Kindness is complicated. It’s a lot different than just being nice because Jesus wasn’t always nice but He was always kind. Being nice is just being pleasant to people, but kindness is treating people better than we think they deserve to be treated. And that isn’t easy when we are angry, sad, in pain, or just plain frustrated. Kindness is going to be really important to understand when we get back to Genesis 18 and 19!

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s 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, where I usually post slightly longer video versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.

Of all the ways to be like Jesus, being kind seems like it would be the easiest when actually it can be the most complicated. I suppose the best way to describe it is how people treat us better than we have treated them, or when one person treats us better than everyone else does. There are a lot of ways to be kind, and some of them are very simple, but the truth is that kindness can be very hard when we are angry or hurting or confused. When we were learning about how Sarah and Abraham treated Hagar, neither of them were kind and they wouldn’t even call her by her name—but God called her by her name and made her promises even when everyone else was being hateful to her. We see that a lot in the Bible, where God is kind when others are cruel. Or when God is patient with someone when others want to just get rid of them.

In fact, when we get to Genesis 19 and talk about Sodom and Gomorrah, we will see a lot of kindness and unkindness. Even starting in chapter 18, when Abraham sees three men traveling and who end up in his camp, he is kind to them and gives them a feast and even takes care of them personally. It is in the middle of the afternoon in ancient Israel with no air conditioning and they have been traveling so they would have to be very thirsty and hot and he made sure that they had shade, and milk, and the best food he can provide. He didn’t know who they were until later, but showed them kindness anyway when he could have treated them like unwelcome strangers. That’s a great example of kindness. In the next chapter, two of the men who are actually angels go to the city of Sodom to find out if all the people who are crying out to God because of the unkindness and cruelty of the men of the city are telling the truth. Abraham’s nephew Lot goes out to them and convinces them to stay with him for the night because he knows how cruel and evil the men are and wants to protect them. That’s another great example of kindness. But when the evil men of Sodom try to beat his door down to get at the strangers, Lot puts his own daughters in danger instead of the strangers or himself. That wasn’t kind at all. He was kind and righteous compared to the people of Sodom, but that wasn’t saying much.

But we will see in both situations that God is kind even when we aren’t. God rewards Abraham with a son through his wife Sarah, who hasn’t ever been able to have babies. And God treats Lot with kindness by saving his life and the lives of his daughters even though he was willing to hurt them terribly in order to look like a good host. Even when God destroyed those cities, it wasn’t to be cruel but to put an end to the evil those cities were doing to everyone else. Sometimes, kindness to one person means that another person needs to have consequences. Many years had gone by since God had helped Abraham save the people of Sodom from the four kings who had taken them all as slaves. We would hope that they would have changed their ways but instead they got worse and were hurting everyone who visited the town.

The people in the Bible are very much like us—sometimes we are kind and sometimes we are cruel but God is always kinder than we deserve. Sometimes—a lot actually—when you read through the Bible you will say, “Oh my gosh, God, don’t be kind to that person!!! What are you even thinking about?? Don’t you see the terrible things they have done???” But He doesn’t listen to us, and He is really kind anyway.

But how are we supposed to know when to be kind and how kind to be? That’s super hard. In fact, that’s why this is part of the fruit of the Spirit—because we don’t know on our own and God has to teach us as we become more and more like Jesus. The way we start out, most of us really don’t want to be very kind when we aren’t happy or even when we just have a headache. It’s hard to be kind when we are only thinking about ourselves but that’s how we all start out—only able to think about ourselves. We think about our pain and our sadness and our anger and our feelings without really understanding that everyone else has all of these feelings inside them too. We forget how nice it is when we are feeling mean and someone is kind to us even though we said something nasty to them. And we realize that what we really needed was for someone to not be mean back to us and what a relief it is when they are nice to us instead. I think that’s why we as kids are so mean to our parents sometimes when we are feeling bad, because we know that our parents aren’t going to punch us out when we are mean to them.

Sometimes, being kind gets confused with being nice. A nice person is a person who is pleasant and agreeable but that isn’t always the right thing to be. If one person is bullying a smaller person and you are nice, you aren’t going to deal with the fact that the bigger person is doing something very wrong. Instead, a nice person will try to make everyone feel better so that they can be friends with everyone. A nice person doesn’t want to make enemies and so they will just try to smooth everything over instead of dealing with what is going on. A mean person might come in and beat the snot out of the bully. But what does a kind person do? A kind person makes sure that the bully stops what they are doing in such a way that the bully knows they are wrong, but the kind person also treats the bully better than they are treating the smaller person.

In the Book of I Samuel, chapter 25, we meet a bully named Nabal, a kind woman named Abigail, and a guy named David who is all over the place on how he treats people—sometimes wisely, sometimes as a selfish bully, and you never quite know what he is going to do. David is a man after God’s own heart, which means he was God’s choice for king of Israel, but that doesn’t mean that David has a heart like God’s. David loves God but that doesn’t mean he is like God—sometimes we forget that. But in this story, David has been on the run for years from King Saul—who wants him dead. David makes his living by killing the enemies of Israel and taking their stuff and wherever he is hiding out, he protects the people who own that land and the shepherds who are staying there with their flocks of sheep and goats. That’s what David and the people with him have been doing for Nabal. But when a festival day comes, David sends people to Nabal to ask for some sheep to roast for a party since they have been protecting his three thousand sheep and a thousand goats. At least, I hope he was asking—he did send ten of his fighting men and sometimes it is hard to know for sure.

But the Bible tells us that Nabal was a harsh and evil man—and that Nabal means fool. By the way, that’s generally a clue in the Bible that we are not dealing with a person’s real name because no one would actually name their kid that. The Bible does that a lot when someone is too shameful to be named—like the five kings in Genesis 14 who had the funny names pretty much calling them all evil. Like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. No one would name their kid Sneezy or Dopey—that’s just rude. Those were nicknames. But Nabal was a rich bully and very foolish and he wasn’t the slightest bit grateful to David and his men or even scared of them. He said some nasty things about David and sent the young men back to him. You see, not only wasn’t Nabal kind but he didn’t even qualify as nice! And neither was David because when he found out he told all of the men with him that they were going to slaughter every man in Nabal’s household by morning and he even swore an oath—which was every bit as foolish as what Nabal was doing. Although David had treated the shepherds well in the past, now he was willing to be even more of a bully than Nabal. Nabal was just insulting David, but David was willing to kill innocent people in revenge. Hey! That sounds just like Lamech in Genesis 4, remember?

But God wanted to teach David a lesson in kindness, so He sent Nabal’s wife Abigail to David with a ton of the best food they had to offer—two hundred loaves of bread, two huge jars of wine, five sheep all ready to be roasted, a hundred clusters of raisins still on the vines, and two hundred sweet pressed fig cakes for dessert. Wow! That was obviously what she had been planning to feed her entire household for the feast day but she gave it to David instead. Nabal, her husband, had been unkind to David and his men and David was about to be even more than unkind back but the Bible tells us that Abigail was intelligent so what she did was kindness to both sides—here is what she did:

When Abigail saw David, she quickly got off the donkey and knelt down with her face to the ground and honored David. She knelt at his feet and said, “I am so sorry, my lord, but please let your servant speak to you directly. Please listen to what I have to say. My lord, you should pay no attention to this worthless fool Nabal, because really he lives up to his name: His name means ‘stupid,’ and stupidity is all he knows how to do.I didn’t see the young men whom you sent. Now my lord, as surely as the Lord lives and as you yourself live—it is the Lord who kept you from murder and taking revenge—may your enemies and anyone who wants to hurt you be like Nabal, who is nothing but a fool. Please let this gift I have brought you be given to the young men who follow you. Please forgive everything we have done to offend you, because the Lord is certain to make a lasting dynasty for you because you fight the Lord’s battles. For as long as you live, do not do what is evil. King Saul is hunting you and wants to kill you. But your life is tucked safely away in the place where the Lord your God protects the living, but he is getting rid of your enemies by flinging away their lives like stones from a sling. When the Lord does for you all the good he promised you and appoints you ruler over Israel, you don’t want to feel guilty for taking revenge against all these men for what Nabal did when you know that God will take care of the problem for you. And when the Lord does good things for you, please remember me and do good things for me.” (I Sam 25:23-31)

Wow! And this is why Abigail is one of the wisest people in the whole Bible. Her parents in choosing Nabal as her husband? Not so much! But when she found out the trouble that Nabal’s unkindness had caused, she fought back with so much kindness that David didn’t even know what had hit him. She gave him more than he had asked for and she even apologized for not being there to greet his men even though it wasn’t her fault. But even though she was kind to David, she still talked sense into him by reminding him that he is God’s choice for king of Israel and so he doesn’t have to fight against people like Saul and Nabal—that God will fight those battles for him. Abigail tells David that murdering Nabal and all the men in her household isn’t right or even reasonable and that he will regret it if he does it. She was very smart with how she said it, and very kind and wise about how she handled the situation. If she had just walked up and yelled at him for being prideful and a murderer, probably he would have been angry enough to kill her too but she was kind and so her words worked their way into his heart and he turned around and even though he had sworn an oath to kill all the men in her household, he didn’t do it. In fact, David even thanked her for stopping him from killing everyone. Kindness is one of God’s secret weapons against evil. What would Abigail have done if she was just nice?

Well, maybe she would have gone to her husband Nabal and said, “Oh honey, do you really think it was a good idea to make those soldiers angry? Couldn’t we give them something to eat? I am not saying you were wrong or anything, just that we have a lot of food to spare and they are probably pretty hungry…” and while she was trying to be nice to her husband, David would have marched up and killed everyone. No, with a man like Nabal, being nice doesn’t solve anything. In the Proverbs, it tells us that we have to know when someone who is foolish should be spoken to and when they should be left alone entirely. In Nabal’s case, Abigail knew that it would be foolish to even talk to him about it and that kindness to her household meant going behind his back and taking care of the problem herself.

