Sparks Highlights 3.16.16

****Sparks Highlights****    Besides showing us His Holiness, His Power, His Provision, His Wisdom/Teaching, Jesus is our Healer.  He is often referred to as the Great Physician.  Jesus, God Incarnate who is our Creator, also can heal all our sickness.  Crowds would often flock to Jesus to heal their sicknesses – blindness, deafness, muteness, lameness, leprosy, and years of bleeding.  His touch would heal them, His words would heal them.  But you know what our greatness sickness is?  Our sin.  Jesus is the Healer of our greatness sickness because He has taken the punishment of our sins upon Himself – that is the antidote, the medicine, for our sickness.    Each time Jesus would heal an infirmity, He would note that it was the person’s faith that would heal them – make them whole, and then Jesus would challenge them to depart and sin no more.  See, each person’s problem was not just a sickness of body, but more the sickness of their sinful heart.  Jesus didn’t just take the time to heal their bodies – with doing that He showed His power as God, but more powerful than that, is when He told them their sins were forgiven them.  Only God – our Great Physician – can heal our sinful hearts.  But as Jesus said, it takes faith to accept Him as our healer, and a willingness to sin no more by giving Him our hearts.  Sure, after we put our faith in Him, we are not perfect in that we still sin, but at that point we should have the concern to confess that sin, and as the Bible tells us, He is faithful and just to forgive us that sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  We still need our Great Physician to heal our hearts then, too!

You are welcome to join us anytime at Sparks!    You can also check out the AWANA program at www.fbc.littletonil.org.    

Mrs. Jennifer Schroeder, Mrs. Barb Stein.

Sparks Highlights 3.9.16

****Sparks Highlights****    Besides showing us His Holiness, His Power, His Provision, He also shows us His Wisdom.  Jesus was the greatest teacher during His time on earth.  He took every opportunity to teach.  Jesus taught the leaders of the day and the poor alike – He taught them about their sinful hearts and need for repentance.  He often taught His lessons in stories, in parables, that help us understand the meaning of His points.  Every meeting with people, every situation was used to teach about God’s love, mercy, judgment and grace.  Many modern-day people consider Jesus just a good teacher – but He is more than that.  He is our teacher that points out our sins and provides way of correction, restoration with God.  You can reject what a teacher tells you, but it doesn’t make it any less true when it is the truth.  Tonight we learned specifically on how Jesus taught us to pray and share through examples He has given us in Matthew 6.   We are not to just follow commands to recite words or just perform good deeds; we are to use these as examples of how to have the right heart that pleases God.  The first step of having a heart that pleases God is to have a repentant, humble heart that has been surrendered to God and the rest just comes naturally out of the heart that seeks Him.  It is only through Jesus that we can have a prayer relationship with God.  We are to pray without ceasing.

You are welcome to join us anytime at Sparks!    You can also check out the AWANA program at www.fbc.littletonil.org.    

Mrs. Jennifer Schroeder, Mrs. Barb Stein.

Sparks Highlights 3.2.16

****Sparks Highlights****    We have learned Jesus is holy, so He can take our sins’ punishment, to be trusted as our Savior. Last week we learned that Jesus is powerful and our creator, so He can be trusted as our Savior.  This week, we are learning that Jesus is our provider so He can be trusted as our Savior.  How much food do you think it takes to feed 5000 men and their women and children?  With Jesus, our provider, it only takes 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish – and there were baskets left over.  Ask your Sparkie to tell you about this amazing account in John 6.   Jesus challenges us that we are to trust Him for our daily provision many times in the New Testament.  God provides for the sparrows, the lilies in the field and knows the very number of our hairs – so if He cares that much – should we be without ever?  No.  Just as a parent provides for his/her children, our Heavenly Father, God, provides everything for us – the air we breathe, the gravity to hold our feet on the ground, skills to earn a living for our family.  Everything is a gift from above from our Provider.  Philippians 4:19 says: And my God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus.  What an amazing provision!

You are welcome to join us anytime at Sparks!    You can also check out the AWANA program at  www.fbc.littletonil.org.    

Mrs. Jennifer Schroeder, Mrs. Barb Stein.

