Today our teens had their weekly Friday afternoon Bible class. We are studying 1 John. We were in the beginning of chapter three which talks about our status as "children of God." When we reached John's statement about people who know God being misunderstood by people who do not know God, this struck a chord with most of the kids, who even deal weekly with family members who do not understand their devotion to the church family every weekend. I used an illustration that got a lot of comments from the teens so I wanted to share it with you.
As Christians we are a lot like caterpillars. We crawl into classes and worship services every week and talk about flying. Then we crawl out again and try our wings for a week. When next week roles around we find ourselves crawling back in to the spiritual family to talk more about flying. All our friends simply see us a caterpillars who refuse to accept the truth about our crawling selves. Yet we know that there is flight in our future. For we know that Jesus has flown.
John talks at length about Jesus' appearing: both his initial appearance and his immanent return. When Jesus comes we will no longer see ourselves as we do now, but we will finally see ourselves as we truly are - like Jesus! While you are crawling around this week do not resist the urge to fly and every time you get the chance, test your wings.
