God's Bucket List For Your Life - and helping your kids know God

Romans 13

-  God's bucket list for your life is to love Him with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love my neighbour as I love myself.

-love does no harm to one's neighbor.  It seeks to serve, love, be understanding and peaceful.

-all of God's rules and guidelines are there out of love.  They are there to help us manifest a proper relationship with Him.  This is why the Bible says that "love sums up the law...".  God's Word is not about rules for the sake of rules.  The Bible is a book that teaches us about how to have a deeper relationship with God.

-I feel that as Brie and I raise our children that we should set rules and should discipline in a way which keeps these things in mind.  It can be very easy to try and teach our kids to simply behave and be good - but if we don't teach them how to have a meaningful relationship with God, then the only thing we are doing is teaching them how to obey rules.  We will have missed the mark and not taught them how to live for Christ.  We will have raised "moral pagans".  It is imperative that we are teaching our children how to have a meaningful relationship with God.  When we are teaching them to follow His rules and guidelines we must make sure that they understand that the reason why they are doing this is because these rules and guidelines are given to us by God out of love.  He gives them to us so that when we follow them we are pitting yourself in a place which will make us more like Christ.  And if we are becoming more like Christ, then we are becoming people who can have a more meaningful and deeper relationship with Him which leads to a life that can be truly lived to its fullest.

-look for blog..."Raising Pagan Kids in a Christian Home"...have some great insights

- A relationship with God is not about being good and setting goals and then hoping that if we are good that God will allow us to accomplish our goals.  A relationship with God is about loving Him and being surrendered to Him.  We are called to work our hardest in all things, but we are called to do so for the glory if God.  This means that we work hard to glorify God and are surrendered to Him for all results of our efforts.  God calls me to work hard in all things and then be surrendered to Him for all results.

-It is okay to be a "go getter", but it is more blessed to be a "go giver".  Both can be done for the glory of God, but when we look at the life Jesus lived it is clear which He most values.

+ Grace is not opposed to effort (which is action), but to earning (which is trying to accomplish only what we want rather than being surrendered)