Living as a Believer

I think Wednesday will be one of my favorite days of VBS. We'll be looking at what it means to live as a believer among other believers. I remember first falling in love with the Acts two church back in high school when I read the book, Rediscovering Church. I loved their example of learning and worshiping together, as well as the love that they showed in meeting the needs of their fellow believers. I love it when our weekend curriculum covers the early church, and the kids in our classes also love hearing about the way that the church supported each other in its early days. People loving people is easy to love.

On Wednesday, each child should walk away understanding that:
-When you are a believer, you share a special connection with other believers.
-We can look at the early church to see how believers should live with other believers.
-We see that we should have fellowship (time together as believers), we should listen to teaching from God’s Word, and we should worship God together.
-The people in the early church really cared about each other: they shared what they had, sold their property and possessions to help the new believers in the midst who had no where to go, and they praised God and enjoyed the goodwill of all the people.

Every year we challenge our kids to raise money for a special giving project. We've helped build a water tower in Tonga, rebuild a home for a family whose house burned down in Tonga, purchased supplies for a VBS in Hong Kong, supported a mission trip to Latvia and supported an outreach festival within our own town. Our kids typically bring in between $2000-3000. I love the enthusiasm they show in supporting a need--I've heard great stories from parents of their kids selling seashells to neighbors, doing extra projects around the house, even giving up money they'd been saving for a trip to Disney Land.

This year our giving project will be our church's benevolence fund. This fund meets the needs of those within our body on a daily basis--helping pay utility bills for people who have lost their jobs, buying groceries for a single mom, assisting with medical bills, the needs met range from large to small but are always great. Helping provide for these needs fits perfectly with the overall theme of our VBS in that we're wanting our kids to understand what it means to be a believer and be a part of the body of Christ. Wednesday's lesson goes hand in hand with meeting this need as our passage talks about how the church in Jerusalem was growing daily. Many of the numbers being added were from outer areas, but because of accepting Jesus as their Saviors, they would be unable to return home. They had great needs and their new family met those needs.

Wednesday’s teaching takes what we learned the day before about how to live personally as a believer and builds off it on how to live in community with other believers. We’ll use the church in Acts 2 as our example. In Acts 2 (but focusing on 2:37-47) we see that the people in the church had a special relationship with one another, and their church was growing! They devoted themselves to learning about Jesus, to fellowship, sharing meals, and prayer. They met together and shared what they had. Not only did they share, but they even sold their property and possessions to help other believers in need. The worshiped God, praised God, and enjoyed the goodwill of all the people. It was a special group of people, and we can learn from them, and learn to live like them.

In the skit, the toys will go on a mission to rescue a missing toy. They toys will have to work together, support each other and help each other on this mission.

As each day gets closer, I check more and more items off my list and get more and more excited! I can't wait to see what God will do!