All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Sunday School

All I really need to know about how to live, what to do and how to be, I learned in Sunday School. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday School. These are a few of the things I learned:

• I may not have a singing voice but God loves to hear me sing
• If a wee little man like Zacheus could see Jesus so can I
• With God’s help, like David, we can knock down our giants
• O be careful little eyes what you see
• I have the love of Jesus down in my heart
• The wise man built his house upon a rock
• Dare to be a Daniel
• Happy all the time
• One door and only one
• Jesus loves the little children
• Let the sunshine in and face it with a grin
• Jesus loves me this I know
• Jesus wants me for a sunbeam 

Take any of these items and extrapolate them into sophisticated adult terms – apply it to your family life, work, or your world, and it holds true and clear and firm.

Decades later I still have the love of Jesus down in my heart. I want to know God and the desire hasn’t cooled. There have been times I have allowed myself to be overpowered by other desires, business, lesser loves, laziness, and the temptation to let someone else do all the hard work of digging into the rich reservoirs of scripture. All to often I find myself tempted to live a distracted life. You know the kind – the one where in the midst of the busyness of life you still manage to perform the stand up, sit down, clap, clap, clap of regular church attendance. You drop a check in the offering plate, hope for a new nugget of knowledge, understanding, or insight in the weekly sermon, and check off a random, albeit short list, of acts of kindness to others. Somehow I’m supposed to feel like I’m living the Jesus-driven life. I don’t. Thats when hunger appears in my belly and overtakes my soul, grumbling that there must be more, even in the mundane. 

I find myself wanting more of God. Surely, I can’t be the only one who looks at the seemingly rich buffet of everything this world has to offer and loses their appetite. I can’t shake the sense that there is more. The hunger cries out that there is more of this God-infused life to live. 

I hunger for simplicity. I want to approach God in childlike faith, wonder, and awe. Such a God-infused lifestyle requires me to step away from any insta-grow shortcuts and dig deep into the soil of spiritual formation found only in God. 

I want to discover God anew, in a fresh way. I want to know a God who, in all his fullness, would allow me to know him. I want to know a God stripped of as many false perceptions and adult sophistication as possible. I want to return to the childlike faith, to the B-I-B-L-E. Through Scripture, God invites us to discover the wonders of Jesus shining in its pages.

This fall, through the preaching series, in forming a small group or by taking a class, may we in childlike spirit once more sing out:

• Give me oil in my lamp!
• Isn’t He wonderful!
• There is a fountain flowing deep and wide!
• Oh, how I love Jesus!
• It’s me, it’s me O’ Lord standing in the need of prayer!

What do you remember from Sunday School? Allow it to help you discover God again, anew, in a fresh new way!

Pastor Dean