What if she had just been nice to David and hadn’t told him that murdering a whole household of men just because he got insulted by one guy is really, really evil? Well, David might not have killed her family but he wouldn’t have learned the lesson that God sent her to teach him and the next time it happened he would have just killed someone else instead. God sent Abigail to David to teach him a lesson about trusting Him and not taking matters into his own hands and especially not when he is feeling too emotional to think straight. This wasn’t a war where David was protecting farmers and ranchers from the Philistines or anything, this was just David being ticked off because he got disrespected. David wouldn’t ever be a good king if he didn’t learn from Abigail how to be kind and merciful to the people who weren’t being kind and merciful to him. And we see later that there were a lot of times when David could have lopped off the head of someone who was being nasty to him but he didn’t because of the lesson God taught him through Abigail—who became his wife when her husband died. She was right about everything—God took care of Nabal just like she said He would. David would have murdered all those people for no reason at all. Abigail turned David to kindness on that day, so that he and his men weren’t guilty of murdering innocent people.

What about Jesus? What did Jesus tell us about being kind and how was He kind? Jesus was always kind, even though He wasn’t always nice. Abigail called her husband names when she was talking to David because she knew it was true but also knew that it would help calm David down, but calling her husband a fool to his face wouldn’t have accomplished anything at all. Sometimes, Jesus was harsh with people who were hurting others because they had the power to do a lot of damage and Jesus wanted them to stop. Jesus is different from us because He knows what is actually in people’s hearts and on their minds but we can only guess and usually we get it wrong and call people names just because we are angry and impatient and offended like David. But Jesus proved His kindness through the things He did to help the people who were hurting and by confronting the people who were hurting them. He healed people without blaming them for being sick or injured. He cast demons out of people without telling them it was their fault. He fed people without blaming them for being poor. Jesus did good things for people without embarrassing them for needing help—and we all need help sometimes. It’s hard to get help when people make us feel bad for needing it or when they only help us so that they can look good for doing it. Jesus helped people because they needed help and because that’s what God’s love looks like. Sometimes, He even told them not to tell anyone!

Jesus told His followers that if they were kind then they would care for the sick, get clothes for the people who need them, visit people who are in prison, and take care of the people who have no one to care for them. He said that being kind to those people was the same thing as being kind to Him and not being kind to those people was the same thing as not being kind to Him. But He went even further than that by telling us to pray for the people who do bad things to us and to be kind to them. He told us to be kind by forgiving people. Kindness is always an action word—kind people do kind things. They don’t just think kind thoughts. Kindness means doing whatever is needed for someone who has a need. In the ancient world, kindness meant hospitality. Like when Abraham and Lot took care of the angelic visitors who came to them even though they just seemed like strangers. They treated them like important people and not just like random strangers. That’s what kindness does—it treats people better than they deserve to be treated just because they are made in the image of God.

That’s what Jesus did when He ate meals with the people whom no one else would eat with, or when He touched the people whom no one else would touch, and spoke to the people whom no one else would talk to. Even when Jesus was angry, He was still kind and wanted to turn people around. When He died, it was for everyone He was ever frustrated with or angry at and everyone who ever insulted Him or hurt Him or even killed Him. Without the kindness of Jesus, absolutely everyone who wasn’t a Jew would still be worshipping idols. Jesus changed everything with His kindness, which is His Father’s kindness toward us. Jesus could have just saved the Jewish people—His family—but that wasn’t enough because He is too kind and loving to stop there. Jesus died so that everyone could be saved, no matter who they are and what they have done. No matter who you are and what you have done too. And not just to save us but to change us and heal us and help us in every way.

Jesus takes gang leaders and drug dealers and makes them into preachers and teachers and missionaries. Jesus takes murderers and makes them into the gentlest of people. Jesus can change anyone into anything because there is nothing that His Holy Spirit can’t do in the heart of someone who is willing to change. And God is really persuasive when He wants to change us into someone entirely different. The Bible is full of people who did great things only because of the kindness of God or who are alive only because of the kindness of God. God has been proving His kindness since the beginning when He didn’t kill the man and the woman in the Garden on the spot but just kept them away from the Tree of Life, and even gave them clothing as a gift. God was kind when He didn’t kill Cain, but protected him instead. God was very kind when He saved the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt along with everyone else who listened to the warnings of Moses and did what he told them to do. Our God is a god of kindness, even when He has to hold us responsible for the bad things we sometimes do—that’s what He told Moses when Moses asked to see Him. Because He is kind, He gives us a lot of chances to get our act together—way more than we wish He would when it is someone else doing the bad stuff. But because we can trust Him to be kind to our enemies, it means that we can also trust Him to be kind to us. If God was as mean as a lot of people make Him out to be then none of us would still be here and the human race would have been gone a long time ago because we are really annoying.

Kindness is one of God’s secret weapons. And a lot of people are scared that if they are kind that people will just walk all over them and hurt them—because we don’t trust that God knows what He is talking about. We have to always treat people better than they deserve to be treated—the way we would want to be treated. Kindness can look like a lot of things. Kindness can mean sending a murderer to jail so that they can’t hurt anyone else but making sure that they are treated fairly while they are there. Kindness can mean forgiving someone who is starving for stealing a loaf of bread and making sure that they get the help they need so that they can stop stealing. Kindness means getting people the help they need when we can. Kindness is standing up to bullies without becoming bullies ourselves. Kindness means winning over people with God’s love instead of getting revenge. Kindness is always about showing people how different God is from everyone else.

There are many people out there who want to get their own way and do whatever they want to do however they want to do it no matter who gets hurt, and sometimes they do that while saying that they are really serving God. But God never acts that way even though He can and there isn’t anything we can do about it. Really knowing and serving God is about becoming kinder and not meaner. Meaner means that we are heading in the wrong direction and we need to turn around. It means that we are following the wrong sort of god because our God fights evil through being kind.

It’s easy to be kind to people who are kind to us, right? But what about people who are just plain nasty? Jesus said that anyone can be kind to the people who are kind to them—even the worst of sinners can manage that. And so we can’t go patting ourselves on the back when we are kind to the people who aren’t giving us any reason not to be. It’s easy to pray for the people we love, and hard to pray for people we hate. And not those nasty prayers we want to pray, “Oh Lord, make that dude suffer, please.” That isn’t praying for someone—it’s praying against them. It’s perfectly alright to pray that they stop hurting people—in fact, that’s a great prayer because God doesn’t want them hurting people any more than you do. But an even better prayer is that our enemies come to know and love Jesus so that He can change them from people who do things that are terrible into people who do things that are wonderful. That’s what Jesus was talking about when He told us to bless our enemies and not curse them—to make sure they are always in our prayers and so if we ever get a chance to hurt them, we won’t do it. And when they need help, we will be willing to do that instead. Just like Jesus does for us.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to know that being kind isn’t easy, but God will always teach kindness to the people who want to learn it.

Mercy is a huge thing in the Bible and so we would expect Jesus to not only teach about the importance of being merciful but also that He would be merciful. Mercy is a big step up from showing self-control. To show how mercy works, we’re going to look at one of the funniest parables about the Ungrateful Servant. It doesn’t seem funny at first, but believe me, it’s really hilarious once you stop to think about what is going on and how crazy the situation is.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s 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, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Bible verses are taken from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked to make the content and the context more understandable to kids.

Last time, we talked about Jesus’s self-control which not only means what He did do but what He could have done but didn’t. He could have done anything He wanted, including kill people. After all, it’s easier to kill people than raise them from the dead, right? And He raised a few people from the dead—including Himself so killing everyone who irritated Him with the snap of His fingers would have been—a snap. But Jesus isn’t Thanos—Jesus came to be an actual Savior and not a fake one. That required a lot of self-control. I can think of times in my life where I might have used that kind of power to kill people who don’t use their turn signals on the freeway. That’s just one difference between me and Jesus but if you stick around, there are enough to fill a thousand books.

Something very much related to self-control is another one of Jesus’s character traits. A trait is something that you notice from someone all the time. It doesn’t change in that person and not everyone acts like that. Last week, we talked about when Jesus went up on the Temple Mount, saw what was going on, went back to the home of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary for the night, and after thinking about it all night, went back and forced all the people making a ruckus by buying and selling animals and money for the tax and all that to close up shop and go somewhere else to do their business. People were there to pray and worship and listen to the singing of the Levites. Some Jews had to travel up to a month or more just to get there and then had to do the same to go back home. And there were also Gentiles who had traveled long distances to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. What kind of an example was this to them? Or to the Roman soldiers watching everything from the Fortress Antonia when the Temple grounds looked like a barnyard? It looked like the Jewish High Priestly family didn’t care about God at all and just wanted to be rich—which is what history tells us was the truth—while the families of normal priests were just barely able to survive. Of course Jesus was angry about it but He didn’t kill them. He didn’t whip them—He used the small flail to herd away the animals. I mean, He had to make it there on the spot so it isn’t like He had anything other than cloth or a belt to work with, right? Not like this was Indiana Jones and the Temple of God.

Jesus saw a problem—a terrible problem that was disrespecting God and keeping people from being able to worship Him. And not in a synagogue or anything, but at the Temple, which is actually holy ground. So holy that the priests walked barefoot. So holy that people weren’t allowed to carry stuff up there or use the grounds as a shortcut through the city. The prophet Hosea, who had to deal with some really messed up nonsense in His life, tells us that the Lord says it is mercy God desires and not sacrifice. That means gentleness—it is just another part of not doing the worst we can do. Sure, we can insult people, but is it going to make a situation any better? We can hit them, but is that really going to help or make things even worse? When we take what we really want to do and maybe even think we should do and we take it down a notch, or go home to have a cup of chamomile tea while we think and pray about it, or sometimes don’t do anything at all because we are too angry to do what is good—that’s mercy.

Jesus told a story once about the importance of being merciful, and that when God judges us it isn’t about a lot of the things we might think are important but about how we treat others as we want to be treated.

