Leader's Devotional #5: All Knowing God

This, the fifth in a series of 6 RaiseUP devotions, can be shared amongst team and used individually ahead of the children’s meeting – for example, at home in the week before church. Alternatively, they could be used as a team devotion and a focus for prayer shortly before the children arrive for the session.

LEADERS DEVOTION

Where’s the highest place you’ve ever been?

[For team reflection] In twos or threes, share your experience of your travels. Where did you go? What could you see?

There’s something really special about hiking the hills. It’s not just that you get to enjoy God’s amazing creation. It’s that it also provides you with a new perspective. Our lives are generally filled with our own business – and busy-ness! It’s good to be reminded that there’s a wide world out there, above and beyond us and our concerns.

This ‘wide world’ is very much God’s concern. His heart is that ALL may know and love Him – and He asks us to make this our heart too!

READ

‘Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.’ - 1 John 4:7

REFLECT

‘Gospel’ means ‘good news.’ And it really is. God, in His goodness, LOVES us and CARES for us. He invites us to be His friends – to find our truest selves and best existence in Him. This is good news for us. And it’s good news for the entire world.

It’s often been said that we in the West live in a highly ‘individualistic’ culture. The term ‘individualistic’ simply means that our lives and our thinking centre around us: our needs, our desires, our dreams.

But the Bible invites us to think BIGGER - to see further than just ‘myself’ and understand that what’s true for me is true for my neighbor too. I am extraordinarily precious to God. And so are they.

‘Love one another,’ says John, quoting Jesus himself. ‘Everyone who loves has been born of God.’ We thought earlier about what it means to be God’s children – immensely loved and eternally cared for by our loving Heavenly Father. But there’s something else here. Being God’s child means growing into His likeness. It means carrying on the family business. At the heart of both of these things is learning to LOVE. God wants to fill us with His goodness and grace - and see us sharing it with the rest of the world.

The English archbishop William Temple (1881-1944) once said, ‘The church is the only society on earth that exists for the benefit of its non-members.’ We find JOY in knowing that God’s heart beats for us. And we find a PURPOSE in knowing that it beats for every person in the world. As we encounter more of God’s immense, life-giving love, may it lead us to love others likewise – so that the world will come to see and know the love of the Father too.

RESPOND

• Take some time to sit in silence. Picture your church. Picture your neighborhood. Picture your nation. Picture the world. As you expand your horizons, ask God to fill you with His love for others. Listen to God: is He prompting you to pray for any particular people or situations?

• Take some time to pray particularly for your church and its witness to the children and young people in your neighborhood: that you will be bold and creative in sharing God’s love, and that their hearts will be open to receiving it.

LEADERS PRAYER

Dear Father God,

Thank you for Your amazing love that reaches to the very ends of the earth.

Fill us now by Your Spirit. May we overflow with Your love, goodness and kindness, so that all the world will see and know You too.

Amen.