Christian Living Series

Imagine that you were headed to church early one Sunday morning. You had set out your "church clothes" the night before so that you would wear the right clothes. You picked out a white pair of pants and cool looking shirt. You wanted to look your best at church. There was this one girl that you wanted to impress. So you spent 2 hours in the morning to spiff yourself up. You put your clothes on and brushed your teeth. You weren't even going to eat breakfast because you wanted to take the extra time fixing yourself up. You were almost done. All you had to do was gel your hair. You had this really cool hair gel that gelled your hair so good that you could go through an "F5" ("Finger of God") tornado and it would hold. Your gel had an odd name, Gorilla Snot, but it smelled good and looked good. So you wet your hair, squirted some Gorilla Snot on your palm, rubbed your palms together and then transferred the smooshed Gorilla Snot onto your hair. Your "Snot", as you called it, took about 5 minutes to set up. Once it set up, you could pretty much do anything you wanted and it would stay the way you had combed it. You had some Snot left on your hands so you smeared it on your nice white pants. You didn't care. It was colorless and no one would be able to tell you had smooshed gel on your pants. [Catch the rest of the story in the Devo] As we walk through this life, we get dirty from rubbing up against a sinful, fallen world. No matter how much we try we can't "rub" the sin off. As we try to "rub" it off, it only gets worse. Maybe "rubbing" the sin off is trying to justify our sin or maybe just ignoring it or maybe we just call the sin a mistake, "it was only a mistake not a sin". At the end of the day our nice clean, white, pure hearts and minds are pretty dirty and the only way to clean ourselves up is to take a spiritual shower. In order to get clean again we need to get on our knees and ask God to forgive us and to purify us. He is the only one who has the "bleach" that can remove the dirt and grime from our lives. You see, when we accept Jesus into our hearts there is a certain way that He expects us to act.

The following is taken from intro story. Imagine that you loved Mike and Ike's (the candy). You loved them so much that you would do anything to get them. In fact, you loved them so much that you would dream about them when you were at school. You couldn't wait until payday. That's when your mom would give you your monthly allowance. Each month, when she would give you your $12.29 allowance, you'd race to the closest grocery store, head directly towards the candy aisle and grab yourself a handful of Mike and Ike boxes. You'd head to the checkout counter with your handful of Mike and Ikes. The checkout line seemed soooo slow every time you'd try to buy your M & I's, but they were worth the wait. You finally made it to the front of the line and the clerk started ringing up your stash of candy. The clerk finally finished ringing them up and you whipped out your money and paid for them.They were yours now and no one could take them away from you. You ran home as fast as you could to add them to your already huge stash of M&I's. You made it home and headed for your bedroom where your treasure was hidden where no one could find it. You head towards your top secret, highly confidential, enter at your own risk, camouflaged, hidden in a really, really, really tough and inaccessible compartment, for your eyes only place. You were so proud to have concealed the M&I's in a place that only you and God could find. If you had the money, you would have put guard dogs, barbed wire and electric fences around it. But for now, you had to settle for a home-made booby trap system. This story is kinda what temptation is like. If you give in to temptation, eventually you will get burned. You will get trapped in a lifestyle of sin. If you play with temptation, eventually Satan will have you trapped. Satan makes you think that there are no consequences to playing with temptation. He will make you think that you can get away with it. But he will trap you if you give in. Eventually you will become a slave to that particular sin. This week we are going to study about temptation and what it is. Temptation itself is not a sin. It's when you give in to the temptation that it is sin. If temptation was a sin, then Jesus would have sinned because He was tempted in every way just as we are. The difference is that He never gave in. But often we do. Especially when we play around with temptation.

One upon a time in a galaxy far, far away was an evil alien race called the Zits. They came from the planet of Zitoid. The planet Zitoid was in the far reaches of the Zittyway galaxy. This galaxy had twelve suns and fourteen and a half planets (one planet came to a head and blew its top off so now it's just a half a planet but that's not the point of the story). Zitoid was ruled by King Zitty. He was a good king and treated all the other Zits well. Life had been the same for many, many zoiks, that's "years" to you earth people. Life on Zitoid was grand. There was plenty of sunlight from the twelve suns so the Zits spent plenty of time outside enjoying the warmth. Of course, since they had twelve suns, the average daily temperature was about 400 zerks, that's about 150°F. That's the way the Zits liked it, nice and toasty warm. One day King Zitty said to his trusted advisors Zerf, Zork, and Carl, "I think we need to go exploring around other planets to see what kind of life we can find. I want you, my trusted advisors, to build a zarfmobile (space ship) so that we can travel at the speed of znarfblat (speed of light) so that it won't take us very many zoiks to get to the other side of the galaxy. Well the king's advisors, Zerf, Zork and Carl, started working on building the zarfmobile. After years of planning, designing and construction, they finally completed it. It was a beautiful space ship. . . Er . . Oops. . . I mean zarfmobile. They had built it so well that it could travel at twice the speed of znarfblat. After they had completed it King Zitty and his advisors Rack, Shack and Benny. Oops. . . I mean Zerf, Zork and Carl began their quest to visit other planets and galaxies. They zwished (ran) into the zarfmobile and headed out to the outer most parts of the universe in search of not so intelligent life. They traveled for many zoiks until they came to the planet called "earth". They actually had found a worm-hole that folded time and space and used that to cut many zenturies off of their travel time. They had heard stories bout these earthlings and how intelligent they were. They also had heard that earthlings had zits and wanted to see if they were actually the Zits' long lost cousins.