The Sunday School: Teaching Reverence For God
A man was telling a friend all the troubles which had come into his life. Everything had gone wrong, he said. He was having problems with his health, with his family, with his finances, and with his friends. He was so miserable, in fact, that he felt he could just lie down and die.
As the man poured out his troubles, his friend was overcome with sympathy. In pity for his troubled brother, he uttered a word: GOD! He couldn’t have told you whether that word was an oath, a prayer, or what.
It just welled up out of his being. The troubled man heard the word uttered by his fried. It occurred to him that through all his troubles, he had hardly thought of God. He had sought neither his guidance nor his strength.
Perhaps If he would call upon him, God would offer some help in his dilemma. That decision was a turning point in the troubled man’s life. As he turned to God for help, he regained a hope he had long ago abandoned.
He discovered a strength to see him through his troubles. And he discovered a different way of living which brought new joy and satisfaction to his relationships with family and friends.
If you were to ask that man, he would no doubt tell you the most important thing he ever learned was to reverence God in his life, and to try to serve him.
We will be sending our children back to school soon because we feel it vitally important for them to get a good education. They will spend about 30 hours a week in classes, and additional study time at home, seeking to master math, English, social studies, and science. We insist that our children go to school, we require them to do their homework, because we think it is important for them to learn these things. They will need them to function and compete in our modern world. Yet the most important thing for them to learn cannot be taught in public school. And we often neglect to carry our children where it can be learned.
The writer of Proverbs is universally recognized to be a man of wisdom. He tells us: The reverence and fear of God is basic to all wisdom. Knowing God results in every other kid of understanding.(Proverbs 9:10 Living Bible)
More science, more math, more English – even more psychology – could not meet the need of the troubled man I told you of. He needed something which would enable him to put together what he already knew.
He needed someone to hold him up, and to give him a sense of direction. He needed to know God.
We and our children need to know God, too. That is why our churches have a Sunday School.
We often neglect Sunday School. We take it for granted, and treat it as unimportant. But many of the problems we face in life would not arise – or they would be far easier for us to deal with – if we could draw upon the learning the Sunday School makes available to us.
If you and your children will participate regularly in the Sunday School, you will come to know God and his will for your life. You will discover his strength, and his guidance. You will receive a wisdom which will enable you to approach life with far more understanding, and with a much greater hope. It is the purpose of our Sunday School to teach reverence and fear of God, that we might have this wisdom for living.
All through life, we are going to be confronting obstacles and problems. At many points it will appear that all doors are closed before us. We will often feel that our knowledge, our skill, our wisdom just are not adequate to deal with the situations life brings to us.
But if we have spent a lifetime learning how God has enabled people like ourselves to overcome their problems, we will have developed a reverence for God – a recognition that God has the knowledge, the power, the wisdom our problems require of us. We will have developed a relationship with God which will enable us to call upon him for help – and to receive the help that we need. Reverence for God means we have a relationship with God – a relationship of trust, a relationship of confidence. Because we reverence God, we can face life unafraid. We can cope with our problems. We can tackle our responsibilities, because we know our God will make us a way even where there is no way.
By our own observations, we can see that people who take their religion seriously enough to attend Sunday School and church regularly develop a stronger faith, a stronger sense of worth and or purpose. And this sense of worth and purpose have a great impact upon their conduct. Reverence leads them into the way of life.
We know that today one of every two marriages performed in the United States ends in divorce. Yet, study after study has revealed that among active church families, there is less than one divorce for every 40 marriages. Reverence for God leads families in the way of life.
As we meet week-by-week to study God’s Word, we discover that in his Word, God has provided us the principles which lead to life in its fullest dimensions. God teaches us to live in love toward other people, to treat them as we ourselves would want to be treated. He cautions us to avoid temptations to self-indulgence and laziness. He calls us instead to cultivate goodness and gentleness, to discipline ourselves to grow and to serve. As we follow in the way he leads, we avoid many of the practices which demean and destroy life. And we discover instead those practices and experiences which ennoble life and make it richer. Reverence for God leads us into the way of life.
We and our children need all the education we can get. It will be a big help to us as we take our place in the world. But the learning all of us need the most is learning about God and his will for our lives – learning to reverence God, and to serve him in all that we do. Reverence for God gives us a relationship with the one Power who can make a way for us where there is no way. And reverence for God leads us into life in its most beautiful and rewarding expressions. We learn reverence for God – and we gain God’ s wisdom – as week by week we gather to study together the revelations he has given us of himself, and as we open ourselves to his saving power which is available to us today.