Hello, children. Welcome to Spring Branch Academy, where we are seeking to instill wisdom and inspire worship in every student to the glory of God. God is great, and God is good. These are the attributes of God. His greatness speaks of his size, and his goodness speaks of who he is. With regard to God is great, he is eternal, and he is omnipresent. In time and in space, he has no limits. He is eternal, not just everlasting, but even outside of time. He is omnipresent, not just in being everywhere, but even being outside of everywhere. Not even the heavens of heavens can contain him, Solomon once said. He is the one who created time and space. He is definitely outside time and space and yet is in time and in space as we see in Jesus the incarnate one. God is great. He is also all-powerful and all-knowing. He is omnipotent and omniscient. He can do all things except stop being God. He cannot deny himself. That means he cannot lie. He cannot do evil. He cannot do wrong, can he? God is able though to do all things within his moral character. That means that nothing is impossible for God. There's nothing too difficult for him. And he knows all things, all things right now, all things in the future, even because he's planned them, not just because he can predict them or see them ahead of time. In fact, God even knows the hypotheticals, the what ifs. As David once asked God, are the men of Calah gonna hand me over to Saul? And God said, they will. And then David didn't stay there, and it never happened. But God knew they would have if David had stayed there. And so God's knowledge, as Psalm 139 says, is so pervasive he knows what you think even before you speak it. Such knowledge, the psalmist says, is too wondrous for me. So God is great in time and space. God is great in power and knowledge, time and space, eternal and omnipresent, power and knowledge, omnipotent and omniscient. Well, what are the eight parts of speech? Nouns and pronouns, verbs and adverbs, adjectives and interjections, prepositions and conjunctions. And what is a noun? A person, place, or thing. A proper noun? It's a noun with a capital letter. It speaks of a very definite thing you name. Pronouns stand in the place of nouns. Verbs, well, they can be action or state of being. And regarding the action verbs, they can be transitive or intransitive. And then, of course, we have the verbs that are the linking verbs that act like be verbs, the stative verbs. There's actually five properties of verbs. There's person, first, second, or third person. First is the one speaking, second is the one spoken to, third is the one spoken about. I, you, he, she, it, we, you all, they. Number is singular or plural, meaning one person is the subject, one thing, or many. Tense, that usually pertains to time, like past tense, present tense, future tense, and the kind of action, whether it's continuous or completed. Voice, it's either active, you're doing it, or passive, it's being done to you. And then mood. Mood implies the human will. A command or an imperative imposes my mood, my will on you. Could be a wish, let it be, or let this happen, which is actually an indirect command. Person, number, tense, voice, and mood. When you learn a foreign language, these will become really important. In scripture, we learned the Shema last time. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Because that is true, this is what you should do. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. And then Jesus identified the second commandment is you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Deuteronomy 6, 4 and 5 speaks of loving God. Leviticus 19, 18, loving your neighbor. Again, hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And then Leviticus 19, 18, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus fulfilled that and brought it to a higher level when he said in John 13, 34, a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I loved you, that you also love one another. It's an old commandment, 1 John 2 says, it's like love your neighbor, but now it's a new commandment because it's not love another as myself, but love another believer as the Lord loved me. A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I loved you, that you love one another. John 13, 34. Let's sing the 10 commandments. God is one, the table's two, Ten commandments we must do, Have no other gods but me, To no image bend your knee. Do not take God's name in vain, Sabbath days do not profane, Honor father, mother too, that it may go well with you. Often, Lord, these laws we break. Save us now for Jesus' sake. God is one, the table's two. Ten commandments we must do. Do not take your neighbor's life. Do not take your neighbor's wife. Do not steal your neighbor's gain. Do not ruin your neighbor's name. Do not covet anything. house or wife or slave or things. Often, Lord, these laws we break. Save us now for Jesus' sake. Well, Jesus once talked about obeying the commandments in a parable of two sons. He was having a conversation with the chief priests and the elders. They wanted to know by what authority he did these things, and he asked them a question first. How about John the Baptist? Was he sent from God or not? And they refused to answer. Well, Jesus then told a story of a father who had two sons, and he told the sons to go work the vineyard. One son said he would not do it, but then felt bad and did it. The other son said, I will do it and didn't. Jesus then asked, which of the two sons did the will of the father? And the Jewish leaders got it right, the first son. And Jesus then indicted them. He basically showed them their fault. The tax collectors and the prostitutes, they listened to John the Baptist and they believed. And you saw it and you didn't feel bad and believe. And so we learn from this that God's will for us is that we repent and believe. What was really encouraging to me, children, in this parable is that doing the will of the Father doesn't mean I do it right away all the time. In other words, perfection. That would be great, and it would please God. But what it tells me is that my life can be sloppy and messy, because it will. I'm a sinner. But my heart needs to be soft. And when God convicts me, I say, I agree, Lord. I feel bad. I repent. And I turn to Jesus. I trust in him fresh. It's what we do when we come to Jesus at first, when we quit trying to make a name for ourselves and quit trying to show how right we are, and we give up and we say, Jesus, I'm bad. Forgive me. That's why you died for me. The rest of the Christian life is just that way. We live the rest of our Christian life then. agreeing and agreeing with God. You're right. You were right. The commandments are good. I sinned, but thank you. I have a priest who prays for me, intercedes for me. Thank you, Jesus. I believe in you. That's doing the will of the Father. Hallelujah. In