our neighbors then we will treat their boundaries with the same respect that we treat our own. And so if they are being treated unfairly, we will say something and we will do something.  Jesus said something when the powerful people were being cruel to the weak, and so did the prophets, and so did Moses, and so does God all over the Bible from beginning to end. Jesus was so concerned about justice that gave His life for it.

But without mercy, justice is a scary thing. If a rich man steals a loaf of bread from a poor man, leaving him hungry, it is not at all the same thing as a poor man stealing a loaf of bread from a rich man, because he is starving. Even though they are both stealing, their reasons are different. Even though they are both wrong, God looks at the poor man with mercy but will be furious with the rich man. After all, if God wasn’t merciful with us, if He always treated us how we deserve to be treated, we would all be in some super serious trouble and no one would live long enough to even be adults, right? God’s mercy boundary is huge, and if we are perfect, ours will be too.

I love you. I am praying for you. I hope you will spend time thinking about your boundaries, because you are important, and what you think and care about and feel are all important.

Like it or not, we are defined by the choices we make and not by how we think about ourselves. So, how do we develop an identity like Jesus? What if we’ve already done a lot of terrible things? What does it say about us when people hurt us? Is Jesus really in our heart or does the Bible say something even better?

(Parents, this is the eighth 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.

 As you grow up and read and hear your Bibles, you are going to hear a certain word a lot. That word is works. And “works” can mean a lot of different things, right? Adults might go to work or work at home or from home. Chores are a form of work. And there’s schoolwork, too. Work can also be used in different ways like, “Boy, that sure didn’t work” or “Maybe it will work if we put new batteries in it!” In fact, if I asked you what the word “work” means, you would also have to ask me to use it in a sentence because if you look in the dictionary, it can mean so many different things that it would be impossible to just give me one definition. Work can be a noun, a transitive verb, an intransitive verb, or even an adjective. In fact, I counted at least 32 definitions in the dictionary. English is just like that and that’s why it is just a really hard language to learn. So, if you know anyone who had to learn English as a foreign language, you should be super impressed. It ain’t an easy thing to do.

And in the Bible, the word “work” is also used in a lot of ways. Jesus and Moses and Elijah and Elisha worked miracles. God works signs and wonders. God completed His work and then rested on the seventh day from all His works. Cain worked the ground as a farmer. Jacob worked as a shepherd for Laban, and he was working so that he could marry Rachel. Pharaoh told the Israelite slaves to “get to work!” The craftsmen who made the Tabernacle worked the designs of cherubim into the curtains and their workmanship was good. Bosses were commanded not to oppress their workers. Jesus told His followers to do good works, and when Herod heard about the miracles of Jesus, he was scared because of the powers at work in Him. Paul talked about the work of the law, which is good, and the works of the law, which are not good. James, Jesus’s brother said that faith without works is dead. In most English Bibles, the word work shows up over six hundred times and has a lot of different meanings and you may think I told you that just to make you confused and irritated but this is just a really good example of why we have to be careful about assuming what a word means in the Bible. And the word “work” is very important to who you are and what you do and don’t believe and shows people the different between what you say and what you really believe.

When people look at you for the first time, they don’t really know much of anything about you. If they are smart, they won’t jump to conclusions based on how you dress or how much money you have or what you look like in general. Wise people wait to see what people say and then they compare it to what people actually do. And that can take a while. Oftentimes, people will be one thing while claiming to be the opposite. People who dress nicely and speak respectfully might be criminals. People who want to be able to trust you with their secrets might blab yours all over the place. You can’t tell by someone’s looks, or abilities, or even their family if they are good or bad. But Jesus said that there is a way you can tell, by the things they do—especially when they think no one is watching. Just because people are saying they are all that and a bag of chips, doesn’t mean we should believe them. In Matthew chapter 7, Jesus told a story about good and bad fruit from good and bad trees and how it is like people. Some folks, Jesus told them, come up and they’re all like, “look at what a harmless, innocent, gentle sheep I am..baaa…” but what they really want is to hurt people because they have a lot more in common with wolves! And if they came up saying, “GRRR…I am a wolf and you look tasty” then someone would probably just go get a gun, or yell and warn everyone or maybe both.

Jesus was telling them to look out for people who are religious and even say that they are speaking on behalf of God, like prophets, because there are a lot of phonies out there who just want to be famous or respected, or to trick people and get money out of them. Just because someone says they love God and says amazing things doesn’t mean that we don’t have to pay attention to what they do and how they treat people and if they are always honest. It means that it is even more important to watch and to make sure they are the real deal. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus talks about the kind of people who are the real deal—but we’ll talk about that later. Jesus said that people who are really doing what God wants are like trees that produce really great fruit but that people who aren’t doing what God wants are like bad trees whose fruit may look tasty on the outside but inside is all rotten, but sometimes the fruit even looks rotten on the outside and they aren’t even trying to hide it because they think they are allowed to do awful things. Jesus said that we would know them by paying close attention to their fruit, what they are doing, and not just by what they are saying. Anyone can talk but a real follower of Jesus is going to act in certain ways because Jesus changes the people who follow Him into the kinds of people who love others and want to do what is good. It doesn’t mean that we are perfect and never do anything bad, but it means that we are always growing and doing better and people can see the changes because His commandments aren’t just written in the Bible to look at and agree to do but on our hearts so that we want to do them.

Anyone can follow rules if they want to, but fruit and good works are about loving our neighbors as ourselves. Jesus is always our example of what that looks like. No one can fake it forever or in all situations. And even if we don’t see it, Jesus warns us that God sees it and those trees will be cut down so that people won’t make the mistake of eating their stinky, grody, moldy, wormy fruit anymore. And I have seen that happen a lot—sometimes after they die and people find out the truth about them because the people they hurt aren’t scared anymore but also when they are still alive and they lose their control over the people who have been hiding the truth about them. What I wish God would do is put a big red X on their forehead so it would be easier to know. It isn’t always easy to know when someone we enjoy listening to or hanging around with isn’t actually a good person. Sometimes we don’t know until they do something to hurt us or someone we love. And then, we know their identity, who they really are.

About two months ago, someone on social media began a countdown and they said that God told him that a terrible war was going to start like two weeks ago. And every day he was talking about the dreams he had of nuclear bombs and he would tell everyone how many days they had left to get things taken care of. And some people were listening to his warnings but what I did was listen to what he was saying to the people who were asking him questions and challenging what he was saying (which the Bible tells us we need to do when someone says that they are speaking for God). He was really mean to them. He was insulting them and telling them that they were in big trouble with God because God wasn’t going to allow anyone to question him. They just had to listen to him and obey him as though he was God. Which was weird because someone with good fruit would answer questions and would be gentle, loving, kind, peaceful, and would definitely not blow a gasket and call down hellfire and brimstone on people who were just doing what they were supposed to do. And on the Friday before all these nuclear weapons and disasters were going to strike, he said that God told him to go to the Appalachian trail and that he would be safe and that everyone obedient would be coming along too as part of the Greater Exodus.

Well, we all know that nothing happened and so people started asking him more questions and trying to hold him responsible for what he was saying. But he made a lot of excuses and said it really has happened and they were too disobedient to realize it and that God would punish them all for what they were doing. He talked about how his bloodline goes all the way back to Biblical times—but that is true about every human being. It isn’t like we sprouted up out of the ground. And he was bragging and a lot of people were shocked but not the people who had been paying attention to how he had been already been treating people for months. He showed everyone that his tree is rotten because all he was giving out was rotten fruit that would make people sick if they ate it. And the people who do eat it and believe him, it does hurt them. That’s why it is so important to listen to Jesus and Paul and Peter and James because they spend a lot of time telling us what good and bad fruit looks like, the kind of behavior that is loving or hateful, and helps or hurts. In fact, there are whole lists of things that we are supposed to be and lists of things we are not supposed to be. Because our deeds, our works, our actions show who we really are on the inside and sometimes we aren’t as good on the inside as we like to tell ourselves we are.

Now, how does the way you act line up with the things you think about yourself? Are you always right in the way you treat people? Are you always kind and patient and gentle? When someone smacks you do you smack back twice as hard? When someone says something mean to you, do you say something even worse? Do you take things that belong to other people and make up reasons why it is okay when you do it but not okay when someone does it to you? Do you stand around and do nothing when someone else is doing something to hurt someone else? Are you a bully or a protector? Do you brag and boast and tell everyone about how awesome you think you are or do you just do what is good even when no one is looking? Do you tell the truth when it will get you into trouble or do you lie instead? Will you lie even if someone else gets into trouble because of it? And if you do, how will you live with yourself without coming up with lies to convince yourself that it’s actually okay? Let’s talk about what good works look like, because if you want to have a real identity as a person who follows Jesus and does what is right, then the best start is to find out what He says about good trees and their yummy, nutritious fruit.

But before we do that, I want to talk about something that is very important for you to understand. Sometimes, people will tell us that when we know Jesus, He lives in our hearts but the Bible tells us that it is a lot better than that. A Jesus that fits in our hearts is pretty small, right? And we would want Him everywhere and not just there. The Bible says that when we believe Jesus and follow Him, that we are actually in Him. Isn’t that awesome? Instead of us surrounding Jesus, we are surrounded by Jesus. And there is no better place to be in this world than surrounded by Jesus. I am surrounded by Jesus and so is everyone else who knows that He is the boss of us, our Master, King, and Lord whom God put over all of us. When we are doing good and cooperating with Him, it’s like we are completely snuggled up inside Him. When we want to go our own way, it’s like we want to be halfway in and halfway out. And so whatever part is sticking out can get into some big trouble, right? We can be completely in Jesus and make mistakes, but we can’t be completely in Jesus and doing things that are evil. So, how to we stay in Jesus? By following His example and taking everything He says seriously enough to learn to do it.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that the people who are honorable in the Kingdom are not the people that the world sees as being big shots or clever or sneaky or rich. In the Kingdom of God, the people who are the best of all are the people who do what is good even when it isn’t very pleasant. And you know what? Even though it is hard to live as people who do good, people appreciate having others in their life who can be trusted. Above all, a follower of Jesus is someone who can be trusted and who people recognize as having an identity of loving what is true and hating lies and doing the right thing no matter what. 

