Hate the World; Love the Father

Interesting that John's use of the word anti-christ is to mean anyone who opposes Christ - i e  a false prophet.  The Antichrist as we talk about nowadays is actually called The Beast in Revelation.

On loving the Lord and hating the world, I found an interesting illustration in a book titled Real World Parents: Christian Parenting for Families Living in the Real World, by Mark Matlock.  It shows God's storyline as a continuous line with no beginning and no end.  That's the storyline we want our children to hang onto, because the world's story line is a segment with a beginning and an end.  And everything we do that invests in the world's storyline will end-- completely disintegrate, with the world. But everything we invest in related to God's storyline will continue to live forever.

It's our jobs as parents to help kids recognize the permanency of God's storyline and how their investments will be locked in forever.  It's a hard sell if we try to push it with behavior-- it has to be from heart.

Sometimes, I wonder how pure my heart is.  Just yesterday on the way home from the WWRC, with 3 of the boys in the car, one of them asks me, "Mom, do you really like to worship?"  I thought, what a weird question.  "I suppose so," I said.

"No," he asked again.  "I mean, like do you really love it like you don't want it to end?"

I have to admit, there are moments during worship time at church where I feel so filled with love for the Lord that I really feel emotional and I raise my arms and I enjoy it.  But there's always that bit of me that thinks about the stuff I have to do that day..  Do I really love it?  Well, maybe not as much as my boys' do.  Just listen to their answers.

"Because, I really love it, Mom," he says.  "Like when we're worshiping, I wish it could go on forever!"

Another of my boys agreed. "Yeah, Mom.  Like at the summer camp when they have two hour worship times, I could go on for hours after that." 

Wow.  I wonder how much loving worship is related to loving the Lord.

The third son in the car seems more like me.  "Sometimes I love it, and sometimes, I kind of want to go and do something else."

Maybe this son's just practical.  But he's also at that ripe age of Jacob's struggle -- more on that later...