.... little warriors

(little guys we made yesterday ... putting on the armor of God... check out the flaming arrows... they say "fear" "anger" "lies" ... and the bandanna of salvation. My kids are the coolest.)

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Harrison, Avery and I are doing a study on prayer , it's a canned thing out of a book we found, but it has actually been quite a beautiful and timely thing - and I have loved hearing them grow in their comfortability and their insight when we pray together.
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The other day, the kids were answering the questions, leading them to recall what we talked about the week before - how to prepare you heart to pray. One of the things was to confess your sins. I talked with them last week about how it wasn't that you had to make a list, but that your heart is right again, like when you are mean to your sister and you hurt her by what you said (or didn't say) - if you come back to her later and act like nothing has happened, there is still this brokenness between you because you haven't made it right... you haven't asked for forgiveness and healed. It's the same with God, we come and confess our sins to let God know that we want to make it right with him. SO, we are talking about prayer this day and the book leads the kids down this path where they wanted them to circle the right answer... "If we don't confess our sins, God will/will not hear us when we pray." Obviously the answer the book wanted was for the kids to circle "will not" - there was a picture of a big wall in between the person and a cross on the page, then a picture of the wall broken down and the person bathed in joy.
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But Avery says "that's stupid, God always hears us" and Harrison says "I think they want us to say he won't hear us when we pray, but that doesn't even make sense. Of course He will hear us. We need to confess our sins so he will forgive us and we can be alright, but He will always hear us."
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I was so proud of them.
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We transitioned into how religion so often teaches concepts of God, and they might start out good and right, but after awhile, the concepts morph into something that is far from what the truths of God are. That was what Jesus actually came to teach... that the people were so fastened to the religion of following God , they weren't actually following God anymore. We do that today too... by knowing all about the rules but not knowing the bible or God.
It was a beautiful conversation that just came...