Jesus says that His followers are meek when they are following Him correctly, which means they aren’t bullies. They are also merciful, which means that just because they can hurt someone or get revenge, they don’t, and that they help people who need it. People who are in Jesus are also supposed to not be hard to get angry and riled up, they won’t just fight with everyone who wants to argue, but they will be polite and try to be loving. Jesus also says that if we love Him we will become very different from other people and you have to admit that even the stuff I have already mentioned would make you very different from a whole lot of people because He says that we were created to do good things so that people would want to love God too. When we teach people to keep the commandments and keep them ourselves, Jesus says that makes us great. When we break the commandments and teach other people to break them too, that puts us at the bottom of the pile. Yikes! He is really serious about us following Him in a way that makes the world a better place to live in.

And now we’re coming to the commandments that all us adults want to ignore and say are too hard to do. Jesus said that if we get angry and call someone names, it’s really bad. And if we think God is okay with us when we have hurt someone else and haven’t done anything to make it up to them, we’re wrong. When Jesus people do something wrong to someone else, we need to fix it if we can. And we also need to be careful about how we think about other people because some thoughts are so bad that it’s like we’re actually doing what we are thinking about. When we get the really bad thoughts about hurting other people or making them suffer, we really need to stop as soon as we realize we are doing it. That took me a long time to learn how to do because I had a lot of practice thinking about doing bad things before I met Jesus, lemme tell you.

We need to be honest and trustworthy when we tell someone that we will do something, or that we will be there for them, or when we get married or get a job. And when we make a promise, we need to mean it and keep it and no saying, “Oh just kidding!” When we represent Jesus, who never lied and who always keeps His promises, we need to make sure we are doing that too. If people can’t trust us, when they can see us, how will they trust Jesus when they can’t even see Him? And we need to be generous and kind, and we are even supposed to be loving to the people who hate us. Now that one is hard, and Jesus has to change us a lot before we can do that but when we stay in Him He will change us and it is such a miracle. He can even help us to forgive people—even people who we have to stay away from because they are so evil and dangerous. Forgiving people isn’t the same thing as forgetting—we can remember but when we forgive someone, it means that we aren’t going to try to get revenge. It doesn’t mean that we don’t call the police and tell them what happened, but it does mean that we allow other people to punish that person if what they did was bad enough. We can forgive and still make sure that people can’t hurt anyone else in the future like they hurt us. That’s being a good citizen by protecting others and has nothing to do with forgiveness.

It comes down to the two greatest commandments—loving God by representing Him in a way that doesn’t make Him look bad, and loving people too, and giving them the mercy and grace we would want to receive when we make a mistake. Let’s face it, most of the things that people do to make us angry or upset aren’t even that bad and when we learn to forgive the small stuff and be kind about it, we are stopping small things from becoming big things. When we refuse to hit back or tease back or call names or get even, we are called peacemakers and Jesus says that is when we are called the actual sons of God. Because it is then that we are really acting like His children. That doesn’t mean that when there are things wrong in the world that we don’t help to make things right and fair and good, but it does mean that we learn to have the wisdom to understand the difference between God’s way of dealing with enemies and how Satan has gotten the rest of the world to do it. It does require a lot of trust, and wisdom, and maturity and we don’t start out like that. God changes us and we cooperate and live differently and then He changes us some more and we cooperate with the new changes and on and on until the end of our lives. I was scared to let him change me, let me tell you. I am a tiny little person and I was bullied for my entire childhood and until the day I left high school. But I am much happier learning to be a peacemaker and having an identity that I can be honest about—one where I am truthful about what I have done and what I am doing, and why I do it and what my real intentions and motives and reasons are. I don’t have to lie to myself that I am doing right when I decided to act like a jerk. When I am honest and aware, I feel very close to God and it’s easier for Him to make the big changes so that I can be called one of the sons of God. It’s nice not having to feel ashamed all the time like I did when I was lying to myself about what I was doing, and trying to hide who I really was from myself. I am what I do, and not what I like to think about myself.

If I sit around watching TV or playing video games all day, then that’s who I am, a person who would rather sit and play and watch TV all day than get something done.  If I hit someone who has hit me then I am a person who wants the person who hurt me to hurt worse than I do, instead of following Jesus and standing my ground and refusing to be violent—showing them that I am loving them no matter what they do to me. And maybe hoping that someone else who has a good identity will stop them. If we watch someone our size hurting someone smaller and we don’t do anything to stop them, then we are the kinds of people who can’t be trusted to do the right thing. If we steal, then it is because we made the choice to be thieves. If we lie to get out of trouble or to get someone else into trouble then we are liars who can’t be trusted. Because we are the choices that we make. We are not the choices that are made for us by others—like if we get beat up by a bully that doesn’t make us people who deserve to get beat up. It means that someone else has the hateful identity of a bully because of the choices they made. If you grow up poor or in a dangerous place or if you don’t think you are beautiful or whatever, that isn’t your identity either because it isn’t anything you have done. When people call you ugly or make fun of where you live or what you can afford, that’s not your bad identity choice, it’s their bad identity choice. Your identity is everything you choose to do and especially when you know it is wrong, and that’s how people should be judged and not for anything they have no control over. People want you to have an identity based on what you can’t control because if who we are is about our choices then they generally don’t look so good.

But I want to tell you something wonderful, your identity, the things you do right now—they aren’t your future. Anyone can decide to have an identity that makes Jesus look good. Anyone can. It’s about choices. It isn’t about waking up tomorrow and doing everything right because that just never happens. Making good identity choices is something that we learn and grow into and a lot of learning comes from doing the wrong thing and realizing it and feeling bad about it and making changes. It’s the same for everyone and life is much more wonderful when we aren’t having to make excuses for how awful we are acting. When we love other people the way Jesus loves us, we have a lot fewer regrets and we don’t have to apologize nearly as much. Come to think of it, the first way God decided to make big changes for me was to push me to apologize when I knew I was wrong. It was hard and embarrassing but it made me think twice before doing something that I knew God would push me to apologize for later.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to talk to God this week about the things you can do to be more honest with Him, yourself and others about who you really are. And they will help you to do better and develop a beautiful identity.

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.)

If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.

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 18^th and 19^th 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.

Why do we make the mistake of thinking that the sports teams we like, and the places we come from, and how pretty or handsome we are, or how athletic or smart we are make us better than the people around us? And how do all those things take the place of belonging to Jesus? How important are all those things and what is the difference between obsessions and addictions and likes, interests, and hobbies?

Parents, this is the sixth 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.

If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.

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.

I am going to start out this week by talking about something Paul said after learning about Jesus, “If anyone else thinks he has grounds for being a big shot, I have more: I was circumcised the eighth day; I was born into the nation of Israel (God’s chosen people), of the tribe of Benjamin (King Saul, Esther and Mordecai were my peeps), a Hebrew born of Hebrews (no gentiles in my family tree!); as far as keeping the commandments goes, a Pharisee (which means I know stuff and have always been more serious about religion than most folks); in fact, I cared about our religion so much that I persecuted and jailed all of my fellow Jews who believed Jesus; I kept the commandments perfectly. But everything that made me a big shot in the world, it’s just nothing compared to Jesus, the Messiah. More than that even, absolutely everything that I ever took pride in was just stuff that means almost nothing compared to knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. Because of him I have lost everything, so I had to think of all that as dung, so that I can have more and more of Jesus and belong completely to Him!” (Phil 3:4-9)

And we could look at others in the Bible and say the same sort of thing as well. Sometimes, following God means saying goodbye to everything we are, everything we have, everything that was once important to us. A lot of people in the Bible even lost their families because their families weren’t interested in following God and kicked them out, which is sad. I have personally given up so much of who I was before I met Jesus, but I am glad because that stuff was really holding me back from knowing and loving Him and being able to do what He wants me to do. What about other Bible people? Abraham left his home, and his family too (they were idol worshipers Josh 24:2) so that he could follow God into the Promised Land. Moses grew up a big shot in Pharaoh’s palace but after he killed a slave master to save a slave from being beaten, he had to run away and found God in the wilderness, and God told Moses to leave his life again and to go back to Egypt to deliver the children of Israel. Think of all the Egyptians who left Egypt during the Exodus to follow God into the wilderness—people who had no guarantees of surviving the journey and had to just trust God. John the Baptist was a priest and had the right to eat tithed foods and to wear linen and serve in the Temple but instead He served God out in the wilderness, eating locusts and honey and wearing camel hair clothes. The early Christians often lost their families and the ability to buy and sell because they had to turn their backs on the Roman Empire’s Imperial Cult religion.

Of course, the best example of losing everything is Jesus. John said that Jesus was with God in the beginning, and that when He came to earth as a baby, he lost everything that He had known for eternity, living a perfect and wonderful life. When He came to save us, He became a human and had to deal with all the stuff we have to deal with. Almost everyone abandoned Him at the end of His life and the soldiers even took everything He had. Obeying God cost Jesus absolutely everything. Of course, we all know the end of the story. Jesus got everything He ever had back, and even more because now He is the King of kings and Lord of lords and God put Jesus over everything and everyone. And all of us who have given things up will get far more. Jesus talked about that once, “Peter began to tell him, “Look, we have left everything (our jobs and our families) and followed you.” “Truly I tell you,” Jesus said, “there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for my sake and for the sake of the gospel, who will not get a hundred times more, now at this time —houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions (because when we follow Jesus our family is everyone who loves Him) —and eternal life in the age to come. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.” (Mark 10:28-31)

Now, most of us will never have to suffer like that but Christians in some places do. We must always pray for our brothers and sisters, fellow believers, in places like Asia and Africa where in some of the countries it is still very dangerous to follow Jesus. Jesus has really changed so much of the world but there are still places that need to know His love, and until they do, people still have to give up everything for Him. And so, you might ask, “Well, what does that mean for us? What do I have to give up?” The Bible tells us that we can’t just live any way we want anymore, not once we know Jesus. The Holy Spirit helps us to begin to make changes and helps us to begin to really love other people.

