Thank you that we can come to ABC Kids again and we pray for all those that are continuing to be affected by the pandemic that you would help in those situations with people's jobs and people's health and loved ones that are more susceptible to it that you would help be with them. Help us to be careful and safe and follow our procedures like we're supposed to be with folks going back to school that you would keep them safe as well and all the teachers and all and and be with other folks that are having difficulties and people that are wrestling with other hard things maybe other kinds of sicknesses that you'd be with them as well and be with our church and watch over us tonight in Jesus name Amen All right, very good. OK, so now we've got to switch over to the other one. Actually, I don't think it's even on here. Let's see. Oh, it is. No. All right. Well, let's see. This may or may not come out the right way. Oh, it does. OK. So OK, good. All right, so does that look pretty good for you? All right, and also welcoming people who maybe will watch this later on the internet. So welcome to ABC Kids as well. And if you've got any friends or anything that maybe they can't come but they would like to watch, they can watch this at our website and maybe on Facebook as well. So anyway, it's AddisonBaptist.com. Yeah, well, we have some other things that have that on there too. All right, so anyway, tonight's lesson is what is life all about? That's a pretty big topic, isn't it? I'm gonna tell you tonight in about 15 minutes everything that life's all about, right? That'd be pretty hard, wouldn't it? That's a little bit too big, too much to chew on. But anyway, we're not going to cover everything, but I just wanted to kind of this is this is pretty much what the entire year is going to be about it's called the big picture and so it's pretty much. Important things that we need to be talking about and thinking about, and this is a good, I think this is a good time to think about some of these things, since such. big and important things are happening all around us every day and difficult things. And when you grow up, you'll be you'll be telling your children about how you live through all this and everything. So this is kind of a big deal. And so we're going to talk about some things that are also a big deal. All right, so go to the next slide there. So this is actually a place our family went recently. It's called Clifty Falls. And we got to do some hiking and stuff and go through. And we got to see some waterfalls and some different things. And then I put in several different slides of some places I've never been before but are really beautiful. So let's go to the next one. So we got some, looks like some ocean there or something. All right, you can go to the next one. There's like a canyon with some fog in it. That's kind of cool. I think that's like Bryce Canyon or something. Next one, there's some fish. Not a landscape, but also part of creation. All right, next one. Big old rock in the middle of the ocean. Next one. There's a bunch of sheep out on some kind of hillside or something. What else we got? I think that's the last one. Big giant mountain, snowy kind of mountain, looks cold. All right, so you can go to the next one. And then we'll hang out at this one for a while, so you're good. So what do all those pictures make you think of? I mean, what does it bring to mind? Or what is it? You like anything? Anybody think they're just like the most boring pictures you ever saw? I mean, some people, these pictures are so amazing. Some people even put them on their computers as their desktop backdrop. Right, right, right. It's like, you know about that? You can use the set image as the background of your phone or something. when you're not doing like, you know, whoever your favorite band is or something or video game or whatever. But why do people like these pictures? Sometimes these pictures will be like in people's houses and stuff or different places like that. Why do we care about these places? Maybe you've been to some of these places. Anybody ever been to the Grand Canyon or something? Or ever been to a big mountain? Anybody ever been to the Smoky Mountains? I bet some people have been there before. Or maybe just hiking around in the woods somewhere, even around here. Anybody ever been down to the Addiston Creek? That's pretty cool. All right. Maybe not quite as grand as some of the other places, but it's all part of creation. And if you get out there and you think about it enough, you sort of get this sense of awe and wonder. Has that ever happened to you? You've been out somewhere, and you just look around. Or maybe it's like a sunset happening. Everybody seen a good sunset? Yeah. And you just have to stop and say, hey, everybody, come to the window. Look at this. This is beautiful. Yeah, and sometimes people make fun of you when you do that, but they ought not to because it is really beautiful. And sometimes it's, you know, you can look at that and you can say, oh yeah, there's pink and orange and blah, blah, blah. But that doesn't do it, does it? That doesn't really describe it. It's something bigger. It's something that's welling up inside you that says, that is just amazing. Like, how does that even happen? And it's supposed to lead us to the idea that God created it. God made it. That's another thing we're going to be talking about quite a bit. And after a little bit, we're going to have a little bit of a memory verse we're going to work on that's to do with God creating. So what happens if you don't have the Bible, though? Did you know for a long time, a lot of people did not have a Bible? Well, for a long time, the Bible wasn't even written yet. And there's a lot of places in the world where they don't have access to the Bible or didn't