The Youth Ministry leadership team met last week and I offered a little devotional based on Philippians 4:6-8:
6 Don’t worry about anything, but in everything, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. 7 And the peace of God, which surpasses (A) every thought, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (B)
8 Finally brothers, whatever is true, (C) whatever is honorable, (D) whatever is just, (E) whatever is pure, (F) whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable—if there is any moral excellence (G) and if there is any praise—dwell on these things.
To open, I passed around a deck of “spiritual questions” cards from Table Topics. Each person at the table drew a card and then pairs of people talked about both questions. The conversation went on for a couple of minutes and then we came back together and shared a few of the questions we’d had to answer. One was about what question we’d like to ask someone who had died. Mine was whether or not I believed in karma.
Then we read the Scripture from Philippians and reflected on how thinking about the “true, honorable, just, lovely, pure, commendable” did not mean keeping our minds set on the “easy, convenient, pretty, or available.” A person can have a beautiful death, for example, but being part of a loved one’s last days is one of the hardest things to do. The Scripture teaches us not to give up thinking about the pure, honorable, true, lovely, just, commendable, because they’re hard to identify, or hard to see, or challenging to our own ways of life. Instead, in a way the Scripture is telling us to seek out the hardest thoughts because the task of keeping our minds focused on them will give us practice in thinking God’s way.