“For this reason… (wait! For what reason? Let’s backtrack or we won’t understand what is happening here! Peter had just come up to Jesus and asked how many times he has to forgive his brother—and no, we don’t know if he was talking about Andrew or about people in general. Maybe Andrew told the other disciples about the time that Peter…oh nevermind. Peter thought he only had to forgive another person seven times but Jesus said something like, “Um, no, actually, you have to forgive him so many times that you will lose count. Unless you are taking notes about how many times you have forgiven him, which is messed up and totally missing the point”)…

…the kingdom of heaven can be compared to a king who wanted to get back all the money his slaves owed to him. When he looked at the books, a guy who owed 10,000 talents was brought before him… (hold up! How much money is that? Well, it was what a person would earn if they worked for 160,000 years. So, it was a lot. Maybe as much as four trillion dollars today.) Since he had no way to pay it back, his master gave an order that the man, his wife, his children, and everything he had be sold to pay the debt. (which wasn’t even going to come close, right? Remember that parables are stories that paint pictures—they aren’t really very accurate) “When the slave heard all this, he fell down on his face before his master and begged, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you everything!’ (yeah right, four trillion dollars? I don’t think so) Then the master of that slave had compassion, set him free, and said, “You don’t owe me anything anymore.” (wow, right? How much money does this guy have if he can just forget when someone owes him 160,000 years worth of work?) “But that slave went out and found one of his fellow slaves who owed him only a hundred days’ worth of work money. He grabbed him, started choking him, and said, ‘Pay me what you owe me!’ (seriously, does anyone think this was a good idea?) “At this, his fellow slave fell down and began begging him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’ But he wasn’t willing. Instead, he went and threw him into prison until he could pay what was owed. (and who exactly can pay back money when they are in prison? Does this sound like a good plan?) When the other slaves saw what had happened, they were really upset and went and told their master everything that had happened. Then, after he had summoned him, his master said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that money because you begged me. Shouldn’t you also have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And his master got angry and handed him over to the jailers until he could pay everything that was owed. So, My heavenly Father will also do the same to you if each of you does not forgive his brother from his heart.”

And if you miss the point of this, you’re going to be having nightmares about how mean God has to be. But this sort of story was only meant to be scary to the sorts of people who aren’t changed by God’s forgiveness and mercy. At all. In fact, this guy was what we would call an oppressor. The Bible has a lot of stuff to say about the people who aren’t just mean because they are hurting or have a headache or because God is still working on them to make them more like Jesus. Nope, this guy owed so much money that you have to ask yourself what on earth did he do with it? Right? When Jesus was here on earth teaching the people, they talked about sin like money owed to God. That was how they explained it. So much money that you couldn’t ever pay it all off no matter how hard you worked. The only thing anyone could do to be forgiven was to ask God for mercy and to be loyal to Him forever. That’s what God wants. God doesn’t want to punish us—He wants to forgive us and change us to be more like Jesus. God wants us to see that we are His servants and that we need His mercy. But what is mercy? Mercy is when someone has the power to punish you but they decide to forgive you instead and give you another chance. Mercy is when I got caught daydreaming and was driving 35 mph in a 25 mph zone and the officer didn’t give me a ticket because I admitted that I was speeding and said I was sorry. Mercy is when an orphan steals a loaf of bread because he is starving and the grocery store owner doesn’t press charges. Mercy is when we are really angry at someone else who has done something wrong and we don’t hurt them. Mercy is when we ask God to forgive us for the terrible things and the small things we have done and He does.

God is God and God is absolutely perfect. He has absolutely no reason to forgive us and He doesn’t even owe it to us to forgive us. But He does forgive us because of His mercy to us. He knows that it is hard to be a human being and that sometimes we make bad choices and at other times we make very bad choices. He forgives us because He wants us to be able to start over again with Him even when we can’t start over again with the people we have hurt. He wants us to change. He knows that we can’t be more like Jesus when we aren’t forgiven. Being merciful to us—being gentle with us—is how He helps us to learn to be different in a world that tells us that being merciful makes us weak and wimpy. But God is gentle with us and so we are supposed to learn how to be gentle with others. And especially gentle with people who are weaker, poorer, and sicker than we are.

That’s actually the message of that parable. A master is more powerful than their slave, right? A master has the law on their side and can do whatever they want to their slave (which is why we can’t have slaves and still be loving our neighbor because a person who has been taken as a slave is still our neighbor but we aren’t treating him like a neighbor when we make him a slave). In Jesus’s world, slaves could be crucified for any reason at all. A slave who owed their master money was lucky to be thrown in jail because the alternative was way worse—being nailed to a cross! That’s our first clue that this master is merciful. Two, this master actually gave his slave almost four trillion dollars in today’s money. That’s not just a one-time loan—he had been giving this slave money for a long time. He had been giving this slave a lot of chances but never getting paid back. Three, when the slave was never going to be able to pay him back and begged him for mercy and promised to pay him back anyway, even though they both knew it was impossible, the master let him go and crossed the debt off his books. The master didn’t just let him go, he let everything go. He was never going to get that money back. It was gone and no one would be punished for it. Wow. That master was awesome. He was gentle and merciful. He didn’t do what he had the power to do. In fact, no one would have blamed him no matter what awful things he did to that slave. His friends would even call him a fool for doing it and say that he was just asking for trouble. And that’s exactly what God is like. As you read the Bible, you will go through the stories of the kings of Israel and read about Manasseh and say, “Excuse me, He forgave Manasseh??? Don’t do it!!!” The master in this parable is very powerful and very wealthy, but he isn’t unfair. He’s someone who can always be trusted.

What about his slave who owed him 160,000 years’ worth of work wages? What kind of person is he? One, he isn’t really responsible with what people give him, right? Oh my gosh I could live forever and still never spend four trillion dollars. He’s the kind of guy who is given a million chances and just wastes them all. BUT, that doesn’t mean that his master is heartless. After all, it was the master who gave him all that money, right? His master is very generous, so generous that it’s just crazy! He has a wife and kids, we know that. He doesn’t want to go to jail and so he begs for mercy, and promises to pay back the money even though he’s lying because it’s not possible. But when his merciful master lets him totally off the hook, what does this guy do? Does he go around telling everyone how merciful and generous his master is? Well, that’s what he was supposed to do in those days. If someone did something amazing for you, you were supposed to make them famous for it. And frankly, four trillion dollars should have bought a lot of positive PR. But it didn’t happen. What happened instead would have shocked Jesus’s audience.

Instead of being happy and dancing and singing in the streets of Jerusalem and making his master famous, he went to another slave, okay? This slave had borrowed like, six-thousand dollars from the guy who had just been forgiven. AND WHERE DO YOU THINK THAT 6,000 CAME FROM? That’s right—it came from the money he had borrowed from his master. Which he now didn’t have to pay back. Which should have meant that he needed to forgive everyone who borrowed money from him because who they had really gotten it from was their master who gave it to him in the first place. He didn’t have any personal money to loan. He was what we call a middleman, just passing money from his master to other people. That’s how crazy this all is.

And did he ask for the money nicely? You know, like his master had asked him? No, first he grabbed the dude and then he started choking him and then he demanded the money back. Money that wasn’t his in the first place. You know how they say that violence isn’t the answer? Actually, Jesus says this in the Sermon on the Mount when He tells us to turn the other cheek when we get smacked. Not only isn’t violence the answer, but he gets violent before he even asks for the money. This guy ought to be working for the mob and not such a merciful master. Of course, the guy doesn’t have that much money to pay him back the money that wasn’t even his in the first place—are you confused yet?—and asked for forgiveness and time to pay back the loan. Payback on this loan would be hard but not impossible. But nope, the forgiven slave chucked that poor guy in jail after beating him up. He went from zero to total rage monster in less that sixty seconds, okay? Well, of course the other slaves were really upset about that. The other slaves knew their master, obviously, and knew this would upset him too otherwise they wouldn’t bother him with it, right? Remember how the people mostly tried to avoid dealing with the false gods of the nations because it was better if they left you alone? It’s the same thing with slave masters. Of course, our God isn’t a slave master. In the Bible, we see He is the god who sets slaves free. Parables show what God is like and what He is not like. So there will be things that do and do not fit in the story but because this story is about gentleness and mercy, that’s the part we have to pay attention to.

Well, the master was really torqued off and in the Roman Empire, he could have the slave crucified as easy as one-two-three. But He doesn’t—He is still merciful. He isn’t violent, doesn’t grab him and choke him either but he does send the man to prison for not being merciful when he was shown such amazing mercy. He doesn’t even do to that man as much as he did to his fellow slave. Even though the punishment is harsh, life in prison, it is way less than what he did to the guy who owed him the much smaller amount of money. The master was merciful, because he didn’t do all the same things, but he was also just because his slave was what is called an oppressor and needed to be put somewhere that he couldn’t hurt anyone anymore. Oppressors aren’t merciful. And so, to understand mercy and gentleness, we have to understand the opposite.

An oppressor is a bully. How terrible an oppressor is depends on what the bully has to work with and how they can use it against others. Men and women and boys and girls and old people and young people can all be oppressors. People can use money, food, weapons, power, and their bodies to oppress other people. An oppressor uses whatever they have to keep other people under control. Someone who is big and strong can use their strength to keep everyone else too afraid to stop them from whatever it is they want to do. Weapons can be used the same way. If you have money then you can hurt people who don’t have it. If people are starving and you have all the food then you can make them do whatever you want before you give them any. During the life of Jesus on earth, the two big bullies in the neighborhood were the Romans and the High Priest’s family. They used what they had to get richer and more powerful while everyone else got poorer and less powerful. The Romans used their soldiers to get what they wanted. The High Priest’s family was even more shameful because they used the Bible to hurt the people. Did you know that people can use the Bible to hurt others if they ignore all the commandments that tell them to love their neighbors? When the Romans took over the province of Syria, it gave them total control over all of the people living in the Holy Land. And they demanded to be paid 25% of all the food people produced on their lands—plants and animals. That’s a lot. That means for every four figs or almonds they picked, they had to give one to the tax collectors and it was all taken far away to feed the people in Rome. But that wasn’t the worst part because we would expect them to be evil and not care about the Jewish people (or anyone else either). The worst part was that the High Priest’s family had gotten rich from the tithes that the people paid—another ten percent a year, so one out of ten of everything. They didn’t need the money and they could have returned it to the people because the tithe also belonged to the people who were poor but they weren’t getting it. They were having to sell their land because they couldn’t make enough to pay all the taxes and still have enough left over to feed their families.

