I’m sure that you will echo this sentiment. As I write and prepare the lesson and then later teach the lesson, I have had the Holy Spirit speak to me and challenge my personal life through the lesson. This has been especially true in this “Children Who Know Their God” series of lessons. Week after week, I have heard the voice of the Holy Spirit challenge me in various areas of my daily walk with Him, perhaps none more evident than in this week’s lesson.
Week #7 God is an All-Day, Every-Day God!
On one of my speaking trips, I boarded an airplane at the Dallas/Ft. Worth airport to return home. In walking down the aisle towards my seat, I noticed a person that looked familiar. I guess that my staring was obvious because they greeted me as though they knew me. I then admitted to them that while I did recognize them, I just couldn’t place who they were and how that I knew them. My mind was racing. Did I know them from a conference? Perhaps they might be a friend of a friend. Imagine my embarrassment when I learned that this person was one of the managers of the Wal-mart which is located one block away from my church, a person that I see several times a week. I had to explain to the person that for some strange reason, with them not wearing their blue Wal-mart jacket and not standing at the front of the store around the checkout lanes, my brain just couldn’t identify who they were.
This is true with our relationship with God. We have compartmentalized Him to being at a certain place at a certain time. If we were to bump into Him outside of His “space”, we wouldn’t know Him. To many children (and sadly, us adults), God fits into a 1 1/2 hour time slot one morning a week. The rest of our week is filled with other things and people.
For this lesson, we also used a woman’s purse as an illustration. As a man, I have to admit that a woman’s purse is a great mystery to me. It is the great abyss, the deep dark hole. But, I have been told by numerous ladies, a purse is the easiest place in the world to navigate in. Why? Because everything has a place and every place has a designated thing. Ask for a piece of gum and within seconds they can pull it out of their purse. Need fingernail clippers? Again, within seconds they can locate it and pull it out of their purse. Everything has a place and every place has a thing. Everything is compartmentalized and assigned a place.
In this lesson, the Holy Spirit challenged us to allow God to move out of His “place” and to become an All-Day, Every-Day God. From Deuteronomy 5:9, we shared that God is a jealous God who is consumed with us and wants us to be consumed with Him. He refuses to be squeezed into a tiny few minutes of our way too busy lives and allocated to being recognized only at a certain place and time.
I’m sure that you can readily see how the Holy Spirit spoke to me in this lesson. In order for me to truly know Him as instructed in our series’ theme verse, Daniel 11:32, then He has to walk out of our church auditorium and be allowed to have more than a little fraction of my 168 hour week. He wants to be an All-Day, Every-Day God.