The prophets, hundreds of years before Jesus, were yelling at the people who were hurting those who were weaker than themselves. They might hurt them physically, by beating them, or might hurt them financially, by not paying them the money they have earned for working, or might not set their debt-slaves free after six years like they were commanded, or maybe they trick people, or leave their wives for no good reason at all. These things are all called oppression, and oppression is when someone powerful is hurting someone who is weaker. And so, the first thing a lot of people do when they know Jesus is stop hurting other people—there will be no bullies in the Kingdom of Heaven. And so, strong people aren’t allowed to use their strength that way anymore. Rich people aren’t allowed to use their money to hurt others. Powerful people aren’t allowed to use their power to harm people who can’t defend themselves. Smart people aren’t allowed to trick people who aren’t as smart. Instead, strength, money, brains, and power are to be used to help those who need it. If being a big shot means that you have to hurt someone to prove it, then being a big shot is not something Jesus wants for you. We can’t do those things without giving up a lot of Jesus.

But maybe you don’t have power, money, strength, or genius level intelligence. There are still other ways that we can try to be big shots. And wanting to be a big shot is a terrible thing because it will always get us into trouble—and the people around us. There is only one big shot in our lives and that has to be Jesus. That doesn’t mean that you can’t admire and respect other people, as long as they deserve it, but wanting to be all that and a bag of chips leads to us making the wrong decisions in life and valuing the wrong things. And that’s what this week is mostly about—what is important to us and how do we try and make ourselves part of things that don’t really matter so that people will be impressed with us? And how do those things swallow up our lives and our identities (which is who we are) and take away from whom Jesus wants us to be? Our identities are important and when we don’t know who we are or what we are and when we don’t value who we are, sometimes we will want to make ourselves into something or someone else that isn’t who we are. That’s why it is so important to know that who we are is enough.

We are what we do, not what we think of ourselves. And so, it’s good to always be talking with the people we love about what is most important to us and how it makes us who we are. Some things are good and others are very bad. But everything changes us one way or the other. One of my favorite books in the world is called We Become What We Worship by GK Beale (affiliate link). And he goes through the Bible showing how whatever it is we want to be like, that’s who we become.

Now, what does that have to do with your identity? How are worship and obsessions (things you can’t stand to get away from) and addictions different than likes, interests and hobbies? What is there in your life that wants you to represent its image instead of the image of God? What things make it impossible for you to show God’s image to the world? Who wants you to look more like them than like Jesus? What wants you to love it more than you love Jesus? Oh my gosh, so many things! I can tell you so many things I have had to give up because there was no way for Jesus to get in a word edgewise. All I wanted to do was to think about those things, and participate in those things, and that’s where all my time and money went. Do you have something like that? Hey, we all do or have had things like that in our lives and so I don’t want you feeling horrible about yourself or like you are alone. God knows that’s how we are and He loves us enough to fix it. The things we are obsessed with and the things we think we need to become like don’t usually make us happy, they just make us greedy for more of it.

Being the age I am, getting wrinkled and a bit plump and all that, I see a lot of women my age who are so focused on looking good that they are never really happy with themselves. But needing to look good starts younger and younger and kids and adults can be really cruel to us if they think we are not pretty enough or handsome enough. They want us to think that who we are on the inside isn’t as important as what we look like on the outside and so people spend all of their money on buying products to make them look like movie stars when even movie stars don’t look like that in real life. They have a whole team of experts dressing them and putting makeup on them and doing their hair so that we have no idea what they really look like. And when they are in magazines, there are always folks airbrushing their faces to make them look better. But people think that they need to change themselves so much to be acceptable to people. God didn’t mean for us to spend all our time at the gym or in front of a mirror. We should take care of our bodies, but valuing beauty and big muscles and being so thin that you can’t eat anything never made anyone look like Jesus. I hope with all my heart that you know how wonderful you are, just the way you are, and that you will make your decisions about what you want to look like based on healthy choices and not what the world thinks. Even those movie stars are told that they don’t look good enough. So, valuing beauty and trying so hard to be whatever the world thinks is beautiful this year will often make you miserable. And everyone gets older and few of us do it while still looking amazing—beauty and muscles aren’t forever.

Sometimes the things that we value, the things that we think make us big shots, are the sports teams that we follow and, when we are adults, our political parties. I was born in Pittsburgh, PA which means that my hometown boasts three amazing sports teams. The Steelers, the Penguins, and the Pirates. It’s easy to be a fan of those teams—not every year but usually—and I used to be really obsessed with the Steelers back in my twenties. Oh my gosh if they didn’t win, then I was just a mess. I felt good about myself and bragged it they won and if they didn’t win, then I was angry and embarrassed. Isn’t that silly? Why on earth was I so interested in what people who have nothing to do with my life were doing. Did Pittsburgh having a good team mean that I was a better person or a big shot? Does it mean that Pittsburgh is a better place to live than anywhere else or that people from Pittsburgh are better than people from other places or better athletes? No. How the sports teams did said nothing about me at all. I am not a better person because of the sports teams that I watch. How well they do is all about them and how hard they work together and that’s it. When they win the Superbowl, I don’t get a ring because I didn’t earn one. It took me a long time to understand that feeling better about myself because I sat on the couch watching a certain football game was just ridiculous. That’s their accomplishment and not mine and so I have no reason to brag. I can enjoy the game, fine, but whoever wins has nothing to do with me.

Being super proud of our ancestry can also be a problem. There are groups all over my country where only certain people can join—like Daughters of the American Revolution—which I could join because I had at least one ancestor who fought against the British in the Revolutionary war. But does my ancestor make me special? Or more special than anyone else who lives here? Does it make me a big shot or more American than someone else who came here more recently and got their citizenship? No way. That’s what my ancestor did, not what I did. I didn’t do squat to help win that war just like I never helped the Steelers to win a football game! But there are a lot of people who are very, very concerned about being related to important people and some think it gives them bragging rights. I once had a neighbor who hated people who came from a certain country and who were now living here in America. I was just a kid, but he told me that he was more American than they were because his ancestors came over on the Mayflower and they just got here a generation ago. I was really shocked even though I was just a kid. How can he be more American than someone else who was born American just because his relatives had been here for a lot longer? They were both born here, no matter where their parents came from. I thought it was silly but he was very proud about it and thought it made him better than anyone else. My ancestors don’t tell you anything about me and I don’t get extra credit because of whatever it was they did.

Other people are very proud of their genetics, but that is silly too. Genetics is the study of a person’s DNA, which tells us where their ancestors are from. I am 38% Irish but what does that tell you about me—other than the fact that I probably sunburn easier than you do? Absolutely nothing. I have never been to Ireland. I can’t speak the language. I don’t get to ride on top of a float at the Saint Patrick’s Day parade. There is no end of the rainbow with a pot of gold in my backyard, unfortunately. My genetics only tell me where my ancestors lived. That’s it. I am not a big shot for being Irish even though some people think it’s cool. I have no idea why. It isn’t better than being from anywhere else. But there are more rocks than most places. Sometimes, people can be really scary about being proud of their genetic background. Hitler wanted to make what he called a “Master Race” based on German genetics. He wanted people to be as pure Germans as possible, and not just German, but not Jewish or Black or Disabled or Gypsies. Anyone that didn’t meet his qualifications for being German enough, he got rid of because he really did think that Germans were better than everyone else. Being proud of our DNA and thinking it makes us better than other people just doesn’t make any sense—not like we were all sitting on a cloud before we were born and that God looked at all of us and said, “Wow, that one has really earned the right to be born into a rich, powerful, awesome family with just the right genetics and let’s make them athletic and beautiful too because I can see that they are better than all the other babies.” Nope, never happened. But people act like it’s true. It’s weird.

And there are so many other things that people think make them big shots or better than everyone else but Jesus taught us a better way, He taught us the truth. Paul understood that truth because he could look at everything he thought made him special and realized that compared to belonging to Jesus, it was all poo-poo (that’s what dung means). When we belong to Jesus, we are all equals—he said there is no male or female, no slave or free, no Jew or Gentile. All the things that make people more important out in the outside world are unimportant in the Kingdom of Heaven. In the Kingdom, we are all brothers and sisters, equally loved by God and we all have the exact same job of becoming more and more like Jesus because when we are more like Jesus, the world becomes a whole lot more like the Kingdom of Heaven. And what’s more, we become happier people because we know that being beautiful, strong, rich, smart, famous, from the “right” family or country, or following the winning team or being good at sports or whatever it is that the rest of the world thinks is important—well, we know that those things aren’t about us at all. They are distractions from God’s love and from becoming like Jesus. He is the best.

We are the people who are so precious to God that Jesus died just to defeat sin and death so we could be free of everything that the world tells us we ought to be. Before we knew Jesus, our identity (who we really are) was whatever the world told us it is. We had to try to be all those things that are important to the world. But Jesus teaches us that there is nothing more important than belonging to Him and being children of God. I mean, just think about it—the world tells you that you are good if you wear the right makeup, work out enough, smell right, have a stylish haircut, wear the latest fashions, belong to the right political party, follow the right sports teams, blah, blah, blah and Jesus just says, “Follow me.” Jesus teaches us what is really important and when we really understand what following Jesus means, the other things that the world is telling us are so important just don’t seem like they really matter.

