Living Intentionally

Living Intentionally
Author: Jill Wargo, Ridge Kids Director
Foretold - Part 1
Before the mountains were born, before You gave birth to the earth and the world, from beginning to end, You are God.  
– Psalm 90:2
The message on Sunday, Don’t Miss It, relates to the times we see the Gospel woven throughout the Bible. It’s found not in one place but many. It shows the importance of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

Pastor Tim’s message led me to think about the book Don’t Miss It: Parenting Every Week Like It Counts by Reggie Joiner and Kristin Ivy. The book shares that we have 936 weeks with our children until they graduate high school and stresses the importance that a parent or guardian plays in shaping their children’s faith. Our kids’ futures are in each of our hands, and the way we guide and raise them will impact their future.

This book pairs well with Legacy Marbles—a jar that contains 936 marbles. Each marble represents a week that you have left with your child. The idea is to remove a marble every week, showing how much time you have left with your child until graduation. Can this be sad? Yes. However, the point is for you to be more intentional with your parenting as the jar becomes empty.

What if we had a jar of marbles that represented our lives? Would we be more intentional with our time with God? Would we be out spreading His Word and love more than we are right at this moment?

We have a two-year-old at home, meaning we have about 824 weeks left until our son graduates high school. Our jar has about an inch of empty space at the top. I am grateful that we have many weeks left in these childhood years with our son. It drives me to cherish the hard days and slow down in the busyness of life.

What if we had a jar of marbles that represented our lives? Would this visual representation change our “what” and “how” today? Would we be more intentional with our time with God? Would we be out spreading His Word and love more than we are right at this moment?

The fact that the Gospel is threaded throughout the entire narrative of the Bible should clue us in to just how important it really is. If the message is so important that God chose to share it in that way, how can we not see that it’s our job to spread this good news? I can feel the weight of this responsibility and realize how much more intentional I need to be with my time with God and the way I share His Word with others.

This week, I encourage you to dive deeper as an ambassador of Christ to share the Gospel. It’s now our time to lean in and see how God wants to use us this Easter season.
Now brothers, I want to clarify for you the Gospel I proclaimed to you; you received it and have taken your stand on it. You are also saved by it, if you hold to the message I proclaimed to you—unless you believed for no purpose. For I passed on to you as most important what I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.
– 1 Corinthians 15:1-4

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