What could they do? The regular priests weren’t getting that food either and they were losing their lands too. Since the chief priests didn’t need it, the Pharisees who ran the court system could have made a law to help out the people but they were so determined to keep the law perfectly that they were making it impossible for the poorer people to survive and keep the commandments. Jesus was really harsh with them about it—He told them that they were all anxious to tithe even their tiny garden spices, because they could afford it, but they weren’t being fair to the people who were the most vulnerable—the people who would die if they just made the rich priests richer. The Pharisees were what we would call fundamentalists today—they were determined to do what the Bible literally said even if people got hurt although sometimes they interpreted the Bible in ways that let them do whatever they wanted, like divorcing their wives for whatever reason they wanted to and marrying someone else.

Jesus said that it was great that they were tithing and all that, but they weren’t being faithful to what is most important to God–mercy, justice, and faithfulness (Matt 23:23-24). Those words meant something then that is different from how we would use them today. Faithfulness is about being trustworthy—it was the word used to describe how soldiers trust their commanders to make good decisions and how commanders trust their soldiers to do what they are told. Jesus was telling them that they weren’t obeying God just because they were tithing everything they grew. Justice and righteousness were two words in Hebrew that meant taking care of the people who were vulnerable—the poor, hungry, widowed, orphaned, sick, and wrongfully in prison. And we’ve been talking about what mercy means—being gentle to people who have less strength, power, and resources than we do. They could keep the Sabbaths and go to Jerusalem for the festivals and never eat pork and that was great but if they were causing poor people to lose their land and starve then they weren’t doing what is important to God. Jesus called them blind because they saw what the commandments said but didn’t see the suffering people around them. They didn’t know God well enough to see what He cared about most.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I hope that you will spend time thinking about mercy and gentleness. Are you gentle when you have things that can be used to help or hurt? Are you gentle with your words and with your body when you are angry? Are you as merciful to others as God is with you?

It’s one thing to say that Jesus had every single fruit of the Spirit to perfection, but quite another to look at what that really means when you have the authority and power to do absolutely anything you want. It isn’t so much about what Jesus did but what He was capable of. That makes Him even more amazing!

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s 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, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB tweaked a bit to be more understandable to kids.

A lot of times, when people talk about Jesus, they make Him look like a normal guy who could work miracles. But today I want to introduce you to the unique Son of God who was all-powerful but never used that power to hurt people. I want to talk about what He could have done when He was sad and angry and frustrated and when people disrespected Him.  What would we have done? What do we do in those same sorts of situations? What would we be capable of if we had the same power Jesus has? The first time I really thought about it, it scared the snot out of me. There are a lot of good reasons why I am not God, and if I had powers, everyone would figure it out really quick. Even though I am better than I once was, and even better than I was last month, I still don’t have as much self-control as Jesus. And that’s what we are going to talk about today—self-control.

Self-control is just what it sounds like, controlling ourselves! Self-control isn’t controlling our emotions because those happen without us even thinking about them beforehand. We can’t stop feeling happy when we see someone we love for the first time in a month. We can’t feel calm when we walk into a dark room and all of a sudden all of our friends yell, “Surprise!” and we see a cake and a pile of presents just for us. When a pet dies, we can’t keep from feeling sad. When someone hurts us, we can’t feel anything but angry at that moment. If our pants fall off at school, we can’t help but feel really embarrassed. That’s how I felt in the first grade when I sneezed while we were singing “God save our gracious Queen,” and I peed all over the floor. I was living in Canada, and we actually called it grade one—that’s why we sang that every morning along with “Oh, Canada” in English and sometimes in French. But there was no way I wasn’t going to feel really upset about having an accident in class. Fortunately, my teacher’s aide saw me and got me out of the class before anyone noticed. Those reactions are normal because our emotions are normal—they are what they are. They are gifts that God has given us and they happen without asking for permission. Although they can change as we get older, they never go away. So, self-control isn’t about controlling our emotions. Self-control is about becoming able to control how we act when we have an emotion.

When we are babies and we are hungry or thirsty or need a diaper change, we might throw a fit because we don’t have any words to talk about how we are feeling or to ask for what we want. When we are that small, we don’t really understand that we won’t die just because we are hungry right this minute. But as we grow older, we know that hunger just means it’s time to eat but even if we have to wait a while, we aren’t in any danger. It’s just a bit uncomfortable, that’s all. We learn that not everything is a big deal. We don’t need to cry when we are hungry or tired or don’t always get what we want. But it takes a lot of years to figure those things out. Parents have to be patient and remember that kids don’t know what they don’t know and that big emotions can erupt in really big ways.

Did Jesus cry when He was hungry? Of course. For a baby, that’s talking. There is nothing wrong or sinful about a baby crying. As He grew older and became able to talk, just like the rest of us, He learned better ways of dealing with getting what He needed. Babies don’t have any self-control at all. They can’t decide not to poop and pee until they get to the bathroom. But we can, because we can control ourselves. Toddlers will sometimes hit or bite to get what they want because they are having huge emotions, but hitting and biting isn’t okay and they have to be taught to control themselves and to be angry in other ways. When I was little, a man named Mister Rogers taught me how to deal with being angry—by pounding on clay or hitting the piano keys and making a big sound or by talking to a friend about it. But never to hit or be mean.  We can’t obey Jesus when He says to love our neighbors as ourselves when we hit people or scream at them every time we get angry. No one likes for that to happen. It hurts. And because everything Jesus did was about showing us the love of God, we have to pay attention to all the things He didn’t do. And we can’t do that unless we know all the things He could do.

Satan gives us our first clues as to what Jesus was able to do. When Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness when He hadn’t eaten for forty days and was really hungry, he dared Jesus to make bread out of rocks. Why would Satan do that if it was impossible? He knew exactly what God’s power in Jesus could do. He wanted Jesus to stop trusting in God just because He was way more hungry than we can even possibly imagine. That means that Jesus could have made the rocks into bread the very first day, or the first week, or the first month—but He didn’t because He was trusting and obeying God. Wow. If I could make rocks into bread then I could also probably make them into cream puffs and that would be the end of eating healthy and all the rocks in my yard would be gone, right? Jesus could have, but Jesus didn’t.

Satan also took Jesus to the tiptop of the Temple in Jerusalem on the holiest day of the year, on Yom Kippur, and dared Him to jump down and make the angels catch Him. Satan wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t know that Jesus could tell the angels to do absolutely whatever He wanted them to do. In fact, if He had done that, then everyone in the Temple would have seen it and would have known that Jesus was God’s Messiah right then and there and no one would have been able to kill Him. Everyone in the world would have followed Him immediately. But Jesus had to control Himself because if that happened, we would all still be doomed to be sinners forever and we would still die at the ends of our lives and stay dead. Jesus would have gotten old and died too, and He never would have fought Satan on his own turf and destroyed Satan’s kingdom. Jumping down would have been easier and more pleasant, but Jesus had to control Himself and do things the hard way so that we could be saved.

Finally, Satan told Jesus that he could give Him all the power to be king over all the kingdoms in the world. By doing that, Satan was showing us that Jesus had the ability to choose whether or not He was willing to be loyal to God, His Father. Jesus wasn’t a robot. He made choices every day. Because He was with God from the very beginning, Jesus had always known what was right and had always done what was right. When He became human, like us, He understood how hard it is for us to make the right choices but He still always did exactly the right and good thing. But Satan wouldn’t have kept telling Him to do what was wrong if Jesus had no choice about His own actions. Jesus had perfect self-control but that doesn’t mean that His choices were easy ones to make when He was hurting, sad, angry, and afraid. Jesus had all of our emotions, but He made better choices than we do with how He handled them.

Sometimes, Jesus had to make certain choices because of what the prophets had written about Him—things that only Jesus could do and that don’t apply to us. Jesus walked on the water because Job says that only God Himself can do that (9:8). Jesus told the terrible storm to stop because the Psalmists say that only God can do that (65:7, 89:9, 107:29). And there is one especially famous episode, in all four Gospels, where Jesus walked up to the Temple Mount and was standing in the Court of the Gentiles, where people from all over the world came to worship and learn and teach about God. But on that day, you couldn’t hear the Levites singing praise music and you couldn’t smell the incense burning inside the Temple, or the frankincense or bread burning on the altar or the smell of roasting whole lamb.

Jesus had visited the Temple, His Father’s house, the day before and what He had seen had made Him very angry. People had come from all over the world to celebrate the Passover—many had traveled for weeks to get there from places like Babylon and Rome. But the people who used to sell animals for sacrifices on the Mount of Olives had been given permission by the corrupt High Priest and his family to sell them right there on the Temple Mount. It would have been very noisy, and stinky, and you would have heard the people who were making deals and paying for stuff. But first, they had to buy the special money, which cost them even more money. They had turned God’s holy Temple, the house of prayer for the whole world, into a shopping mall where they were hurting poor people by forcing them to pay way too much to obey God and getting richer and richer every year. And so Jesus did something that only Jesus could ever do. And people who don’t understand what was happening will tell you that Jesus lost control and flipped out, but Jesus knew exactly what He was doing because He had seen it all the day before and went away to think about what He would do the next morning. Jesus was angry and disgusted by what He saw, but He calmly went to the home of His friend Lazarus to plan what He would do the next day. Believe me, if He was flipping out, He wouldn’t have left and come back later.

