Believing I am broken and in need of a Savior

What we believe influences the choices we make. Inversely, the choices we make demonstrate the things we believe. For example, if I believe that eating sugar coated gumballs will improve my dental hygiene and give me a winning smile, I will probably chew the stuff every day, right after I brush my teeth, of course. In the same way, if I believe that Jesus Christ is God, and God loves me, and God is almighty, and there is no power on earth or in the realm of infinity and beyond greater than His, then, when I am in a place of desperation, the one I will turn to first and foremost will be Jesus.

So being a Christian means that I believe that Jesus is God. In fact let’s give Him the full title due Him; He is the One, True, Living God.

Now that I know who Jesus is, I can begin to answer the question, “Who am I in relationship to Him?”

Here’s what I shared with our kids last week.

Using a broken tape recorder, I told the kids that this machine could no longer work the way it was designed and built to work. It had lost it’s original and true purpose. Then I showed them a cassette tape. (Many of the kids didn’t even know what it was!) I told them that the tape recorder had broken it and that I couldn’t use it any more. In essence, this broken machine caused something else to break. I acted upset and told them that now I was going have to throw the cassette away.

I said, “Since I can’t fix the machine myself and I’m not willing to pay the price to have an expert fix it, what do you think I should do with the tape recorder?” A few said to go ahead and dump it in the trash, but many of the dancers expressed more merciful suggestions, such as putting it in a time capsule and burying it in my backyard, or giving it to a museum that had old things in it.

Then I asked "How is this broken tape recorder like us?”

We are broken, everyone of us. A man and a woman in a garden along time ago broke our relationship with God. They passed that brokenness, like a birthmark, onto every human being. Being a Christian means believing that we are broken, and will never work the way God designed and built us to unless we get fixed. We believe that if we stay broken, in the end, we will be separated from God forever. We believe that we cannot fix ourselves and that there is only one way to get fixed. We believe that Jesus came to earth to fix that broken relationship, and restore us to the way God designed and built us. The cost of this restoration was the greatest price, one’s life. Jesus paid that price when He died on the cross.

THE GOOD NEWS IS...

1 Corinthians 15:22 New Living Translation (NLT)

Everyone dies because all of us are related to Adam, being members of his sinful race, and wherever there is sin, death results. But all who are related to Christ will rise again.

Romans 3:22-24 New Living Translation (NLT)

We are made right with God by placing our faith in Jesus Christ. And this is true for everyone who believes, no matter who we are.

For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard. Yet God, in his grace, freely makes us right in his sight. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins.

Family Time

There’s no time like the present for you and your kids to do some “fall season clean up.” Have them pull out their toy box and find any toys that are broken, or unusable and talk about what to do with them. Talk about what it means to be broken and thrown away and what it means to be fixed and kept. Lead the conversation to how Jesus came to fix broken people just like us, and that people who don’t get fixed will be separated from God forever.

Act out the story of Adam and Eve’s saddest day, the day they made the worst choice, and believed a lie instead of the truth. Show, through movement, how Adam and Eve’s relationship with God was broken on that day and would be so for every one in their family then and now. End with a prayer or a song thanking Jesus for making a way and paying the cost for their relationship with God to be fixed, so now they can become the people God designed and built them to be.

Hope Of the Broken World by Selah is a great song to include in your family worship time. LINK