Makeup and fashion never made anyone a good person or more like Jesus. Being a star athlete never made anyone unselfish or peaceful. Being famous never made anyone more gentle or humble. Being rich doesn’t make people more generous or honest. Being smart never made anyone more forgiving. But belonging to Jesus does make those things happen, little by little as we listen to the Holy Spirit and become Jesus people. And I know it is hard to want that more than you want to be a part of the in crowd. I understand. All your life there will be people pushing you to become what they want you to be and very few will ask you what you want or teach you to listen to God so that He can teach you exactly why He made you to be you. Life without God can be very lonely and empty, and when we are fighting against Him by going our own way and trying to be what the world expects us to be, it can be very disappointing, frustrating, and confusing.

No matter what you do in your life, not everyone will love you or approve of you or agree with you. That’s normal, that’s okay. No one is loved by everyone, except maybe Mister Rogers, I think everyone loved him. But Mister Rogers was a lot like Jesus and he made everyone feel important and loved, just as they are. If you need anything more than belonging to God to make you somebody, then you are in trouble because it will never be enough. And I want you to know that you are enough. You are a wonderful creation of God and I am glad you were born. Maybe everything you do isn’t wonderful but then not everything I do is wonderful either. But what we do can change as we become more and more like Jesus and show His love to the world.

I want to tell you one more thing from Paul, when he was in trouble for not playing by the rules of the world and was choosing to follow Jesus instead, to members of the Church of Corinth who still wanted to be everything the world wanted them to be and so the world was nice to them—“The whole point is that none of you will be arrogant, thinking that anyone is better than anyone else. Who makes you so superior? What do you have that you didn’t get from someone else? If, in fact, you did get it, why do you brag like you earned it? You already have everything! You are acting like kings without us—and I wish you were, so that we could also reign with you! I think God has displayed us, the apostles, in last place, like men condemned to die: We have become a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to people. We look like fools for Christ, but you look wise in Christ! We are weak, but you are strong! You are respected, but we are dishonored! Up to now we are hungry and thirsty; we are poorly clothed, roughly treated, homeless; we work with our own hands. When we are insulted, we bless; when we are persecuted, we put up with it; when we are lied about, we are kind. We are treated like the scum of the earth, like everyone’s garbage.” (I Cor 4:6-13)

It sure sounds like no one is treating Paul like a big shot!

I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to spend this week thinking about how much more wonderful you are than the things you surround yourself with.

If I were to ask you who you are, you would consult your memories to give me an answer. Without our memories, who are we? And what if those memories are traumatic, does it mean that we will be broken forever? Does it mean that our lives are over? No way.

Parents, this is the fifth 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, and still valued, no matter what trauma they have faced. When we try to push kids into filling stereotypical roles and don’t allow them to ask questions and be confused, we’re often the ones creating the crisis 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.

I am going to ask you a very important question, so pay close attention. Who are you?

When I asked that, what happened? What did you think of? Did you say your name? Did you think about how old you are? How about what grade you are in at school, or what you are good at? Did you maybe think about your family and how you fit in? Whatever you did, you were able to do because of your memory—and that’s what we are going to talk about today because just try and imagine your life without your memory. Your memory tells you who you are, and who everyone else is. Your memory is why you know how to do things and also why you can learn new things and keep on doing them. Your memory tells you who loves you and who doesn’t. Because of your memories, you know who is safe to trust and who to avoid. Your memories help you to know what you are and aren’t good at. In your memories, you can go back in time and explore happy events or sometimes very sad ones. Memories can make you mad, sad, glad or confused. But who you are today has a lot to do with what has happened to you, what you have done, and how you remember it. Our memories are incredibly important because, without them, what would we even think about ourselves or others?

If you were to ask me who I am, I would say that I am fifty-three years old, that I am married to Mark and I am the mom of Matthew and Andrew, that I have a college degree in Chemistry, that I love to read and that I am a Bible teacher. I would tell you that I have loved Jesus since I was twenty-nine years old. And I could tell you some awful things I did before that, and terrible things people did to me. Those are the main things I remember when people ask me who I am. Those things are part of me, and all of those things together plus a lot more have made me into the very unique person I am today. There is no one else exactly like me, or like you! We’ve all had millions of different experiences, have lived in so many different places, and we look different and have different cultures and customs. What’s normal to me might be so strange to you! Things that I love to do, you might hate! Our memories tell us not only who we are, but also what we think is good or bad, or normal or weird. Every day, you make a whole lot of decisions based on your memories of what has happened to you in the past or what you have heard of. Without our memories, we would stop being us.

What that means, is that our memories are very important but they aren’t the whole story. I have a very good friend and something horrible happened to him once and he was sharing it, and it was very hard for him to do that. What happened to him was worse than anything that has ever happened to me in my entire life. And remembering that is hard for him for a lot of reasons. It not only hurt his body, and that is hard to remember, but it hurt him inside his mind and in his feelings. And when we get hurt like that, it’s easy to think that there is something wrong with us, that we are bad and that we should feel guilty or that if we were better or more lovable that no one would hurt us like that. Because we always remember, right? Memories don’t usually go away just because we want them to. But I told him that what happened to him wasn’t about him, and so it didn’t say anything about who he was. The bad thing that happened to him was about the people who did that to him. They made a bad, bad decision that hurt my friend. No one deserves to be hurt. No one can say that what they did to him was okay because of anything that he did. I always want you to remember that—that if people hurt you and try to make you feel bad about it, it’s because they don’t want their memories to tell them that they are bad people doing bad things. They want to remember what they did differently than it really was.

A long time ago, I read a book with a really great quote in it, it said, “Your enemy is never a villain in their own eyes.” So, what does that mean? It means that none of the terrible people in history say themselves as bad. Do you think Hitler thought that he was a bad guy? No way! He thought he was saving the world from all the people he hated, people he thought weren’t really people at all. Hitler didn’t see every human as made in the image of God, he thought only some people were and the rest needed to be killed. In Hitler’s way of thinking, he and everyone who worked for him were heroes. Isn’t that scary? And there are always people like that. Do you think bullies see themselves as wrong or evil? Of course not, they think that the people they are hurting deserve it for whatever reason. And you know what? Sometimes we do that too when we do something wrong and then tell ourselves a different story about what happened, and we even start to believe it.

Many years ago, God had to deal with me about something bad I was doing but I told myself it was actually good. Actually, he has had to do that a lot with me for a lot of different reasons. I am just like most people, when I act like a jerk I don’t always want to be honest with myself because no one wants to think they are a jerk. We want to think good things about ourselves because, if we don’t, life is very unpleasant. So, we come up with excuses of why the wrong thing we did wasn’t really wrong, or why the other person deserved it, or maybe we tell ourselves that they are making a big deal about nothing because we don’t want to apologize. And actually, I think we all do it with our families. Or we lie because we don’t want to get caught for doing something and we think it’s just easier.

But anyway, I used to kind of beat people over the head with the Bible and I am not proud of it. I could be really mean and harsh and I would tell people things they weren’t even ready to hear. I was very foolish, and I didn’t love the people I was talking to. I was just angry at them for not doing what I thought they should be doing, or whatever. But you know what I did? I told myself that I was good because I was just speaking the truth in love and it was their problem if they didn’t want to hear it. Oh no, the problem couldn’t be me. Or that’s what I told myself, anyway. But I was lying because there was nothing loving, kind, or patient about how I was talking to people. Except, I didn’t know I was lying anymore because I had lied to myself so many times that I couldn’t see the truth. By lying, I changed who I was in my mind from a Bible bully, which I actually was, into some sort of an angel of mercy! But God can do some amazing things and one day, all of a sudden, God made all of my lies disappear and I could see the terrible things I had done and my excuses and lies didn’t work anymore. I saw what I had been doing the exact same way that God saw it, and from that day on it became very difficult for me to lie to myself when I was being mean. God changed how I thought about myself and remembered about myself and it changed who I am. I still did all those mean things but He made it so that I could remember it honestly. I saw who I really was and that made it so that I could be a different kind of person afterward. And that’s not the only time He had to do something like that!

How about your memories? Are you always honest with yourself and others about the things you have done? Do you make bad choices and then make excuses or blame someone else or just lie about it never happening at all? Have you ever had someone else blame you for something they decided to do? Di you know they were lying? Did they act like they believed what they were saying? When we lie about our memories, we will eventually become people who lie without even thinking about it, just like I used to do. When someone talks about something I know about and their version is not honest, it makes me really mad and especially if people believe them. I remember that once there was this bully and he lied about me to so many people and tried to hurt me, then years later, when someone asked him why we weren’t friends, he didn’t talk about how he had lied about me but said that I disagreed with him about something and wouldn’t talk to him anymore. And I wonder if he actually believed it and he really didn’t see all the terrible and cruel things he had been doing to me over the years. Because of what he told others about what had happened, it changed him from the bad guy to the good guy in his story. And I wasn’t the person he was spreading lies about and bullying, I was the problem! And that’s hard to deal with. It happens to everyone. It’s why we can’t serve Jesus or show the world what God is like while not being honest about our memories. But it isn’t just the bad things we have done that we have to remember honestly, we also have to remember the good things about ourselves too.

Do you ever make a mistake or make a bad decision and then tell yourself that you are just hopeless and worthless and absolutely everything you do is wrong and bad and it would have been better for everyone if you had never been born? You aren’t alone. Most of us tend to be very hard on ourselves when we are embarrassed or feel guilty about something. If we fail a test because we didn’t study, or if we promised to help a friend and then we play video games instead, or if we forget to put the chickens in the coop for the night and weasels get them, or our bike gets stolen because we threw it on the front lawn instead of locking it in the garage? At times like that, sometimes we aren’t honest about our memories either. No one who feels guilty or embarrassed or sad about the things they do wrong is a totally bad person! A totally bad person wouldn’t feel bad or care at all, right? But, I bet if you try, you can think of things that you have done to make people smile, or to help someone out, or were kind, or did really good on a test. When we tell ourselves that we are stupid or worthless or hopeless, we are lying just as badly as when we aren’t honest about the wrong things we have done. And when we are dishonest about all the good things that we really have done, we forget about them. We can rewrite our memories to make ourselves better than we are and we can also change them to make ourselves worse than we are. Both of those things are wrong and can make it so that we are totally confused about who we really are.