used to have access to the Bible. And even for a long time, for a while, people couldn't read well enough to even know what the Bible said. So how did they know about God? I mean, how could they know about God? What tells us about God? Well, it turns out that God left us some pretty big clues about His existence. And one of the biggest ones is this creation that we have all around us. That's what Paul says. Paul says, even people who don't have the Bible, they can look around. They can see this created world, this beautiful world, the sunsets, and the beautiful animals, and everything just sort of working together in a perfect harmony. And that should just point you to the fact that somebody made all this. Somebody caused this to be. Caused this to happen. Somebody bigger than us, and smarter than us, more powerful than us. And so it should sort of point us in that direction. Another thing that God gave us was conscience. Even deep down inside, if you had never met anybody else or seen anybody, you would still have this idea of things that are right to do and things that are wrong to do. And that's just buried deep down in us. You know it when somebody does something wrong to you, right? Somebody comes up and steals one of your pencils or something. It's like, that's wrong. You just know it. And if you stole a pencil, you might think you could get away with it, but you'd still think it was wrong. You'd still know it was. I mean, you might justify and say, well, I needed that pencil, but you would still know it was wrong because you have that sense deep down inside. King Solomon said, we have eternity in our hearts. It's like we know there's something bigger than just this world. We just know it. And it's really hard. The scientists say, well, why don't you prove that? But it's deep down inside us. We know it. Now, there are several other ways of... We're not doing questions right now. Oh, no. Well, sorry. That's okay. I don't think we need this for right now, so we'll just turn that off. We'll look at our Bible verse in a minute. Maybe we can plug that in. So there are a few other ways that people look at the world. So not everybody believes the Bible. Not everybody believes in God even. Did you know that? probably most of you knew that there's some people they either never heard about God or maybe they just they've got some other things that they they think the way the world is and So there's a few of those we want to talk about just just briefly Some people believe there's no God What's that called? Everybody know what that's called? Do you believe that there's no God? atheism that's right so the theism means theos is god ah means not no god atheism means there's no god so they think that the world is all that there is like everything that you can see and touch that's all that there is that's all that there's ever going to be and uh And when you die, it's just nothing. And there's nothing to it. And there's really no reason why we're here. And there's no reason for us to even be here. And nobody will ever know that you were even here, you know, hundreds of years from now. That seems kind of depressing, doesn't it? It really just robs life of all of its purpose and meaning. And then some people think that there are many gods. You can think about like the ancient Egyptians or the ancient Greeks. They thought oh, there's lots of different guys Well, there's Jupiter and Apollo and Zeus and all these different well different ones. I guess I put some Roman ones in there, but anyway or There's all kinds of like different stories about them and everything maybe you've heard some mythology stories like about different anybody ever heard any of those stories about different people like that you probably You've probably heard of a guy named Thor, maybe. He's one of those guys. Yeah, yeah. Loki. Yeah, you know all those. That idea is called polytheism. That's like a lot of gods. And but their view of the world is that the world is a very chaotic and crazy sort of place and that you just never know what's going to happen. Like Zeus might send a lightning bolt down on you just out of the blue and you just wouldn't be ready for it. Now there's a little bit of truth to this because like well there are a lot of chaotic things that happen. We experienced that quite a bit this year. A lot of chaotic sort of things. But that doesn't mean that there's multiple gods if they're fighting around or something. And so they think that life really just can't be understood. We just have to do our best, and we can't understand it. We can't know. So what they end up doing is they end up making their own gods. So they'll take something and paint it up gold or something, and they'll say, this is my god. Even some of the ancient Israelites did that. They'd make a golden cap and say, this is our god now. And really what they're doing is they were worshiping themselves. They said well our God says it's okay to do this or that Because they're making up their own all right, then there is There's everything can be God some people believe everything is God. That's called pantheism It's like maybe a lot of you can see this more like in places like India like Hinduism is a little bit like this or some different ones like everything like so that you can't cut down trees and you can't you know kill animals to eat them and stuff like that because they're all sacred there so everything is is sacred so you can't really touch anything you can't really do anything really it's not good to build anything it's not good to have any kind of technology or anything it's kind of hard to to live like that and really that's not what god wants for us And so then another view, and this is the one from the Bible, one God. It's called monotheism. Mono is one, one God. And so that's what we have in the