Psalm 69:9 tells us something important about the Messiah. It tells us that He will be consumed with zeal for His Father’s House—the Temple. What is zeal and what does it mean to be consumed with zeal? Zeal is a fancy word that means we care very, very much about something. Some people are zealous to protect others—like the members of the Underground Railroad who risked their lives, their families, and everything they had to help people who were being kept as slaves to be free. That kind of zeal is good. That kind of zeal comes from God. Other kinds of zeal can be very bad. Sometimes people care so much about this or that thing that they hate anyone who doesn’t feel the same way—even their own families. That kind of zeal isn’t from God. Jesus cared about the Temple because it was the place that Jews from all over the world came to worship God, every single day of the year. But these people who were doing business and selling money and animals were just out to get richer than they already were. In Jeremiah 7:11, the prophet calls the Temple a den of robbers because of how people were treating it. A den of robbers is where people who steal from others go to hide out and be safe. That people who were doing evil things would think that they are safe doing them right there in God’s House is really messed up.

So, in Mark chapter 11, Jesus sees all of this on His first day in Jerusalem. And He didn’t do anything. He went to the home of Lazarus, Mary and Martha a couple of miles away, and then went back the next day. John says that He made a little whip, the kind that ranchers use to get animals to move in a certain direction—not like a big old dangerous Indiana Jones whip. This is what Mark says happened, “They came to Jerusalem, and he went into the temple and began to throw out everyone who was buying and selling animals. He tipped over the tables of the people selling the special Temple money and the chairs of the men who were selling doves to the poor, and He wouldn’t let anyone carry anything on the Temple Mount. He was teaching them: “Is it not written, My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations? But you have made it a den of thieves!”

Mark said that Jesus was teaching. Not that He was out of control or flipping out or whipping people. Sometimes you will see painting that make it look like it was a rampage, but Jesus would have been arrested by the Roman soldiers in the Fortress Antonia that was attached to the Temple Mount on the northwest side. They always had an eye out for troublemakers. And it wasn’t strange not to let people carry things on the Temple Mount—we see latter that the Rabbis wrote that no one was allowed to do it ever and so those people were doing what was already wrong by Jewish law. They were disrespecting God by turning His Temple into a shopping mall. Jesus tipped over their tables so that the money went everywhere and it was impossible for them to do business. He told them to get out of there and made sure they knew that if they tried it again, He’d come back and tip their tables again. And then He taught the people who were gathered there trying to worship God that what they were doing was an insult to God.

But what could Jesus have done if He had wanted to? If He had no self-control? That’s a scary thought. When He was being arrested, the night before He was killed, one of His disciples took out his knife and cut off someone’s ear and Jesus point blank told him (probably Peter) to put the knife away and if Jesus wanted to, He could command more than twelve legions of angels to do whatever He wanted them to do (Matt 26:53). Oh man, now that’s a scary thought. No one can defend themselves against an angel. No one. No one is smarter than an angel. Angels can’t be killed. And only God can order angels around and tell them to do things. No one else can. At all. One of these days, read the Gospels and ask yourself, “What if Jesus had called down a huge truckload of angels to deal with that guy?” Because a legion—when Jesus was on earth, that number could mean anything from three to five thousand soldiers but sometimes just meant a huge group. So, at minimum, Jesus was telling them that He could call for thirty-six thousand angels on the spot if He wanted to. Boom. Immediately. To do whatever He wanted them to do. So every time Jesus was angry at someone, or frustrated, or whatever, He could have summoned angels to kill them all but He never did. Be really glad that I can’t tell angels to do stuff. It would be bad. I can get super feisty.

What about the time the disciples were ticked off because the people who lived in Samaria didn’t want to let Him come through their town because He wouldn’t worship at their Temple? In Luke 9, Jesus is heading down to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover and He sent some messengers down to one of the Samaritan villages so they could get ready for Him, but when they found out He would be going to the Temple in Jerusalem instead of to Mt Gerizim where they kept the Passover, they told Him that He wasn’t welcome there. And James and John, they got really angry and asked if Jesus wanted them to call down fire from heaven and kill everyone in the village. And Jesus was clearly angrier at them for even suggesting it than He ever could be for being rejected by the Samaritans. James and John wanted to do their worst, just because they felt disrespected. Which reminds me of someone else we have studied about in the past—Lamech, the first guy in the Bible to have more than one wife. Do you remember the song he sang to his wives when a kid hurt him in Genesis 4? A kid???

“Adah and Zillah, listen to me; wives of Lamech, pay attention to what I am saying. I killed a guy for hurting me, a young man for hitting me. If Cain is to be avenged seven times over, then for Lamech it will be seventy-seven times!”

One, it’s just creepy when someone writes a song about themselves killing a guy for something so ridiculous as hitting him and frankly, from the sound of this nonsense, he probably had it coming. Two, this guy is so over the top with no self-control whatsoever that he sounds more like a toddler having a tantrum than a grown man. Three, that this guy is going to assume that God will be on his side and defend him if other people want to come and get revenge is ridiculous. Four, can you imagine what would happen if this guy had twelve legions of angels he could boss around? But that’s why the Bible included his story—not to tell us that yeah, God is going to defend him but to show us what having no self-control looks like. I mean, the guy wanted more than one wife and if you scratched him he would kill you. This guy is ridiculous and the Bible wants us to know it. And what isn’t always obvious is that the Bible didn’t have chapters and verses until like the last five hundred years so when it was originally read, the story of Enoch being so awesome that God took Enoch away to be with Him happened just about right after that. We’re supposed to roll our eyes and facepalm and not want to be anything like Lamech—at all. Those kinds of comparisons happen a lot in the Bible. We will see that a with Abraham and Lot in Genesis 18 and 19.

And so what lessons can we take away from learning about Jesus’s self-control? What do we do when we are right? What do we do when someone else is wrong? How do we treat children, and especially as you get older? How do we behave when we are bigger, stronger, smarter, richer, or more popular? How do we use what we have to help or to hurt others? What do we do when someone hurts us? How much getting even is enough? Do we forgive the small stuff that people do to hurt us? How do we handle the really big things people do to hurt us? Do we call the police, or do we do something even worse to them instead? Do we require everyone around us to be perfect and punish them whenever they aren’t? What does it look like when grownups in our lives don’t use their self-control. Is it scary? Does it make us mad? How do we use our words and our bodies or whatever else we have when we know they can be hurtful?  Are we careful not to embarrass and humiliate people when it isn’t absolutely necessary?

Those are all very important questions and as you get older and become more mature and get to know Jesus better in your own life, He will help you to use the good things in your life (and even the bad things) to help other people instead of hurting them. Sometimes the meanest people in the world are the people who have been hurt badly by others, but sometimes they are just people who enjoy being mean. Sometimes the kindest people in the world are the people who have been hurt the most but don’t want to make others feel the same way, and sometimes kind people are just people who were always treated kindly. There are no rules to why some people control themselves so that they can be a blessing to others and why some people don’t. But there is one thing that is absolutely true—anyone who is determined to listen to and follow Jesus will become more able to control themselves, more able to bless others by being kinder and gentler than the world around them.

God gave us each gifts that can be used to do good for others or do bad to others. Strong people can be bullies or they can be protectors. Smart people can teach and invent things or they can make other people feel stupid or trick them. Rich people can hurt others and get richer or they can help others with their money. People who are popular can change the world for the better and help people who are suffering, or they can make the lives of other people just miserable. Our emotions are just like the gifts we have—do we use our anger to get even with people we are mad at or do we get angry when someone else is being hurt and do what it takes to help make their lives better?

There are always going to be people who take what God has given them and make people’s lives better and others who will take what God has given them and selfishly make other people’s lives worse. Your life is about what you decide to do with your gifts and talents and blessings. No one else can make those choices for you. The people around you can make it harder or easier for you to do what is good and right, but you have all the power to decide if that is what you want to do. Learning about Jesus helps us, but learning from Jesus changes us from people who don’t care about others into people who do care.

I love you. I am praying for you. Maybe you don’t know your gifts yet, but as you figure it out, I pray that you will always remember to ask God what He wants you to use those gifts for. We aren’t all the same, and we can serve God and other people in thousands of different ways and they are all good no matter who we are or where we live or what we are good at.

Today we are going to talk about the most exciting fifty days in the history of all the world! And also about why the strangest day on the entire Biblical calendar turned out to be the most important of all. If you have never heard of the counting of the omer, hold on to your hats because that’s what we will be learning about today.

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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 MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible modified a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context).

Did you celebrate Passover last week? Did you celebrate Jesus’s resurrection from the dead last weekend? We sure did! We’ll learn more about Passover next year and also when we are learning about Exodus, but right now I want to tell you about the fifty most exciting days in the history of the entire world so far! More exciting than when the children of Israel were freed from slavery in Egypt! More exciting than when Noah and his family got out of the ark! More exciting than when Joseph told his brothers and his father who he was after many years away from home! More exciting than coming into the Promised Land and more exciting than when the walls of Jericho fell! In fact, nothing like this had ever happened before and nothing has happened like it ever since.  In fact, the only thing more amazing than those fifty days will be when Jesus comes back to be King over all the earth. So, what fifty days am I talking about? The fifty days that God commanded His people to count the omer from the day after the Passover Sabbath until the Festival of Pentecost. What? That really doesn’t sound very exciting at all—counting days? What the heck? Can’t we just program it into our smart phones or watches or put it on the calendar? Why would God tell His people to count up a bunch of days? Well, that is what we are going to talk about this week before getting back to Genesis and the life of Abram next week.

You see, when God delivered His people from slavery in Egypt, He gave them a whole bunch of parties to celebrate forever. These parties, which happened during three different months in the year, were full of secret clues about Jesus the Messiah, our Savior! But until He lived among us, died, rose from the dead and poured out His Holy Spirit on everyone who believes Him—no one could see any of those clues that God had given Moses in the wilderness. The Bible is like that, you know. God puts clues in there that no one can understand until after they have already happened! Like God told the prophet Isaiah, He kinda does that to show off and prove how much better He is than all of the fake gods of the rest of the world. Their gods couldn’t ever predict the future because they didn’t even know what was going to happen to themselves the next day. God sees everything from beginning to end and so He can tell us all about it but that doesn’t mean He is going to make it understandable. God told Isaiah that He gives us clues about what will happen but not so that we can figure things out ahead of time—but so that after things happen we can say, “Oh man, there it is right in the Bible! I can’t believe it! God told us this would happen thousands of years ago! I never thought it would happen like that!”

