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Quote of the week comes from our actual meeting. I asked Jonathan if he prayed at all this week. His answer was, “I tried, but I forgot the story.” Hmm…I think I may have explained how to pray poorly. We’ll get to that in a minute. First…how cool is the cup on the table on the right of the photo? There is a zoomed in version of just the cup after the jump, only because I think it’s cool.

Normally I blog about these meetings by going through what we studied and talking about the details of what worked and what didn’t work. I like to use these more as a guide for other parents that may be looking to start a similar study with their child. However, this week I have to break the mold, because my meeting broke the mold. This blog also may be a little bit longer than usual, if you’ve ever heard me tell a story, you’ll know why. I am genetically incapable of just getting to the point…sorry.

If you need a refresher of what happened last week, please read this blog post. It will really help you get caught up on what’s happening in my devotional meetings with Jonathan. If you haven’t read anything about what Jman and I are doing, take a look at “The Story” blog. It gives a background to these meetings.

Jonathan and I met last Monday night. We ordered our Vanilla Milk and Eggnog Latte and went out to the patio to sit down. A side note, I love that we’re having these meetings in a public place. The same Baristas see him walking in with his Bible each week and there were like 15 people on the patio all watching us meet. Watching him laugh and enjoy time in the Word.

We started the meeting with me asking Jonathan if he remembered what we studied the week before. He said, “Yep, we talked about the guy, what’s his name, that could not be put back into his mom’s belly”. I asked him if even though Nicodemus did not know what it meant to be born again, did he. He said, not really. We reread John 3:20-21 and I asked him what keeps you out of the dark and in the light. He immediately answered, “You need to confess your sins to Jesus” (tear).

What impressed me with his answer was that it didn’t seem like a church answer. It wasn’t, ask Him into your heart. It wasn’t believe in Jesus. It showed to me that he understands that it is his sin that put him in darkness and Jesus that will save him from it. I’m seriously getting misty just thinking about this one.

So I had to ask him the question that we talked about a week before. “Have you confessed your sins to Jesus?”. He answered, “Yes”. With Jonathan, as with any person that you are witnessing to, I felt the logical next step is to jump into Romans 6 and talk about the application of the Gospel in your life. I told him great. Let’s read this verse,

Romans 6:1 What should we say then? Should we keep on sinning so that God’s grace can increase?

Before we read verse 2, I realized that Jonathan’s laughter had already answered the question.

Isn’t it interesting that we have a hard time with this section, but when I read the question to a 7 year old he thinks that it’s a silly question to even ask. This is such a reminder to me to NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE COGNITIVE UNDERSTANDING OF THE GOSPEL IN YOUR CHILDREN. Seriously, these guys get it. They aren’t stuck in the mire of a lifetime of sin clogging their minds. Jesus asked us to come to Him with the humility of little children for a reason.

OK, so since he understood that keeping on sinning after we’ve received God’s grace is a ridiculous notion, I asked him why do we stop sinning. This question kind of stumped him. This led to a nice discussion about how we stop sinning, because we love God and want to please Him. Not because we think it will help us, but because we just want to show Him that we care for Him. I think he understood this, but it is the hardest thing for any Christian to understand.

I then followed up with asking him how he prayed this week. If you remember, last week I asked him if he wanted to put his trust in Jesus and he said, “Not really”. I told him that was OK and that I would pray for him and I asked him if he wanted to, to pray that God would make his heart desire Him. This is where his, “I tried to, but couldn’t remember the story.” answer came in. After some discussion about what he meant, I realized that he wanted to pray, but didn’t know what to say. He wanted to follow my instructions to ask God, but forgot what to ask Him. I asked him if he felt dumb sometimes when he started to pray, like he was gonna say something stupid to the Lord of the universe. He said, “Yeah, that’s it!”

This is the part of our discussion that God really showed me something. It was so obvious that the Holy Spirit had His hand on our conversation, because well…I can’t explain it. God was just there and it was awesome!

So our study was of John chapter 4. I opened the Bible and read through that section. I told Jonathan that this story of the woman at the well is interesting, because it is so similar to what we just read with Nicodemus. God then showed me something from this text. Although the two chapters are not primarily chapters on prayer, if we take and apply John 1:18 at it’s word we can see that these two chapters teach us a lot about prayer. I want to look with you at what the Jman and I looked at.

Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman had conversations with God. Jesus was explaining theology to them and look at their responses to Him:

Nicodemus John 3:4 “How can I be born when I am old?” Nicodemus asked. “I can’t go back inside my mother! I can’t be born a second time!”

Samaritan woman John 4:11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you don’t have anything to get water with. The well is deep. Where can you get this living water?

Both of them proved that they were on a completely different plane than the Lord. They showed that intellectually they had no business talking to Him. If I’m talking to someone that I think is off the tilt stupid, it makes me crazy. I mean, did Nicodemus seriously think Jesus was talking about a 2nd physical birth? Really? I wouldn’t have the ability to respond the way Jesus did. But God, Jesus responded with grace. With the Samaritan woman it took explaining himself 3 times and then showing her really who He was to get through to her.

So now let’s look at how these examples “Show us what God is like”. Grace. He doesn’t expect our prayer life to be perfect or accurate or anything. He knows that we don’t get most of this, but He asks us to “pray without ceasing”. We pray, not to fix our life, but to show God that we depend on Him. To remind us that we depend on Him. We have to remember this and not let our pride interfere with our prayer life. Man! God taught me something this week.

So bringing this truth back to my meeting with Jonathan, it was easy to be “7 year old funny” with that story. When I asked him if he thought he could ask God something dumber than “How can I go back into my mom’s belly?” It lead him to a quick and easy no. I think he really got an understanding of what it means to pray. This week was so fruitful. I am constantly encouraged by what God is teaching Jonathan.

Thank you all for your prayers as Jonathan and I study God’s word together. Continue to pray for God’s saving grace in his life and that the Holy Spirit draws him to Himself. Now that Jonathan has made a profession to me that he wants to confess his sins to Jesus, my job is to teach Jonathan about assurance. He has said that he wants to put his trust in Christ. I need to teach him what that trust is. Now more than ever Jonathan needs to understand that we obey God because we love Him, not because we’re supposed to. Pray that Jenna and I can be good examples of these truths.