It’s also a big mistake to pay too much attention to the people who aren’t honest with us either. They can also mess up our memories. What if you beat up a little kid and some of the people around you cheer you on and tell you how tough and strong you are? Well, they are trying to change the memory that Jesus wants you to have about what happened. If you beat up a littler kid, Jesus doesn’t want you to feel good about it. He wants you to understand that you decided to act like a bully when you are supposed to protect people who are weaker and smaller. He doesn’t want those other kids changing what your memory should be by telling you that you are a hero. No sir. And what about the kids and adults who never do anything except tell you how awful you are, or stupid, or clumsy, or whatever they come up with? Well, anyone who never tells you anything nice is not worth listening to and people like that generally pick on lots of people. Don’t let them change your memories about who you are. Not only is it important for you to always be honest with yourself about your abilities, talents, and your character and not think of yourself as too awesome or too horrible, it is also important to be honest with yourself about what others say about you. If someone calls you mean, then ask God if you are mean. If someone tells you that you should go sing on American Idol, then get another opinion because some of those people who auditioned had friends and family who were not honest about their voices!

Your happy memories are a gift from God. And so be careful about who you share them with. There is a verse in the Bible about being careful not to throw your pearls before pigs, or what is precious to you to the dogs. Your happy memories are like treasure and pearls and they can be about all sorts of things. Maybe you failed and failed at something but kept working at it and one day, you did it! That’s an incredibly happy thing! What about a great day with family or friends? Did you win a race or get an award? Did you read a really hard book? Did someone you respect tell you “Good job!” in front of a lot of other people? What about the day you met your best friend? Or got a new puppy or a kitten or a rabbit or whatever? Maybe you remember hearing from Jesus about something that was bothering you. Maybe you got good news! Maybe your favorite team won their big game! Or you saw fireworks, or went swimming in the deep end, or ate something that was totally amazing! Let me tell you my happiest memories. I used to take lunch to my twins when they were in first grade and Andrew always wanted me to kiss his eyelids before I went back home. And then there were the times when we lived in New Mexico when I would chase the boys with the hose in the backyard and they would laugh and scream. Or when they were just little squirts and I would chase them with their big stuffed bear. When I think those thoughts, they remind me that one of the best things about me is that I got to be a mom.

Now, I shared those memories with you because I trust you guys not to be mean or to make fun of me or make me sad about my memories. Because some people are just like that. Some people will take everything happy and try to ruin it so don’t be quick to share your really, really happy thoughts with just anyone. If you ever saw the movie Inside Out, that’s a really good movie about the importance of our memories and how they need to be honest and protected. Those memories of me and my sons, those are my core memories that I think of whenever I am sad or discouraged or feeling like I am just the biggest loser on the planet. Everyone has those feelings and sometimes they last a long time but they are never forever. I know because I am old. And I used to be very sad all the time, but one night God taught me a really important lesson. He said to me, “Remember joy!” and all of a sudden my mind was filled with these wonderful memories about my sons and I would start feeling happy. I remembered that my life wasn’t all terrible and that wonderful things happen and that I needed to not forget the good things. It’s easy to forget our good memories when we are sad. Now, I still get sad and angry and scared and all sorts of emotions because I am still a human being and stuff happens to me that I hate. But I have also learned that when I focus on my joyful memories that little things don’t bother me as much.

Remembering things correctly about ourselves means that we see ourselves as we really are. It means that we can work on the things about ourselves that need fixed, we can remember what things were a really bad idea when we did them, we can protect ourselves from people who are just really not to be trusted, and we can also be proud of our accomplishments, and remember the things we did that worked really well and try them again, we can know what we are and are not good at so that we can focus on our strengths, gifts, and talents instead of wasting time on those things we just aren’t good at. God has given everyone gifts, and we need everyone’s gifts. If you weren’t needed, then why are you here? We must need you. Even if you don’t think you are good at anything, just keep paying attention. Sometimes we wait a long time before we get put into a situation where, BAM! We get a chance to do something new and we totally rock at it. And if you can’t think of anything, you can ask people you trust about what they see about you.

One of my sons is really hard on himself and just doesn’t always see his talents. One day, I was passing by his bedroom and I heard that he was playing a game with some friends online. His friends were angry at each other and blaming each other because they messed something up and my son, and I didn’t even know he could do this, knew exactly what to say and everyone calmed down and he knew just how to encourage the people who needed to be encouraged and to get everyone ready to try it again. That’s a skill I have never had! I generally just make things worse. You know what? Now he works with people who are angry and helps them out, and he’s super good at it. If I had to do that job it would be very very bad.

I want you to know that God will help you with your memories—the good ones and the bad ones. He won’t make the memories totally go away but He can make it so they don’t hurt anymore. It can take a long time but he can heal your memories just like a doctor can heal a broken arm or leg. Sometimes He needs to show us what really happened when we don’t remember correctly—like if you thought a friend did something terrible but it was just a horrible understanding. Sometimes, He helps us to go to the grownups in our life that we can trust if someone has done something that isn’t right or against the law. Sometimes, He shows us how to forgive people so that we can stop being so angry all the time. Sometimes, He shows us that we were wrong and need to ask forgiveness and apologize. When we cooperate with God, He can change our identity, who we are, for the better. When we listen, and do what He tells us and trust Him that it will be okay, we become the kind of people who are more like Jesus. For me, it all began by telling the truth to myself and then I began telling the truth to other people. Lying was a lot of hard work and it didn’t make anything better—it just made it a lot easier to lie about stuff!

The Bible is full of verses telling us who we really are and what we are really supposed to be when we know Jesus. The Bible says we are the children of God! We are adopted into His family and one thing I can tell you about adoption is that it means we are wanted. My husband and I adopted our sons when they were babies because we couldn’t even imagine life without them. We wanted them more than anything. And how we feel about our kids is nothing compared to how God feels about us! Everything He has ever done was to rescue us, and He is still rescuing us even when we can’t see it. When I was a kid, I thought He didn’t care about me at all because a lot of people in my life hated me and were cruel. I figured that He felt the same way because He was letting them do it. I didn’t understand that He loves me so much that He doesn’t force me to do anything, and that also means He has to let me do bad things because I have to be able to make my own decisions. Now, He tells me not to but I don’t always listen. Everyone is the same. The people doing bad aren’t listening to God telling them to stop but He always keeps hoping that they will listen and do what is right.

Here’s a memory for you. I want you to think about the times when people have hurt you and I want you to know that God was paying attention. He saw everything that happened and it made Him very upset. He was upset that the person hurting you was hurting their own soul by doing evil, and that it was leading them in a bad direction away from Him. And He also saw you and was there with you and never left you. You weren’t alone. God isn’t okay with it when people do wrong things to each other. He loves us and so He hates that. You are never alone.

I want to talk about one more thing. You might have grandparents or other people in your life who are having trouble remembering their life, who they are, and maybe who you are too. I know that hurts and maybe you are wondering why you aren’t important enough to them to remember but it just isn’t like that at all. If they knew they were forgetting you, they would be very sad about it. But the part of their brain that controls what they remember is broken and we don’t know how to fix it. You know, brains are just like any other part of the body—they can stop working, they can have diseases, the chemicals that they need to work might not be getting to the right places. So many things. Really, when we look at how amazing and complicated our brains are, it’s just amazing that they don’t break all the time but God designed them so well that they mostly just work perfectly pretty much all the time. But there are diseases like Alzheimer’s and Dementia that cause people to begin to forget things and even the people they love most in the world. They can’t even remember who they were sometimes, and so they can’t remember how to act toward people and they might be mean to the people that love them. If they remembered themselves, that wouldn’t happen. They would know how important you are and they would remember how much they love you. You are worth remembering and loving and being kind to.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to spend this week remembering what is wonderful about you.

If you guys are anything like me, I bet that sometimes you feel like the world would be no different without you. We all feel like that sometimes. But today I want to teach you guys about community and why we all need each other and how God created us so that we could be with Him and so that He could be with us. You aren’t a mistake or an accident, you are someone that the rest of us need. We’ll also talk about how the people we are friends with change us and how we change them, and the difference between people who are true friends and people who are just buddies.

(Parents, this is the fourth 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 and still valuable. 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.

Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible.

Things are very different now than they were in the time of Abraham, Moses, David and Jesus. Jesus, for example, never played with another child who didn’t know exactly where He lived or who His parents were. And they knew this even though He didn’t even have a last name! Did you think that the word Christ was His last name? Don’t worry, a lot of people think that because about a thousand years ago, last names were invented, and we just think they are totally normal now! Although a lot of people think that Christ is Jesus’s last name, the truth is that Christ is just a title that means the same thing as Messiah. Like, if we hear the phrase King David or Queen Victoria, we know that the words King and Queen are titles that describe what their jobs are and aren’t part of their names at all. Jesus was born under the name of Yeshua ben Yosef, Yeshua the son of Yosef, or in English Bibles, Jesus the son of Joseph. How we got to Jesus from Yeshua is too long a story but it comes down to Hebrew and Greek and Latin and English all having different alphabets and sounds and translators doing their best to take names from one language to another when they aren’t at all the same. But the reason I brought that up is because Jesus was known by His relatives. He wasn’t Jesus Jones. He was Jesus the son of Joseph and His father Joseph was known as the son of Jacob. His mother Mary was called the daughter of Heli, but when she married, she became Mary, wife of Joseph and when Joseph died, the Bible calls her Mary, the mother of Jesus because He was her oldest son. People would also go by their place names when they were far from home—like Joseph of Arimathea and Mary of Magdala or Saul of Tarsus. In fact, the first use of last names wasn’t until about a thousand years ago! What would your name be if you didn’t have a last name?