And that’s how all of the promises in the Bible about Jesus worked. People had figured out from studying the Scriptures that there would be a Messiah who would be their king, or maybe their high priest, but they were confused because different Scriptures said different things that they didn’t think could all be true. Some people thought there would be two completely different Messiahs coming to save them in entirely different ways. They didn’t understand how some verses in the Bible said that Messiah would be a mighty king forever while others said that he would suffer and die! That’s how God likes to keep us on our toes—if we could just read the Bible and predict the future, we wouldn’t have to depend on Him anymore. Jesus is the best example in the world of that. Now we look at what Moses and David and the Prophets all said and we just say, “Oh yeah, duh, that’s all totally about Jesus,” but that’s only because we live in a time after He came. But we are waiting for Him to return now as King of the world and although we may think we have all that figured out—how it will happen and when—we probably don’t because no one has ever been able to do it before and why would now be any different? God is going to do what He is going to do and what He will do will be the absolute best and we will be shocked and excited and we will look at the Bible and say, “Oh duh, why didn’t we see all that ahead of time? Why did we think all those other things?” Just like many, many Jews like Peter, James, John, and Paul did—but only after everything had already happened. Before that, even when Jesus told them to their faces what was going to happen, they still didn’t understand. The Bible is a special book—not here to tell us the future but to tell us after things happen that God was in control all along and nothing takes Him by surprise. God knew what wicked people were going to do to Jesus and they used it to trick Satan and set people free from all of his evil ways.

The name that Moses gave us for the fifty most exciting days in history was the counting of the omer. Wait—the what? Miss Tyler, you said this was exciting and I don’t even know what an omer is and I doubt I want to count one. And you probably haven’t even heard of it and especially since people mostly ignore this now. The omer was very important in ancient Israel because it was the beginning of the new harvest season. All winter the Jewish people were eating what they had stored away during the year before. Old barley. Old wheat. Dried fruit. And if they had a bad year? Then they might not be able to eat much at all by the time spring came around. But all that changed on the first day of the counting of the omer. You see, the barley that was planted in the fall, right after the big festivals in Jerusalem and right before the early rains fell, was always ripe at the time of the Passover celebration during the first month of their festival year. But no matter how ripe it was, they weren’t allowed to eat any until the week after the Passover. On the day after the weekly Sabbath, when no one was working and everyone was resting and celebrating and learning about the Bible in the synagogues, the priests would go to their special barley fields that they grew themselves especially for the Temple, and they would cut a sheaf—which is a big bundle of barley stalks—and they would take it to the Temple and present it to the Lord and only after that happened could everyone sell and buy and eat the new crop of barley. God gets his share first. Since the Land of Israel is His special place, everything that grows there belongs to Him and they had to give Him the very best before they took anything for themselves.

And the week Jesus died was no different. Just like everyone else, Jesus rested in the grave on the Sabbath and on the very next day, He rose up from being dead and was alive again. A bunch of women had come to take care of His body but when they got there, the stone had been moved away from the opening to the tomb and there was no one inside! They were incredibly upset because they thought someone had stolen His body, but then they got the surprise of their lives! Jesus was alive, and they were told to go and tell the rest of the disciples that He was alive! Because those women never abandoned Jesus like the men who followed Him, they were the very first to spread the good news that God had proved Jesus was good and innocent and the Messiah by raising Him from the dead. The wicked leaders of the world were wrong to kill Him and God wanted everyone to know that Jesus being dead forever wasn’t okay with Him. And Jesus told the women not to touch Him because He still had to go up to His Father. But why would He even say that? The answer is one of the mysteries of Scripture answered—Jesus was the first to be dead and to come alive again in a perfect body to live forever and never die again. All the people who Jesus raised from the dead died again later—like Lazarus, and the widow’s son and the synagogue leader’s daughter. But Jesus is different. When He came back from the dead, He never died again. Because of that, Jesus is called the firstfruits of the Harvest. And I will explain what that means.

Whenever the children of Israel grew anything in the Land God gave them, they had to give the firstfruits to God—which means the first and very best of what they grew. The biggest and juiciest dates, olives, pomegranates, barley, wheat, etc. You might even remember that Cain did that and God wasn’t happy at all with what Cain gave Him. Cain must have not given his very best to God but God wasn’t fooled. Think of giving God a bunch of brown, moldy old bananas that aren’t even good for banana bread anymore! Or apples with worms in them. Or wheat flour from the bottom of the batch that had dirt in it! God is going to be, like, “Dude, I wish you hadn’t even given me anything at all instead of THAT. Who is it that you are trying to fool because if it was me? No, it didn’t work.” In fact, when the Bible describes what Cain gave to God, it just said that it was “some of the land’s produce.” Wow, that’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the quality, right? If, on your birthday, you walked up to a dessert table and you saw fig newtons and jolly ranchers and huge chocolate cakes and cheesecake and fancy donuts and chocolate truffles and crème brulee, and someone brought you a plate and all it had was a broken fig newton, half-eaten black licorice and a brussel sprout flavored jolly rancher then you would not only be disappointed but you might even be angry. That’s what Cain did to God, probably, although it doesn’t say that for sure.

But the priests, when they cut that new sheaf of barley each year, they made sure that it was beautiful and that all the grain heads were perfect and beautiful and ripe with no mold on them or bite marks from bugs. They found the best of the best from their very own fields and brought it to the Temple and waved that beautiful grain so that God could see it and be honored that they remembered that everything they had and everything that grew in the Land was because of Him. And after everyone presented their sheaves of barley, the people could eat it. They could roast the kernels over the fire and eat them whole, or they could grind them into flour and make bread or whatever else they wanted to do. And that sheaf of barley was called the omer. And that day was called the first day of the counting of the omer. It was also the day that Jesus was raised up from the dead and appeared to the women in the garden outside the tomb He had been placed in after He died. And when Jesus said that they couldn’t touch Him before He went to His Father, He was saying that He was just like that omer of barley, the best and first of the entire harvest that needed to be given first to God before anyone else.

But what is the harvest? Jesus wasn’t a plant, right? Well, the harvest is a way that the Bible talks about God gathering up His own people and rescuing them from Satan. Jesus is saying that He is the first and best that the world has to offer because He is God’s own Son and He is just the first because everyone who believes Jesus and everyone before Him who ever served and loved God will come back from the dead in a perfect body just like Jesus someday. After Jesus told them that He had to go to the Father, He left them and when He came back and talked to His disciples and all His other followers, they were allowed to touch Him and He ate meals with them and taught them the most amazing things over the next forty days. So, the first forty days of the counting of the omer were spent actually with Jesus, back from the dead, and teaching them all the places in the Hebrew Bible that talked about Him and exactly what He was going to do. I bet they were just amazed at all the Bible verses they knew that were talking about Jesus but they just never realized it! Moses had talked about Jesus. David had talked about Jesus. The Prophets had all talked about Jesus! Why hadn’t they put all the pieces together???

Because if they could figure it out then so could everyone else and especially Satan. Same with Jesus coming back again—if we could figure it out, we’d do a whole lot of messed up stuff with that information. And people have been doing just that for almost two thousand years—setting dates and very sure that Jesus was going to come back right away and they could even prove it by comparing Bible verses to what they saw happening all around them and people do it today too! But everyone has always been wrong even though they were absolutely sure that they were right. Jesus told everyone to just ignore what was going on around them because there are always strange things happening but that believers in Him had to just keep on doing what was right and telling people all about Him and what He did and the Kingdom of God. We don’t have to worry about when Jesus is coming back, we just have to live our lives in ways that make Him happy and help others. If we do that then we don’t need to worry or care about when He is coming back. Who knows, maybe He will come back when you have great-great grandchildren and I will have been dead a very long time by then! I am not worried at all because I trust God. Because He has everything figured out, I don’t have to. He can get it done without me! In fact, it will probably be easier for Him to get things done if I don’t know anything about it. We humans have a way of messing everything up when we know what’s going to happen and when, right? And every single year, people write books proving that Jesus will come back this year or that year and a ton of people buy those books and they make some bad decisions because they think they can make plans, and then when it doesn’t happen, they can be in some pretty big trouble.

And during those first forty days of the counting of the omer, Jesus’s disciples were probably very confused at how the great Bible scholars had all been so wrong too. But I also imagine that they were learning so much from Jesus and were so glad to have Him alive again that they weren’t upset about it at all. Can you imagine getting your Bible studies from Jesus? Man, I am wrong sometimes but He was never wrong about anything. And He went through the entire Bible with them showing all the parts that talk about Him. Don’t you wish that someone had written all of it down for us to read??? But I guess that we just weren’t ever meant to know everything. And even the disciples were wrong about things later and Jesus had to correct their wrong ideas—like when Peter didn’t understand that it was okay for him to eat at the same table with people who aren’t Jewish. During those first forty days, a lot of things changed. Jesus’s brothers started to believe that He really was the Messiah and not just crazy like they had thought before. All the people who ran away came back to Him, and I bet they were very embarrassed, but Jesus forgave them and didn’t yell at them or send them away. Jesus was very generous. Most regular people would be so angry that they would never trust those people again but Jesus knew that they were going to run away before it even happened and He also knew that they wouldn’t be so prideful anymore and they would be willing to die for Him, which they mostly all did many years later.

