To All the Children of God

“I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.”

2 Corinthians 6:18

     After I rededicated my life to Christ in 1993, the first order of business God had for me was to attend a weekly Bible study and to work in Children’s Ministry by teaching Sunday school to third graders.  God knew what he was doing.  Since I had not grown up in the church and had not received basic teaching about the faith, he called me to instruct children so I could learn along with them. In Matthew 18:4, Jesus says “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”  I was in adult form but was a babe in Christ and realized there was so much I did not understand.  The simple Bible lessons children learn were what I needed.  I taught children for a decade before the Lord directed me to new areas of ministry: leading adults in Bible study, speaking to women at First Friday Feast and eventually overseeing the Trietsch Women’s Fellowship in Flower Mound, Texas at Trietsch Memorial United Methodist Church. 

    God has a way of bringing us along slowly in our faith.  He seems to polish and fine tune one area at a time and sometimes the process is painful, isn’t it?  However, as I look back, the most difficult periods of my life, where I received the most “pruning” seemed to produce the most fruit spiritually.  Our heavenly gardener, God, knows that pruning keeps our vine from growing out of control!  In John 15:2, God’s Word says:  “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.  He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.”   When we resist the gardener’s pruning, our vine (or faith) becomes dry and we’re in danger of watching it wither away.  We lose our connection with the vine grower.  God does not want that and neither should we, so as we go through life we must remember to approach our spiritual walk as children in many ways, absorbing God’s teaching like a child, having a child-like faith in the Lord so that we trust him in all our circumstances, good and bad, and most importantly, we should believe that we are truly God’s children and that he loves us dearly!  Claim John 1:12:  “Yet to all who receive him, to those who believe in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”