Does it seem strange to you? It probably does because we have really lost something that they had in Bible times and what they had was something called community. Today we can use the word community in a lot of different ways where it can just mean a town, or a group within a town—maybe a religious group or an ethnic group. My father’s family came from the Irish Catholic community in Pittsburgh, PA. And when I say community, I mean it because even though my family has been here since before the Revolutionary war, I am still 38% Irish and my father is 75% and my grandmother (and everyone before her) was 100% Irish with nothing else. The Irish community always married other people who were Irish from the same area, and people from the Catholic community would marry other Catholics. Community means that a group of people are connected. They live together, worship God together, belong to neighborhood groups, and all that sort of thing. A community has shared interests and backgrounds. They are the kinds of people who are important to one another and keep traditions alive. A community of people is stronger than just a bunch of people by themselves. They can support each other and teach one another. In a community, every single person is important, part of the larger community. Each person knows how to do things that help out the community. God gives gifts to everyone so that communities can be strong, good places to live.

Of course, it is hard to find places like that now. People can get what they need from far away, other countries even. All they have to do is order stuff on the internet. And they don’t have to go outside with other people to do things because of television, internet, video games, books, smart phones, and all that stuff. Because of this, people are always busy but they are also very lonely because they feel like they are alone and not part of anything. We were made in the image of God and so, just like Him, we are social creatures. A social creature is a created being (all animals, birds, fish and insects are created beings too) that needs to be around others in order to be healthy, happy, productive, useful and mature. Even people who are very shy, like me, and who like to be alone, like me, need other people. I just don’t want to be around other people all the time because it makes me really stressed out but I do like to go shopping and chat with people, and I love to help people, and I enjoy being needed and useful to the people around me. Even though I talk to God and feel His presence all around me, without other humans it would be very difficult for me to be happy.

In fact, God created humans to be with Him, to be His image-bearers so that they could show the rest of the world what He is like. Unfortunately, we are not very good at that and the first two people really blew it big time. Genesis 3 tells us that God walked in the Garden, and He must have spent His time with Adam and Eve because when they didn’t show up He asked where they were at. God also spent time with Abraham under the oaks of Mamre, where he and Sarah prepared a meal for God and the two angels with Him to eat and they talked together. God even shared good news and bad news with Abraham, like a man would do with His friend. With Moses, God actually did treat him like a friend, saying things to him that He would only say in riddles to anyone else (Ex 33:11). And in the Gospel of John, we see Jesus referring to His disciples as His friends (John 15) and Lazarus as well (John 11). The Bible talks about friendship a lot—we were meant to have friends and loved ones because that’s the way God created us to be. If He wants company, just think of how much we must need it ourselves!

And, of course, it isn’t just about you needing people—not by a long shot. People need you too. I need you. And it may seem weird because we have probably never met, but the Bible says that God put all of those people who believe and follow Jesus into one big community. In some places, we are called the Body of Christ, and in others we are called a Temple made of Living Stones. Close your eyes for a minute and imagine that Body or that Temple, and think about all the different people all over the world, who look different and speak differently and have all sorts of different kinds of lives, but who love Jesus. Maybe it would look like one of those pictures that is actually made up of a billion tiny little photographs. Because of Jesus, we are all equally part of the same community. And so, we all need each other. We can’t serve the Kingdom of Heaven alone. I am needed, and you are needed, but not just for the work and jobs that we can do to help others.

We are also needed for the love that we can give and share. Actually, that is where we are all MOST needed. Compared to love, everything else is just kinda okay. We need the love of friends and family and even strangers but the love that we get from different people will be very different. A stranger might see you struggling with carrying something heavy and help you out, because the love in their heart hates to see people get hurt when two can make the job easy! A stranger might see that there is a house with a lot of yardwork that needs done and they might know that someone lives there who can barely walk anymore, and the love in them will help out around the yard. A stranger might help change a flat tire or prepare food at the homeless shelter. A stranger can even become a family member when they take in a foster child and decide to adopt. All of that is called being a good neighbor because a community is also a place where neighbors live together. Unlike my grandparents’ community where so many were Irish and Catholic, most communities have all types of people who believe all types of different things and can even live in different ways. But Jesus not only told us to love our neighbors but also that everyone is our neighbor. Let me tell you a story from Jesus:

Once upon a time, there was a man traveling from the great city of Jerusalem to Jericho, the beautiful city of Palms and every tree that was good for fruit. But on his way down, robbers ambushed him when there was no one else around to help him. They stole his clothes, beat him up so badly that he was dying, and then ran off with all of his things. And there was hope because a priest was also walking down that road, but when he saw the man all naked and bleeding, he crossed over to the other side of the road and left him there! And again there was hope because a Levite, one of the people who did jobs like tending sheep, raising crops for the Temple, and even singing during the services, was also walking down the road but when he saw that poor man, he crossed to the other side as well and did nothing to help him. What the heck guys, those are like the serious church people! But thank God that there was another man on the road that day, a Samaritan and he went right up to the dying man and felt just awful about what had happened to him. He tore strips of fabric, maybe even from his own clothes, to make bandages and he poured wine on the wounds to clean them and oil to keep dirt out. Then he carefully lifted the man’s heavy body and placed that man on his donkey. Then they made the careful and slow journey to the city and paid for a room at the inn. He stayed there all that day and through to the next morning taking care of him. Then he paid the innkeeper two whole days wages to take care of him and promised him more money when he returned from his trip.

You see, Jesus was talking to a very educated man who knew that the most important commandments were to love God and love our neighbors. But he wasn’t quite so clear on who his neighbor was—a lot of folks thought that their “neighbors” meant their family and close friends but certainly didn’t mean their enemies! But when Jesus told that story, where the religious people wouldn’t even stop to help that man, it would have been very surprising because the Jewish people and the Samaritans were bitter enemies. Yet, it was the Samaritan, who they hated, who had done what was right. Everyone is our neighbor but not everyone is a good neighbor. Because God placed us in a community together, it means that one of the most important ways to obey God and serve His Kingdom is to learn how to be a good neighbor. The Samaritan was a stranger to the man who was robbed, but he was a good neighbor. You can be a good neighbor too—if you saw something like that, it would be important for you to call 911 or get help. But there are always a lot of ways to help strangers. You can return your shopping cart at the store, help people pick up things they dropped, open doors for people who have trouble walking or who are pushing baby strollers. You can pick up your trash so that it doesn’t blow into someone else’s yard and you can clean up your leaves so that your neighbor doesn’t get stuck with them. There are so many things you can do—ask the grownups in your life how you can help them and others.

But a community is more than a group of strangers. Your community is also where your friends are. Are you a good friend or are you a bad friend? I hope you are all very good friends. Friends are people who love each other very much and love to spend time together. Sometimes they will have a lot in common and sometimes they will be very different people but they stick together because they enjoy each other’s company. Good friends can depend on each other to be there when one of them is sad, or hurt, or needs help. Good friends are also there to celebrate when something great happens. Good friends are never jealous because they really want good things to happen to their friends. Good friends are always encouraging one another to do good and to try to meet their goals. Good friends are good sports, they don’t have to win all the time and they just enjoy playing games with their friend no matter who wins. Good friends share with each other. Good friends have each other’s backs and they won’t leave their friend to face a bully alone. Good friends are kind, honest, and generous.

But not all people are like that, right? Not everyone is a good friend and even if you are a good friend to people, it doesn’t mean that they will be good friends to you. It is important to love people no matter what they are like, but a healthy community also needs boundaries. Boundaries are like fences between people and everyone has them. No matter how much you love a friend, if he kills your pets one by one you aren’t going to allow him to come anywhere near your house ever again. Or if she steals from you, you won’t invite her inside or trust her to take care of anything that is valuable to you. If your friend is always telling stories about you to everyone, sharing your secrets and embarrassing stories, you won’t want him to know anything about you. If your friend is only interested in playing with you when there isn’t someone more popular to be with, you will have to decide whether or not you want to deal with that. When we make decisions about what we are and are not willing to put up with, that is called drawing boundaries. Boundaries are a good thing. They tell people how we want to be treated and what we hate and they can either respect our boundaries or just be friends with someone else. And our friends have boundaries too, and if we love them then we follow them.

Even God has boundaries, did you know that? When we come to Exodus and Leviticus, we will talk about clean and unclean, which has nothing to do with dirt but is about how close you can get to the Holy of Holies in the Temple. One day a year, one guy could get super close and some people couldn’t even get inside the city walls. But like with God, boundaries aren’t about loving or hating someone. God had to set those boundaries because if people got too close then they could get hurt. God loved the people outside the city who were lepers. God loved the people who had been near a dead body and weren’t done with their week of mourning. They could pray and be as close to God as they wanted to be, but they just couldn’t get near the Temple for a while. And you might have to stay away from someone you really love because they are hurting you. Maybe they hit you, or say terrible things to you or about you, or maybe you can’t trust them—and you don’t have to hate them. It’s okay if you love them. It’s okay if you can’t be with them even if you want to, because you know you aren’t safe or happy when you are together—maybe even just sometimes. You have the right to not be with people who hurt you. God didn’t give us a community life so that we could hurt each other but so that we could take care of each other. If someone isn’t taking care of you, it’s okay to let someone you trust know about it.

Our community also has family in it. When you grow up, that might mean a husband or wife, and right now it might be sisters, brothers, parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. And how we care for all of these people—strangers, friends, and family, will be different depending on who they are. You aren’t going to hug and kiss a stranger! And you will treat your wife or husband entirely differently than you treat your parents and your brothers and sisters. And some strangers, friends and family are also members of the Body of Jesus, His Church, His Temple of Living Stones, His community—but some won’t be. We are still told to be just as good neighbors to them as to those who love Jesus and keep His commandments.