On the fortieth day of the counting of the omer, Jesus told them not to go anywhere—and to stay in Jerusalem for ten more days because something amazing was going to happen. He told them that God, the Father was going to keep His promise to send them the Holy Spirit. And that was really special because in the Hebrew Scriptures, people rarely were filled with the Holy Spirit. Prophets, Kings, High Priests, Moses and the seventy elders, and the two men who were responsible for making the Tabernacle in the wilderness—they were but the people around them weren’t. And so, this was different because now God was going to pour out His Holy Spirit into just regular people who followed Jesus. Not just artists or prophets or leaders but poor fishermen and former tax collectors and normal men and women. That was exactly what John the Baptist had said years before, and the prophet Joel as well. Joel said that the spirit of God would be poured out on ordinary girls and boys, young people and old people, men and women, servants as well as free people—everyone who believes Jesus. Not just people the world thought were important. And it wouldn’t just be Jews either, although for about ten years that’s the only people who believed Jesus. Soldiers and slaves and rich people who used to worship idols, they would be included too—but right now the disciples didn’t know that. And now there weren’t just twelve, or even seventy-two, but a hundred and twenty of them.

But they were still confused. Wanna know what they actually asked Him? They asked Him if He was going to “restore the Kingdom to Israel” right away. That means they were still wanting Him to be that fighting Messiah who would go to war with the Romans so that they could be their own Kingdom again. But Jesus had different plans, plans that His disciples still couldn’t understand yet. They wanted the Romans who had been hurting them for so long gone and dead but Jesus wanted the Romans to be saved. After all they had gone through with Him and learned from Him, they still didn’t understand all that He came to do. And we’re the same way still, to this very day. But Jesus just said to them, “You know what? That stuff isn’t for you to know—not how or if or when—that’s the Father’s business and not yours. Here’s what you need to be concerned with—the Holy Spirit will come just as I promised and when that happens, you will get the power to do amazing things and you will use that power to tell everyone about me. You will tell everyone in Jerusalem about me, and in Judea, and you will even tell the Samaritans about me even though you hate them. And then you will keep going until absolutely everyone knows about me.”

You know, we can spend a lot of time with Jesus and still get a lot of things about Him and about the Bible and about God and the Holy Spirit all wrong. Sometimes that happens because we want something really bad and we spend too much time thinking about it. All their lives, they had suffered because of the pagans around them and especially the Romans and the Greeks. They were tired of it and nobody wants for their terrible enemies to be forgiven and to be part of the family and the Kingdom of God unless God really changes them a lot first. I know that has been very true in my own life and it will almost certainly be true with you as well. We humans are more interested in hurting the people who hurt us than we are in forgiving them and praying for them and even wanting God to help them, right? God just makes us weird when we start believing Jesus and following Him.

But then Jesus left them. A cloud swallowed Him up and then He was gone. As they were looking up in the sky, two angels started speaking to them and asked why they were looking up in the sky—and told them that Jesus would return in the same way that He disappeared. But they didn’t say when or even where or anything like that. Jesus had given them their orders and it was time to get to work. Their first job was to count the next ten days leading up to the Spring Festival of Pentecost—a Greek word that means “fifty days” or really “fifty count” Imagine the long conversations they had, well into the night and early the next morning and all through the days that followed. They probably ate meals with Lazarus, Mary and Martha, who lived just two miles away. Jesus would have returned to God the Father on a Thursday, and Pentecost always happened on a Sunday. People would be coming, like a huge parade, from all over Judea and the Galilee with offerings of their best produce—veggies and fruits and nuts. They would march their baskets full of food up to the Temple; they would give it to the priest and say, “My father was a wandering Aramean. He went down to Egypt with just a handful of people and lived there as a foreigner with no land of his own. There he became a great and powerful nation with many people. But the Egyptians abused us and treated us badly because we had no power or way to defend ourselves, and forced us to work very hard as slaves. So, we called out to the Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the Lord heard all of our crying and saw how miserable we were, how hard they forced us to work, and how they did whatever they wanted to do to us just because they could. Then the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, with terrifying power, and with signs and wonders. He led us here and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. I have now brought the first of the land’s produce that you, Lord, have given me.”

And while they were doing all of that, all 120 of His disciples were gathered together and praying. They didn’t own any land and so didn’t have baskets of food to present at the Temple, but they had something much better. They were about to be filled with the Spirit and when that happened, they would be able to tell everyone about Jesus. But we’ll talk about that in another six or seven weeks.

I love you. I am praying for you. I want you to think as you count the days leading up to Pentecost, about those wonderful times Jesus had with His friends, His followers, His brothers, and especially His mom.

Every once in a while, something is going on with Christians or the world and I think it is important to explore it with the kids so that they understand better what everyone is talking about. This week we’re going to learn about revivals and outpourings of the Holy Spirit and what we can learn about them from looking at Ezekiel, Acts, and the ministry of Jesus.

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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 MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible modified a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context).

Everybody is talking about something amazing going on at a Christian University in Kentucky called Asbury. Now, there are two different schools in that town by that name, one is a Theological Seminary where people study to become ministers, but the school I am talking about is just a four minute walk down the road. On Wednesday morning two weeks ago, all the students of the University were gathered for chapel to hear a message from God’s word. In fact, they all go to chapel on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and then have church services on Sunday. These kids seriously love God! And by kids, I mean that most of them are under 25. To me, that’s kids even if they sound like old people to you. They are definitely grown ups but they are also kids compared to me because when I was their age, they weren’t even born yet. But I am going to tell you something important—God doesn’t care how old you are when He wants to do something amazing in your life or when He wants to use you to do something for Him.

Anyway, like I was saying, they were all gathered for Chapel (so, if you don’t like going to church four times a week then this is not the school for you!) and the leader for that day gave a sermon from Romans on the sins that keep us from truly loving each other. I thought it was a really good sermon and that he did a great job. It wasn’t a flashy sermon, and he seems just like a normal person like you and me. But then after the sermon, the choir sang and after they stopped, people just kept on singing and never stopped—and they are still singing even as I am typing this on Monday morning, twelve days later. They had to fill extra buildings, and there are people lined up all over the place wanting to join in worshiping God. And the people in line are worshiping, and people have flown in from all over North America and from all over the world to come and see what is going on. I haven’t been there but I do know two people who have been there the entire time—one teaches French at the University and the other teaches New Testament at the Theological Seminary down the road. They are husband and wife and he comes from America and she comes from the Republic of the Congo where she escaped as a war refugee and the story of how they came to be married is a really great one!

We know from the Bible that worship is very important to God, and we are supposed to be worshiping Him all the time, with the things we do and the choices we make and even how we treat our bodies and especially in how we treat each other. In Bible times, everything was religious. Going to the market to buy food was religious, farming was religious, which means that everything in their lives was about God or about the gods—depending on who you were and how you believed. In ancient Israel, they saw God as part of absolutely everything they did, from sleeping and eating to what they wore and what stories they told. Just everything was about God and His relationship with them. They believed that God was involved in every part of their lives and the people who didn’t? They were called wicked and foolish because they actually thought they could hide things from God and He wouldn’t see what they were doing and so they could be hurtful to others. But God does see us and sees everything and knows everything. It’s actually nice because we can be absolutely honest with Him and nothing we say can surprise Him. Like, we could say, “Lord, I was being a real jerk to my baby sister yesterday,” and He’s never going to respond with, “What? I can’t believe you did that! I never would have guessed!” Nope, but He might say something like, “Oh yeah, I noticed. You need to go make it up to her and make things right again. And then come back to talk with me about it!”

Now, I have to share with you why I believe God chose young people and not older people like me. These people are at the beginning of their grown up lives and they love God so much that they go to a college where they are surrounded by people who also love Him and who worship together at least every other day. Do you think that makes God happy? That young people are doing this on purpose instead of going to a school with a lot of parties and drugs and really bad stuff going on? This school doesn’t allow any of that and they kick out people who behave that way—they send them back home so they can go to the kind of school that lets their students do absolutely anything they want to do. Like the school I went to—and some messed up stuff happened to people I know and especially the girls. But when I was the age of these young people, I didn’t love God. I knew He was there and sometimes He would talk to me but I just really didn’t like Him very much, didn’t trust Him, and was very angry at Him. He didn’t hate me because of that. He knew why I felt that way and He did a lot of work to change me enough that I could love Him and not be so sad and angry all the time. If the me from today went back to college, I would definitely want to be in a place where I go to church four times a week!

A lot of older people like me are just stubborn and set in their ways and very judgmental. They don’t like it when something is happening to anyone who isn’t exactly the same as they are. They think that if people don’t believe this or that, then God doesn’t want to use them or bless them like this. Others believe that God shouldn’t do something like this with young people at all, that it should be older people who have been Christians longer. But God doesn’t care what we think and who we think deserves to be a part of something like this. In fact, none of us can say we deserve something so wonderful because that is very prideful and we are not supposed to be like that. We aren’t supposed to be bragging, or even thinking that we are all that and a bag of chips, or that we have everything figured out so God should use us instead of someone else. Jesus told His disciples that everyone who exalts themselves would be humbled but whoever humbles themselves would be exalted. But what does that mean? That means that people who brag and think they are really awesome will be sorry because they are going to be very embarrassed, and that God will make the people who are quiet about themselves very great in His Kingdom! Next week, we’re going to look at the Book of Esther and how Esther was very humble but the evil Haman was very prideful and exalted himself. She ended up as Queen and he ended up dead. After being really embarrassed in front of everyone.