math, We have the five mathematical operations. We've gone through the number sets, haven't we? And last time we looked at groupings, pairs, weeks, dozens, and even the decimal system, twos, sevens, twelves, and tens. Well, the five operations are addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and exponents. Say exponents. Addition is joining together. Subtraction is taking away or comparing. Multiplication is multiple additions. Division is multiple subtractions. And exponents is multiple multiplications. They all make sense and they all actually build on addition. Someday in algebra you will learn the key on how to look at subtraction and division and you'll tie everything back to addition. showing again that algebra is basically arithmetic, generalized, and arithmetic is counting. In science, we have Isaac Newton's three laws of motion. The first law is an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. Similarly, an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. That's the first law. It's the law of inertia. Inertia is that ability to maintain velocity unless acted upon by an outside force. The second law shows a relationship between a force and mass and acceleration. A force is proportional to the mass. You get a bigger hammer, you get bigger force. Ah, but it's also proportional to the acceleration. If you make that hammer Speed up more quickly, it has more force. So F equals MA, force equals mass times acceleration is the second law. The third law is that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you're on a smooth pond of ice and you wonder how do I get off it, and you can't grip anything. Throw your shoes in one direction and you will slide off the other way if the ice is perfectly smooth. It's how rocket ships move in outer space. They thrust out one side of the rocket ship with firing gas out that side and they move in the opposite direction. Isaac Newton also studied many things, including light. And it's from him that we see that the white light can be broken apart into the visible color spectrum. And we call that Roy G. Biv. Wow. Roy G. Biv. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. It's an acrostic of seven letters. Roy G. Biv. Well, In geography and chronology, we've been looking at a lot of things. And last time we saw the basic timeline of the Middle Ages. I want you to remember those key dates. This week we're looking at Anglo-Saxon England. If you were to look at a map of Anglo-Saxon England in the 700s, you would see that it is made up of four peoples, The Saxons are in the south, and they have West Saxon, South Saxon, East Saxon, which is shortened to Wessex, Sussex, Essex. That's where London is. The Jutes are in the southeast corner, down in the bottom right in Kent. The Angles are on the east. Mercia, East Anglia, and North Umbria. And the Britons, who were on the island of Great Britain before all these Germanic tribes came, they're now on the West. That's Patrick's people. They're over there in the South, in what is South Wales, West Wales, excuse me, Cornwall. Then they're in Cambria, which is Wales today, and in the North in Cumberland. And so, In the 9th century, the 800s, the Danes, who are the Vikings, they started invading the east side of Great Britain and King Alfred, the only king who's called the Great, Alfred the Great, united not only the Saxons but also the Angles and the Jutes and got a big kingdom together of united England and kept the Danes from taking over the island. I think that's why he's maybe called Alfred the Great. Let's sing, or let's say, our church history timeline. Western Augustine and Patrick of Ireland, Gregory, England, Mohammed, and Muslims, Charlemagne, Cluny, Crusades, Inquisitions, Anselm, Aquinas, Scholastic positions, William the Conqueror, Dominic, Francis, bubonic plague, then reason and faith, the church in the West, imperial state. Cluny was a monastery that led a large reform in the 900s. Out of that reform came Hildebrand. He was influenced by the Cluny reforms and Hildebrand became Pope Gregory VII, who led the fight against the investiture controversy. Well, the investiture controversy is a big, big name. It basically means the king can appoint who's going to be head over the churches, like a bishop, and the people that want to be head over the church can pay the king. That's called simony, after Simon in Acts 8, who wanted to buy the Holy Spirit. These two things did not please Rome. They wanted to be in charge of all the church. They thought they had that right. I don't agree. I don't think God's Word says so either, but they thought they did, and so they pressed against it. Oh, it's such an interesting story how Gregory VII fought against Henry IV, and it went back and forth, back and forth, until finally Gregory VII is kicked out of Rome by Henry's armies. The king, the pope, often didn't get along, remember? The three players, the three figures in Middle Ages, Muhammad's lurking in the background, as it were, with the Muslims. Speaking of Muslims, at the end of the 11th century, the Crusades start. Those are then the kings of Western Europe invading the so-called Holy Land, the land of Israel or Palestine, where the Muslims now are in charge and they fight the Muslims. The reason why they said to fight them is to protect those pilgrims who travel there. They fight the Muslims and they establish kingdoms in the Holy Land. Well, they don't last long, and there's wickedness on both sides. Humans are humans, and we've had strife ever since. And so the Crusades did not help negotiations between the Christian lands and the Muslim lands. Interestingly, then the Pope turned the mindset of the Crusades, which is encouraging kings to do holy war, against heretics in Western Europe. And now the kings are going out there and killing off people who don't agree with Rome. And so we have big, big problems coming. Rome is starting to act as if they are the replacement of Jesus, saying things like, I absolve you. saying things like you must take an oath to Rome in order to have a bishop position, eventually saying things like the Pope says later, I am the vicar of Christ, the one who stands in the place of Christ. You'll learn later what God does to correct this problem, but for now, God is patient. He deals with centuries And so often he lets things stay for a long time in our consideration before he deals with it. So that's the Cluny reform, the Cluniac reform and the investiture controversy, and the Pope's claim to have power over kings, spiritual power over temporal power. Children, God has written an interesting story. Praise be to his son. He is king of kings and Lord of lords. And he is the author of this story and the one who is bringing it about. I hope that you trust him in all things and praise him over big world events and over the events of your lives too. Amen.