All of these people, as you live with them, play with them, visit them, or meet and help them, will change you and you will change them too. Every good thing you do for others makes God very happy, and it makes their life better—and not only that, but it changes you and fills your heart with more and more love. I want you to think about how you feel when someone does something good for you. What if you are super hungry and someone makes you a sandwich? How does that make you feel about yourself? Like you aren’t invisible, maybe? Like people notice and care about what you need and love you enough to do something about it? What if school is really hard and you are flunking math because you just don’t understand this one stupid thing, and someone notices and quietly teaches you a trick and then you totally get it? You’d think, “wow, that person thought I was important enough to take the time to help.” Is there someone who always notices you and how you are feeling? Or another person who likes to make you smile? Or someone who stands by you when there is trouble? There are a million ways to love our neighbors, whether they are strangers, friends, or family. As we pay attention, it is very easy to figure out things to do that will show other people how much we love them. But it is also important to notice when people are loving us and to say thank you.

Because our friends change us, and we change them, it is very important to make sure that we are changing into better people—more like Jesus. Sometimes instead of good friends we have bad buddies who get us into trouble or at least teach us how to get into trouble ourselves. Having buddies like that is very dangerous. It is good to love them and pray for them and to be kind to them, but we can’t allow them to change who we are. Sometimes, things that seem just mean and terrible start to look okay when we are in the company of someone who is not truly our friend. Have you ever noticed that there are people who are the friends of bullies and how mean they can get as they spend more and more time with them? When we get used to bad behavior, it stops seeming like such a big deal. We knew it was a terrible, big deal before we were friends with that person, but once we get close, we start making excuses and we become as bad as they are and worse, because we knew it was wrong in the first place.

Sometimes when we are lonely, it is tempting to get involved with people who are mean just so that we won’t feel left out. But I want you to know that you have a friend in Jesus. I want you to know that He loves you and although people can mess you up, He never will. The word we translate as faith in the Bible actually means trust. I can tell you that you can absolutely trust Jesus. You may or may not believe me now and that’s okay, there is nothing wrong with you. You can’t just decide to trust someone, not even God! You can’t just say, “Okay brain, that’s it, we’re going to totally trust God forever and ever.” We have to learn to trust God, and that takes a long time. He proves Himself to us, and He helps us to get rid of all the wrong thoughts we have about Him based on things that other people have done to hurt us and even lies some people tell us about God. God is a wonderful friend to me and I know He will be just as good a friend to you because He loves you more than you can imagine.

Because God is my friend, He has never been mean to me when I mess up. Because God is my friend, when I ignored Him for a few years (I was pretty angry at Him) He never gave up on me and He never stopped taking care of me. He has never called me names—not even when I maybe deserved it. He never stops trying to make me more like Jesus even when I was absolutely nothing like Jesus! He has let me think and do all sorts of wrong things without sending a bolt of lightning to blast my butt because He knows I am only human and has been very patient and understanding with me. And unlike people, God never tells me anything bad about myself until He is going to help me change it and then I just have to cooperate! God is not like anyone I have ever met in my life. I don’t have to worry about Him making any mistakes, or believing lies about me, or leading me in the wrong direction, or expecting me to be perfect or a mind-reader. It is safe to be confused around God. It is safe to be honest with Him and tell Him absolutely everything. It is okay to complain to God because in the Bible lots of folks do it. It’s even safe to argue with God because people in the Bible do that too! I complain to and argue with God a lot.

God is the best example of a good friend. Wow, imagine if we were as good a friend to others as God is to us? What if our friends could absolutely trust us like that? What if we could trust them like that too? That would be a perfect community. Just like we see at the end of the Bible in the last chapters of Revelation.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I hope you have some happy dreams about all of us being together, loving each other, and being completely safe and happy.

The things that have happened to us and the things we have done, and the things our family and ancestors have done can be really hard to live with. We have all done terrible things that we wish we could undo, and especially when people know about them and make us miserable about it. It can seem like our life is over and so that’s why this week we are going to talk about our histories and why they aren’t the whole story about us and why we can be honest about it. We are going to look at Jesus’s family history and the things people did to embarrass Him! And the best thing of all? We’ll be talking about YOUR identity as part of God’s family.

(Parents, this is the third 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.)

If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.

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.

(Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible—sometimes with words changed for clarity as the TDR Version, the Tyler Dawn Rosenquist Version.)

Let me tell you the crazy thing that the Bible does—it tells super embarrassing stories not only about God’s chosen people, the Israelites, but also about the big heroes of the Bible. In fact, the bigger the hero, it seems the worse the stories are. Let me give you a few examples (1)  Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and instead of taking responsibility for his own actions, Adam straight up blamed Eve even though he knew he was wrong, and when they got kicked out of the Garden you can just imagine how awkward that was—at least Eve blamed the serpent; (2) Cain killed Abel in what amounts to an epic temper tantrum; (3) Noah drank too much wine and he passed out drunk and naked on the floor of his tent and it did not remain a secret; (4) Abraham was so scared of being killed that he told his wife to lie about being his wife, which got her kidnapped and married off to someone else—twice; (5) Isaac and Rebekah messed up their family by having favorite kids, and so did their son Jacob; (6) Joseph was such a spoiled brat that he told his brothers and parents that he had dreams about them all bowing down to him (just FYI, never tell people about those kinds of dreams, it doesn’t end well), and it got him sold into slavery and then thrown into jail; (7) Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery and then about half of them did some really, really bad things plus they had to watch while their father spent like twenty years crying over Joseph because they said he had been torn apart by wild animals—so not cool; (8) Moses killed a bully and ended up having to run out to the desert to hide for 40 years; (9) Aaron built a golden calf for the children of Israel to worship and party with, (10) Miriam was yelling at Moses because he married a black woman when they were brown-skinned, and she got leprosy for a while because of it—racism is not cool; (11) Moses shamed God by making it look like he was getting water out of a rock by himself, as though it was magic, just because he was ticked off; (12) Joshua made a covenant with people who had tricked him, and that caused a lot of problems, (13) Samson told a woman how to make him as weak as a baby just because she was nagging him (and he did a whole lot worse, too). And there are so many more examples! David, Solomon, Hezekiah, Jonah, James, John, and Peter, and again and again with those three and especially Peter. Unlike us though, no one will ever forget the stuff they did because it is written in the most popular book ever written.

It’s like imagine the worst thing you ever did, on a viral YouTube video and then they show it on the news, but unlike most of that stuff, people are still watching it thousands of years from now. None of us will ever have it that bad. I doubt that any of us will actually murder a brother or a sister, or try to be God, or pass out naked in front of a bunch of people, or get anyone kidnapped, or make people so angry that we get sold into slavery by our own families, or whatever. We’re mostly going to live normal lives and, at worst, someone might videotape something stupid we do and people might laugh at us for a while and that hurts, a lot, because it is super embarrassing—but it never lasts forever. It sometimes feels like our lives are over and we will never recover but once you get to be my age you will look back on all the things that you just wanted to die of embarrassment over, and they won’t hurt anymore and you might even laugh a bit at some of them. But it hurts really bad while it is happening, not gonna lie. And that’s a good reason to be merciful when someone else is getting laughed at because we shouldn’t want anyone to hurt that badly. We have to be careful with others the way we want them to be careful with us. We never see Jesus laughing at anyone who is in trouble—He helps them. But the people who hurt and killed Jesus? Oh yeah, they made fun of him and were just horrible, and He still forgave them.

Sometimes, when there is something embarrassing like that, it seems like we will never feel good again. And for a while, we don’t. But I want you to know that it doesn’t last forever. There are people who are just mean and cruel, and they might never want you to forget it and there is nothing you can do about people like that. But I will tell you a secret, they have done embarrassing and bad things too and they don’t want anyone to know about it. Sometimes, they deal with their pain by trying to make other people look even worse. So, the people who are making you miserable? They have horrible, embarrassing secrets too—ones they would never want anyone to know about. I know this because I was bullied really badly from the time I was little until I graduated from high school, and after high school I found out a lot about the lives of the people who were hurting me. I wouldn’t trade places with most of them, my problems were bad enough. Even though I thought their lives were perfect, they absolutely weren’t. In fact, some of their stuff was so much more embarrassing than mine that I could hardly believe it! Everyone has their pain but we must not make other people hurt worse than they already do.

The story of our life including all those embarrassing things is called our history—everything that has happened in our past, not only our own stuff but also the stories of our families, and friends as well. Your history is everything that has ever happened to you, everything you have ever been a part of or experienced. And not only that, but you also have a family history, and that’s everything that ever happened to your ancestors (your grandparents and great-grandparents, etc. all the way back to the beginning of time). Family histories can be messy. You know people like to get those DNA tests done. I have never done it but my parents did. Evidently, that family legend on my mother’s side that we had a Crow Indian gggg-grandmother was total bupkis. But people go looking for interesting relatives, not the embarrassing ones! So, I know that my grandmother’s cousin, Honus Wagner, won the World Series for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1909. His baseball card is the most valuable sports card on the planet. It’s worth over 6 million dollars if it is in pristine condition. What I don’t know about is how many horrible people and scoundrels and criminals and all that are in my background because no one wants to talk about that. Honus is someone to be proud of and we want to forget everyone else. It’s kinda funny though because the bad ones are just as much a part of our history as the famous ones and I suppose that if we want to claim one of them we have to claim all of them!

But like the embarrassing things we have done and people make fun of us for, our history can also be very embarrassing. I don’t like that my ancestors might have owned slaves or might have sailed on slaving ships or might have kidnapped people from Africa or hurt them in other ways. I don’t like that, even if my ancestors didn’t own slaves, that they smoked tobacco and wore cotton harvested by people who were enslaved for life and had no freedom. Maybe my ancestors did terrible things to the Native Americans when we came over to this country. My father’s family has been here since before the Revolutionary War, and that is a whole lot of time to be able to do some really terrible things. And America isn’t the only place where terrible things were done to people and where bad things are still happening. I want to think of my ancestors as being perfect but I know they were probably every bit as awful as most were. Some were good and some were bad. That’s a fact of life—that’s our history. When we look at our history, we have to understand that we aren’t our ancestors. We get to make different choices, just like they had the ability to make different choices than their ancestors. Some had no choices at all but we usually have a lot more now. I didn’t actually do the terrible things my ancestors did, or the wonderful things either. They aren’t me. That’s why I don’t need to pretend like they were perfect. I can look at the bad things they did without making excuses or trying to lie to cover it up. I don’t need for them to be good in order to decide to live my life in a way that makes God happy now, and to help the people who are still suffering now because of what happened in the past.

