Thinking Girls Bible Study

Recent events in our world have reminded me of the time in which I grew up. A week ago I was preparing my next lesson to teach the fourth and fifth graders at my church. The designated lesson is about Paul’s third missionary journey. I knew this would be a great lesson to tie in what we had just witnessed with the assassination of Charlie Kirk and his testimony and witness. Initially, I was going to start out by saying how much harder it is for kids today to be witnessing all this violence and hatred and how the world was different for them than it was for me and even my co-teacher who happens to be my daughter-in-law from the Millennial generation. But then I remembered the day when I was nine years old and had stayed home from school because I was sick. I was watching TV when they broke into the regularly scheduled program to announce that President Kennedy had been shot. We had already witnessed the Cuban Missile Crises. Over the course of the next few years, we would live through m...

It's hard for me not to be scared right now, because this is some scary stuff we are facing. The Bible uses terms like perilous, beginning of sorrows and days of lawlessness to describe the last days before Christ returns. I believe we are in those last days now. So what do we do? How do we approach this? Of course, the Bible has the answers. Paul was forever exhorting and teaching not only how to live, but to endure, to be patient, to persevere to the end and to finish well. He was constantly using the term "in vain," exhorting us to remain faithful and persevere lest we believe in vain, or labor in vain, or receive the grace of God in vain. It has to be possible to believe in vain, and all those other things he lists, or else Paul would not have warned us about this. So now, in these most difficult times, it’s imperative that we set our resolve to persevere, endure and finish well. We need a plan of action. We need to know what it really means, what it looks...

A few years ago I watched a program on Day of Discovery. It was about a twenty year old girl named Lygon Stevens who was a mountain climber and had died in an avalanche while climbing with her brother. Lygon did not sound like your typical twenty year old. We get a glimpse into her walk with the Lord through her journal that her brother salvaged during the accident. She seemed to have found all the things that young girls are looking for in her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. But after her death, her family was left to deal with their huge heart rending loss. Their suffering was horrific. More of the story can be found on the website http://www.timetoliveisnow.org/ . The takeaway in this story for me is an illustration that came from Lygon's mother. She had been asked to speak somewhere and had gone to a place of solitude to gather her thoughts. It was still very hard to carry this whole thing around with her...the loss of her daughter, but the story of a...