Thank you so much for allowing your junior high student to attend Freedom Week.  We have seen so much life change and our hope is your student comes back new and improved in some way after personally encountering the Lord for several days straight.  We hope that you’ve seen some changes, or at least been challenged or encouraged, as well this week as you’ve gone through the Freedom Week Parent Devotionals. 

Have you ever seen the move, “The Sandlot?”  It’s a classic movie about young boys and baseball.  The boys had lost their baseball because someone hit a home run over the fence.  The reason it was lost forever was because there was a giant monster/dog on the other side of the fence.  The newcomer to the neighborhood was going to jump over the fence to go get it before all the boys pulled him down.  The newcomer didn’t understand why they wouldn’t let him go get it.  In a later scene, the newcomer was explaining to the other boys that the reason he climbed the fence was because he thought he could just jump over and go get the ball back.  One of the regular boys in the neighborhood simply replied to him, “If you were thinking, you wouldn’t have thought that.”  That line makes absolutely no sense, but it’s really funny to hear little boys try to be serious or philosophical.  Our thoughts do have the power to direct how we operate and feel about ourselves though.  What we think about really does make a physical, emotional, and spiritual difference in our lives.  What do your thoughts dwell upon?  What is constantly swirling around in your mind?

Psalm 139:17-18- “How precious to me are your thoughts, God!  How vast is the sum of them!  Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand- when I awake, I am still with you.”

How precious are the things of God to you?  The beginning of the verse states how precious the thoughts of God are to the author of Psalm 139.  The things that are of God should be the things that we are thinking about.

Romans 12:2- “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”

The apostle Paul tells us in Romans that we don’t need to think like the world does.  We need to be transformed, and how does that transformation happen?  “By the renewing of your mind.”  If we want to know God’s will for our lives, our families, our community, and our nation, the Bible says it happens by winning the battle for our minds.  You’ve done a great job this week filling your mind with God’s Word, thinking about the Lord, and dwelling on spiritual things.  Keep it up!  Don’t let this devotion time just be a Freedom Week thing.  Continue to make this time a priority in your day.  If you didn’t know it, Pastor Kerry Shook actually has a devotional that you can access every day to help you in your spiritual walk.  You can go to the link, https://www.kerryshook.org/blog, and read a new devotion each day.  Our encouragement to you is to keep going, and please know that we are right there beside you- cheering you on!

We’re In Your Corner-

The Student Ministry Staff Team