And then I have friends whose ancestors were stolen from Africa and enslaved and beaten and worse. It’s hard thinking of your ancestors being hurt like that, and even killed, and having their loved ones, their children and husbands and wives and sisters and brothers, sold to someone else and never see them again. It would make you wonder why anyone thought they had that right, or how they could have hated people who look like you enough to be so cruel. And others had their whole tribes wiped out, and the life they lead now is not what they know they could have had if people had just left them alone or had seen them as fellow human beings, made in God’s image. When one group decides to hurt another group like that, not only do the survivors lose their relatives but they also lose their culture, the beautiful things that made them who they were. But it can happen in smaller ways too in normal life. I get embarrassed and angry about having been bullied and made fun of as a child. It makes me feel helpless and scared sometimes, just like I did then. But I have to tell you something, my history isn’t my whole story. And your history isn’t your whole story either. It’s a big part of your story, but not the biggest.

We can’t change anything that happened in the past, not to us and not to our ancestors. We can’t make it so that the bad things didn’t happen, and we can’t even take back the things we have said and done. We do have the power to try and make things right, but only now and in the future. If we have hurt someone, we can go to them and admit what we did, and admit that we were wrong, and find out how we can fix some of what we messed up. When we do that, we aren’t changing our history but we are making a better future. And we can’t help who we are related to, it just is what it is, right? There are a lot of terrible people in this world who have done a lot of terrible things, and when they have kids, those kids are just stuck with that family history. But there are wonderful stories of what God can do so that we can be different, and we can use what was bad to make things better. I want to tell you a favorite verse of mine, Jeremiah 29:11-12, “For I know the plans I have for you”—this is the Lord’s declaration—“plans for your well-being, not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. You will call to me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.” God said this to people who were suffering for the sins of their ancestors because their ancestors had been just awful. But even with all the terrible things they and their ancestors had done, God still had wonderful plans for them. God wasn’t going to remember their past forever, God wanted to give them a future, and hope.

What does that mean? It means that no matter what your history is, or the history of your family, God has plans for good. All you have to do is stick close to Him, learn to follow Him and He will take care of the rest. When you become a part of God’s family, you still have your own family history but you also gain the history of the family of Abraham. I told you some of the messed up, terrible things they did that got written in the Bible, but sometimes we forget that all of those terrible things—that is Jesus’s family history! His relatives did all that nonsense! And they read about it in the synagogues every week, all the terrible things that their ancestors did. And when John the Baptist was baptizing people in the wilderness for repentance, they were repenting of the sins of their ancestors that were responsible for them being oppressed by the Romans. The Romans were only there in the first place because their leaders had been so corrupt, Jews killing other Jews over the silliest things. It must have been terribly embarrassing to think of what their ancestors had done to bring such terrible consequences into their lives. And not just once but over and over again! To them, reading the Bible was personal. Even their greatest heroes could be real goats.

Really, it was a wonderful gift to them from God. We should have a balanced look at our ancestors. We can’t afford to pride ourselves in being related to them to the point where we have this need to pretend like they couldn’t be total skunks. But that’s what a lot of people do and actually, that’s what some Jewish scholars began to do during Medieval times—they started coming up with excuses for why the horrible things Bible heroes did were actually okay! And especially King David. And that’s a big problem. We have to accept the past as it was, even when it makes us unhappy or uncomfortable. And we can learn to do that when we realize that when we became a part of God’s family, that we inherited the family history of the Bible—all that mess! Now it is our family history is all written down for everyone to see! We don’t have to be Jewish for Abraham’s family to be our family. What did the Apostle Paul say? “And if you belong to Jesus, then you are Abraham’s children, heirs according to the promise.” (Gal 3:29 TDR Version) In fact, Paul said that everyone who believes is adopted into the family of God. He also calls that being “grafted in” like when a branch from one tree becomes part of another tree.

Did you know that my twin sons are adopted? My husband Mark and I grafted them into our family because we wanted them to be our sons more than anything in the world. They are grownups now but adopting them was the happiest day of my life. When I held them on the day they were born, I felt like my heart was going to explode with love and I have devoted every day since then to loving them and looking out for them and when Mark and I die, they will be our heirs, which means that they will get everything that we have. Paul says that the same is true with God and us. We are His adopted children, and that means that He wanted us. We weren’t unplanned, or a mistake, or an accident, and most especially we weren’t unwanted. Jesus said that when God wants us, He draws us to Himself. Like when I open a can of wet food or shake the treat box and my cats come running. I want to give them good things because I love them and care for them and they know what the good stuff is. God is the good stuff, and He wants us to know it and experience how wonderful He is. That doesn’t mean that bad things won’t happen because people can do really bad things, but it means that when bad stuff happens, we are not alone. God doesn’t control us because He loves us too much to make us into robots, and so sometimes we do bad things too, but because we are not alone it means that He is helping us even when we don’t know it or think we can feel it. Isn’t that amazing? God loves you so much that even though He wants us to do what is right, He doesn’t take us over and force us. Instead, He teaches us and comforts us and guides us, just like a parent.

God is the ultimate parent! Another word we could use instead of adopted or grafted in is “converted” or “saved.” When we follow Jesus, we get a new identity. We aren’t just us anymore, we are part of the family of God all over the world and Jesus’s history becomes our history. His Father becomes our father and if you ever want to know what God is like, just look at the things Jesus did to love and help and save people! Our history is still there; everything we have ever done or was done to us still happened—and it matters. But our identity is who we are now in God’s Kingdom. Before you know Jesus, you may be a hockey player or a violinist or a painter or a comic book collector and that’s what people may think of when they talk about you, and those things are fine, but they aren’t the most important things about you. You are adopted into God’s family. You are His child. You are a follower of His Messiah, Jesus. You are a child of light. You are a member of a royal priesthood of believers because wherever you go, you are bringing God into the world. No matter how famous you become, or how quietly you live, your identity is all about God’s family. The rest is on the side because it talks about what you do, not who you are. Imagine being the child of the President or a sports star or an actor—you’d want everyone to know and you’d probably be pretty proud of it because people would think it was cool. But having the Creator of the whole universe is way cooler. It means you were chosen by the best of the best, the King of kings and the Lord of lords. When you think of yourself, I want you to understand that God didn’t have to choose you but He did. No matter what your history is, God wanted you. Your history is not your whole story.

A good example of this is Paul. When Jesus blinded him and spoke to him, Paul didn’t stop being Jewish, or a Pharisee, or a Roman citizen, or a tent maker, or the guy who had hunted down Jesus’s followers and put them in jail. But he became a new person on the inside and his identity changed. Now he was a follower of Jesus and he wouldn’t ever hunt down anyone again and he spent the rest of his life making a difference and telling everyone he met about Jesus. Who he had been could never change, he only had control over who he became. He was still Jewish but he was a Jew who was totally devoted to Jesus. He was a Pharisee but he was a Pharisee who listened to and obeyed the teachings of Jesus first. He was still a Roman citizen but he used his citizenship in order to preach the Gospel because he knew that the Roman Empire wasn’t his home, that his real citizenship is in Heaven. Everything that was important to Paul became less important than Jesus. And Paul knew that his new identity in Jesus wasn’t worth anything unless he lived it out in real life. After all, I can think of myself as a ballerina but until I get my ballet shoes and a tutu and take lessons to learn how to dance, it isn’t real. We are what we actually do and not just what we think about.

Paul taught more about our new identity than anyone else in the Bible because he changed more than just about anyone else. Moses talked a lot about it too, when the Israelites came out of Egypt, they stopped being Pharaoh’s slaves and became a kingdom of priests, all serving God. It doesn’t mean they were all literally priests working in the Tabernacle, but it does mean that they had the responsibility to serve God. What does the Bible say about our identity? It says that there are no hierarchies—which means people who are elite, on the top of the heap, and others who are at the bottom. It means that I am not better than you and you are not better than I am. I hope you grow up to love God more than I do and obey Him better, but we are still equally loved by God and equally made in His image. Paul says that there is no male or female in Jesus. That means that even though in the world people might act like men are better or smarter or more capable of doing things than women, that in the Kingdom of Heaven it isn’t like that. It doesn’t mean that we stop being girls and boys! It just means that our identity in Jesus is bigger than that. Paul also told us that there was no Jew nor Gentile in Jesus. Does that mean that there are no Jews who believe in Jesus? Of course not, but it does mean that the Jewish believers in Jesus aren’t more important in the Kingdom than the non-Jews. God doesn’t make any second-class citizens. And Gentiles aren’t better than Jews either. We are all His image bearers, showing the world who He is by being exactly who we are, and showing the world what Jesus is like in what we do and how we live. And while we are at it, Paul says there is no slave or free person either. Did that mean they stopped having slaves right then? Unfortunately, no, and in fact it wasn’t until the 18^th century that people started seeing that slavery is wrong. Paul was telling us that it is wrong to treat people like they are less worthy or less human because of their race (Jew or gentile), their gender (whether they are men or women), or what family they were born into. We are all equal in Jesus, even though we aren’t the same.

And you and I are the same, even though we are different. In God’s Kingdom, it won’t matter who you were here and so I don’t think it should matter now either. God created you to be someone who can serve others and His Kingdom in a very special and unique way, no matter what your history is, or what you have done, or what has been done to you. Your history isn’t your whole story, not by a long shot. God has plans to give you a future and a hope—good plans. You have a new identity and so I want you to live like you believe you are important to God, because you are, but you also have to allow everyone else to be important too, because they were also created in His image. That’s why in Revelation, we have God’s Name on our foreheads, because we belong to Him. You belong to Him.

I am praying for you. I pray you have a wonderful week not just reading the Bible, but also thinking about how the history of your life doesn’t tell the whole story about who you are and who you will be.