Bible. We believe that the world is in God's hands. It's not just chaotic, and it's not just it doesn't make sense. It is exactly what God wants, and he's holding on to it. And life is about bringing glory to God. That's what some of our questions were about, you know. Why are we here? We're here to bring glory to God. We'll talk a lot more about that in some other lessons. Bringing glory to God. You think, well that doesn't sound very fun. Does that mean we just go to church all the time and that's all we do? Well it turns out what God wants us to do is he wants us to take care of this world and to flourish and to take care of our families and to build things and do things and and recognize that he is the creator of everything. And so that's what he wants. So all of those things are ways to glorify God. So it's either, here's your choices. You can either do whatever you want and maybe try your best. That's like one view of the world. Or the other view is become a part of God's story. You see, those other views, they don't really have a story to them. It just is a bunch of stuff that just sort of happens to you, and then it's over. But God's way of looking at the world, it's not like that. God has a story that you can be a part of. And the story involves this perfect creation and us failing at that and sinning and breaking our relationship with God and then God rescuing us by sending Jesus and ultimately one day bringing us all back together and restoring the creation. That's God's story. All right, I just have a couple of verses, and then we're done. This is sort of like the ending part. So Paul was a missionary, and he went to a lot of different places. And one of the places he went to was Athens in Greece. And this is the place where lots and lots and lots of smart people sat around all the time talking together. And so he went right in the middle of them, and he started telling them about this new thing they had never heard of before. Here's what he told them. This is in Acts chapter 17. He says, So Paul, standing in the midst of them, said, Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along, I observed the objects of your worship, like all their idols and stuff. And I found also an altar with this inscription, To the unknown God. And then he says, this is the God I'm going to tell you about, the unknown God, the God you don't know about. And what he tells him is that he is the creator of heaven and earth. That's the God that you don't know about. You see, all the Greek gods, none of them were that powerful. I mean they were more powerful than people but basically they were just kind of like superheroes and they would fight together with each other and sometimes some of that would spill out and you know mess up stuff on earth and sometimes bad stuff would happen and they would try to come and fight it or whatever but ultimately you know it was just more like little bit better than people but God is not like that God is is completely over and above everything else that he has created and they didn't know a God like that and so Paul was telling him something they had never known and then he told him this at the end He said, being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. He said, you shouldn't think of God as some kind of idol. You created that. God's bigger than that. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed. And of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. Now that really got their attention. They said, what are you talking about? Somebody was raised from the dead. Well, none of their gods could do anything like that. And so then who is Paul talking about? He was trying to tell them about Jesus, right? Yeah, he's trying to tell them about Jesus. And why was he talking about this? Why is it so important to know about Jesus? Because that is the continuing part of the story. The story doesn't make sense unless there's some point to all of this. There's some way for us to fix all of this brokenness that we see around us. And so that's what he was trying to tell them. And so that's what God wants from us. He wants us to acknowledge that He has made all of this. And He wants us to acknowledge that His way is better than our way. You know, we have some ideas about how to have a good life, but God has some better ideas about how to have a good life. And we're supposed to acknowledge that. His ideas are called righteousness. They are perfect goodness. And so He wants us to repent. Repenting means changing your mind about something. Instead of saying, ah, my way is the best, changing your mind and saying, you know, maybe God's way is the best. That's repenting and saying that God's right and I'm wrong and changing what you're doing. And God wants to include you in his great story that he is working and he is telling over the course of the ages. And so that really gives a real purpose and a real meaning to your life if you're a part of God's story and ultimately a part of God's kingdom. That's really what God wants for you. And so if you have that and you have God's forgiveness, then the world starts to make sense and we can finally understand what a little bit about what this life is really all about. All right, let's bow our heads and we'll pray one more time. Father, we thank you again for gathering us together tonight, and we pray that you would help us to understand about what this life is all about, why you created us, why we're even here, and how all of that happened. Lord, help us as we talk about these things and think about them, how important they are, and how important it is for us to be a part of your story that you've made for us. And help us the rest of tonight, in Jesus' name, amen. Alright, so that is going to be the end of our lesson. Let's see if we have enough juice in this thing to