And some people call this a revival and others call it an outpouring of the Holy Spirit so I want you guys to understand what those words mean. First of all, the word revival is not a Bible word—it’s a word that people have made up to describe when certain things happen. Now, we do see words like revive in the Bible a lot. Dang, there is this one spot where God is talking to Ezekiel the prophet and something totally freaky happens: “The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by his Spirit and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones. (can you even imagine God picking you up and putting you down into a valley full of bones??!!) He led me all around those bones. There were so many of them laying right on the ground of the valley, and they were very dry. Then God said to me, “Son of Man (which means “human being” here), can these bones live?” I replied, “Lord God, only you know.” (which means, I have no clue and I don’t even want to try to guess) God said to me, “Prophesy about these bones and say to them: Dry bones, you pay attention to the word of the Lord! This is what the Lord God says to these bones: I will make it so you are breathing again, and you will be alive. I will put tendons on you, make muscles grow on you, and cover you with skin. I will make you breathe again so that you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.” So, I told the bones everything I had been commanded to say. While I was talking to the bones about God and His promises, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. As I looked, tendons appeared on them (to hold them together), muscles grew, and skin covered them, but they still weren’t breathing. God said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man. Say to it: This is what the Lord God says: Breath, come from the four winds and breathe into these dead people so that they will be alive!” So, I told the bones what God told me; the breath entered them, and they came to life and stood on their feet, a huge army.” (Ez 37:1-10)

Well, dang, I bet you didn’t know there was anything like that in the Bible! But God did that to show Ezekiel that he was going to bring His people to life again. You see, they had been conquered and were living in a foreign country where everyone around them was an idol worshiper. The people wondered if their lives as Jews were over, and if they would ever be able to go back to Jerusalem or be at the Temple ever again. It was a sad and scary time to be alive and they didn’t know if things would ever change, but God was showing Ezekiel that not only can He make a huge pile of dead bones into a living group of humans again, He could also bring all of his people back home again and make them a country again and rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple. But this is where we get the idea of revival—that word I promised to explain to you. Revival can mean when someone or something that is asleep, or very sick or dead, wakes up, or gets better, or comes back to life. In Church life, we call something a revival when God does something amazing to the people who worship Him. One day, everything is normal and then BOOM out of nowhere it is like God has breathed into them and they become more alive than they were before. In the Bible and especially in the book of Acts, which tells the story of the Apostles traveling around preaching about Jesus, this is called an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. This is what happened fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus, when He came out of the tomb that they had laid Him in after He died on the Cross. Three days later, He was revived—not dead anymore but alive and more alive than He had ever been before!

On Pentecost that year, all of Jesus’s followers (120 of them) were gathered together and were worshiping God and all of a sudden they heard a huge noise and the Holy Spirit entered the place they were in and filled them up inside and they even had flames over their heads! And they started speaking strange languages that none of them knew and they were all telling people about God—and the people visiting Jerusalem from all over the Roman and Scythian Empires were just shocked that they were hearing about God in their own language from back home. And they were so amazed that three thousand people became believers in Jesus that day and they took the message of Jesus back to their homes after the festival! Now that’s definitely what I call a revival. These people were all Jewish and they accepted Jesus as their King, and when that happened, they were filled with God’s spirit too! Just like all those dead bones. Without Jesus, we are a lot like those dead bones that Ezekiel talked to about God’s promises. Some parts of us are just as dead as those dried out bones. But God revives us, gives us life in His Spirit, so that we can be His people.

What happened in Acts 2 was just huge and affected a lot of people all at once and there were also miracles so that is called an outpouring of the Spirit, because God took His Spirit and poured it into everyone who believed Jesus. Just remember that to be revived is to change someone from being dead or almost dead, to being filled with life. And an outpouring of the Spirit is just a pouring out of the Spirit into people. But there are also times in the Bible where God makes it so that everyone around can feel that He is there, really strongly. And that’s just an amazing feeling. For me, it’s like I can feel every little cell in my body. I feel like a bottle of fizzy soda. And I know He is right there with me. I feel it most often when I am really sick. That’s really nice, it’s like a hug from God and I know that He is helping me to get better. But what about when God does that with an entire place? That’s kinda what has happened at Asbury University. It started with a few people continuing to sing after the choir ended their song and then it spread and spread and people could feel that God was there right with them, enjoying their company and the songs they were singing to Him. He has special angels who do nothing but sing to Him, that’s what they were created for, but when we worship Him—when we can’t even see Him—that’s extra special. Humans choose to love God and to worship Him and to obey Him and serve Him and trust Him. We also choose to do really messed up stuff! But when we all come together, and when we don’t care which Church we go to or what we look like or what language we speak or how much money anyone has or where we all come from, then it is an amazing thing. It’s what God wants, and at the very end of the Bible, that’s what God’s city looks like. People of all kinds, all shapes and sizes and colors and languages, all gathered together—loving each other and loving God. We will all sing, so happy to be together like we were always supposed to be, worshiping God together the way we were created to do. When people do that here, it looks a lot like the Kingdom of Jesus will when He rules over all of us as King. No wonder God would want to come down in a special way to be part of it.

And the people I know who are there tell me that the ministers of all the churches there are talking to the crowds in line and people who didn’t used to believe that Jesus was even real are believing in Him. Sick people are being healed and miracles are happening. The professors at the schools are praying with the people who want prayer but no one gets up in front of the people to talk unless they are a student. God visited young people who were doing this and the adults decided that they needed to just let them keep doing it because God seems to be really happy about it. Isn’t that cool? A lot of times, adults really mess up a good thing by stepping in and trying to take control over it. They decide to do it a better way and everything falls apart. And so, all these grownups decided to let God do what He wants to do for as long as He wants to do it. Big time preachers and singers have asked if they can come and preach and sing in front of the church and the University people said, “NO!” No one is getting famous. No one can even see who is up in front of everyone singing or reading Bible verses. No one is allowed to do anything except worship God and Jesus. Everyone is praying and singing. No one there is better than anyone else. Only Jesus is better than anyone else. Only Jesus is perfect. Only Jesus deserves all of the attention.

Just like in the book of Acts when all of those Jews who believed Jesus went back to their countries and preached about Jesus, the same thing is happening with the students who have been visiting Asbury—they are going back to their schools and the same thing is happening there too! You can think of it like the churches and schools are catching on fire because they got close to someone who came back. Or like a virus that everyone needs to catch. But just like in the Bible, not everyone is happy about it. In the Bible, although everyone who believed in Jesus at this point was Jewish, all the enemies of Jesus were Jewish too and they didn’t like what was happening. Even before Jesus died some of them were saying, “All the world is going to Him!” And they weren’t happy about that because it meant that Jesus was becoming more popular and important than they were. There were so many Pharisees, and Scribes and Priests, and normal, everyday Jews who started believing Jesus but there were also very powerful people who didn’t and especially the Chief Priests and the High Priest. And they had been spreading rumors and telling lies even before Jesus died because they were jealous of all the attention that Jesus was getting and because of all the miracles He could do when they couldn’t do any. It would have totally been okay if they were concerned and they were asking Him questions, like Nicodemus did, but they hated what was happening and wanted to stop it.

Jealousy is a terrible thing. It can turn even nice people into monsters and the Sadducees, who were the head honchos of the Temple, weren’t nice people to begin with. They were greedy, liars, cruel, and corrupt—which means that they weren’t doing their jobs honestly. And if the High Priest was supposed to be anything, it would certainly be honest in serving God and the people, right? But all they could see was that Jesus was stealing the honor that they thought belonged to them. They thought, even with what low down dirty skunks they were (and we know that about them because all of the Jewish writers who wrote about them just hated how awful they were)—well, they thought that they deserved to be respected and admired by all the other Jews. They thought they were the best and that what they believed was the best and how they did things was the best and more than that, they figured that being rich and powerful was just proof that they deserved it and God loved them more than anyone else. How come it is always those types of people who think that the awful things they do are okay to God???

So, they were lying about Jesus before He died and after He rose again. And today, the exact same thing happens—even with Christians. It wasn’t long after they began worshiping God all day every day at Asbury that some religious leaders started spreading nasty rumors about the student leaders, rumors that have been proven to be false but lies spread faster than the truth. But the people I know who are there are very trustworthy and good people. They have even helped me with this radio show! They have said that none of the bad rumors are true and that the people saying those things haven’t even bothered to come and see for themselves. I have been playing their worship on YouTube all day and there is nothing fancy going on and there is nothing crazy going on. God is just being worshiped and people are being blessed.

Some grownups are saying, “Unless these people do this or that (the same way that I do) then this isn’t a real revival!” Or another person said, “Those women aren’t wearing skirts so God is not a part of this!” And how about, “They let women teach there, and God hates that!” It seems like a lot of people think that their churches are the only ones that have everything right and that God should have chosen them for this but God chooses who He chooses and doesn’t have to tell us why. I am going to be really honest, I think that God would rather do something like this with people whom everyone else thinks doesn’t deserve it because they will accept it as a gift that they don’t deserve. Grownups, when something like this happens to us, we tend to decide that it happened because God wants everyone to be like us and that He is putting His great big stamp of approval on us. And that is the worst attitude in the world but I have heard it from a lot of grownups. Of course, they don’t think that’s what they are saying but everyone who is listening to them knows the truth. It isn’t God’s job to make everyone like us. He wants everyone to be like Him and to do that we have to be like Jesus. We have to do things like forgiving the people who have hurt us, even when we have to stay far away from them, and not taking revenge or getting even when someone hurts us, even when we have to call the police. We are supposed to treat other people like they are better than we are and not like we are better than they are.

But when grownups say things like, “They aren’t the right sort of people,” what they are really saying is, “that should have happened to people like me instead!” When they say, “God wouldn’t do anything that way,” they are telling God what He can and cannot do. When they make up lies and are quick to believe gossip and rumors, they are showing that they have evil thoughts and envy and jealousy in their hearts toward anyone whom God wants to bless and use. We need to have a different attitude. When something amazing happens and God is being praised and praised and praised and people are coming to know Jesus and miracles are happening, we just need to be glad it happens. It doesn’t matter who it happens to, only that it is happening and that God and people are being blessed and lives are being changed. We still don’t know all of what will happen but deciding that something is bad right away can get us into a lot of trouble with God. I am sure you have heard of the young man named Saul, who went out arresting and hurting the Jews who were following Jesus. He decided that Jesus couldn’t be the Messiah and that his followers were criminals and that God would never use Jesus or them for anything. But then, on his way to the great city of Damascus to arrest Jesus’s followers there, he suddenly became blind and he heard a voice from Heaven. That voice belonged to Jesus, and Jesus said that when you hurt His followers, you are hurting Him. It’s something we need to think about.

I love you. I am praying for you. Next week we are going to talk about Queen Esther.