Sparks Highlights 2.24.16

****Sparks Highlights****    We learned why Jesus can be our Savior as He is holy, without sin.  He did not succumb to temptation to sin.  He knows what temptation is because Satan himself tempted Him, but He did not sin – therefore, because of His holiness, He can be our Savior.   He knows our weaknesses to sin.   Tonight, we learned about His power.   Our P in SPARKS stands for Power – it says in Psalm – “Great is our lord and mighty in power”.   Jesus Christ, who is God in the flesh on earth, created the earth and all the galaxies as the Bible tells us in Genesis 1:1.   Creation is evidence of God and it listens to the voice of its creator.  In Mark 4, we see how Jesus and His followers (disciples) were caught in a storm with the wind and the waves surrounding them.  All it took was Jesus to give the verbal order to the wind and the storm to “Peace Be Still” and immediately the storm ceased.  The disciples were amazed, as we should be too, but not surprised.  Jesus is powerful over His creation and all events.  He even is powerful to be in control of all our circumstances – all our storms.   And as we will learn about in the weeks to come, He is powerful over death.  He raised people from the dead. He raised Himself from the dead. And because of that, we can trust Him to save our soul from eternal death.  Do you trust His Holiness? Will you trust His Power and accept His salvation?

You are welcome to join us anytime at Sparks!    You can also check out the AWANA program at  www.fbc.littletonil.org.    

Mrs. Jennifer Schroeder, Mrs. Barb Stein.

Sparks Highlights 2.17.16

****Sparks Highlights****    These weeks of Sparks we have been learning about salvation – our Bible heroes and their lives are pictures of Jesus.  They were saved or were used by God to save someone else.  We learned that Christmas was when Jesus – God’s Son, God in human form – came to earth in human flesh as a baby.  Last week, for Valentine’s Day we talked about God’s love for us that He gave us that gift of Jesus that when we believe on Him, we can have everlasting life.  That gift of love took the punishment of our sin, which was death.   He was and is our salvation from the punishment of our sin.  Tonight, and for the rest of the Sparkie year, we are learning about who Jesus is and why He is the One who is fit to take that punishment and to claim He is God in the flesh, to claim why He is the One and Only One that can grant us salvation.   Specifically, tonight, we are looking at Jesus’ character of Holiness.  He was tempted to sin, yet did not.  He could not take the punishment for our sin if He Himself was a sinner as He would be no different that you and me.   Indeed, we are not perfect as Jesus to never sin, but we can use His example to help us try not to sin.  Jesus was tempted three times in Matthew Chapter 4, and each of those three times, He used the help of His Father God to resist the temptation.   Those words He quoted were words of His Father, and you know, we have those same words in scripture.   That is why it is so important to learn God’s words, memorize scripture.  These verses your Sparkie works on every week are the words of God!   They can hide those words in their hearts that they might not sin against God.

You are welcome to join us anytime at Sparks!    You can also check out the AWANA program at www.fbc.littletonil.org.    

Mrs. Jennifer Schroeder, Mrs. Barb Stein.

Sparks Highlights 2.10.16

****Sparks Highlights****    All of our holidays – whether remembrance days or just special days – can remind us of God and His provision for us.  Thanksgiving we are thankful to Him for His blessings.  Christmas we are blessed by the gift of His Son Jesus Christ coming to earth as a man.  Valentine’s Day – it is not a remembrance day, but it is a special day that we can be thoughtful of the greatest love of all – John 3:16 – our Sparks key verse tells us that God so loved the world.  He so loved the world that He gave us His only begotten Son that whoever believes on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.   The penalty of sin is eternal, everlasting death, but God provided a substitute to take that death – His son Jesus – that when we believe in Him with all of our heart, soul and mind and He then so becomes the Lord of our life, we have everlasting life through Him.  He loves us that much that He sacrificed.  We talk about loving people – God is Love because He has given us the greatest love anyone can give and receive – that Jesus laid down His life so that we might have everlasting life.  We just have to believe, it is nothing we earn or pay back. This Love is free to those who believe.  Do you really know and have Love this Valentine’s Day?

You are welcome to join us anytime at Sparks!    You can also check out the AWANA program at www.fbc.littletonil.org.    

Mrs. Jennifer Schroeder and Mrs. Barb Stein.

Sparks Highlights 2.3.16

****Sparks Highlights****    We have learned thus far about many heroes who obeyed, but there were heroines, too.   One such was Esther.  There is even a book of the Old Testament bearing her name that accounts her obedience to God.  She was a queen who saved the whole nation of Israel.  The evil king’s advisor Haman had plotted to kill all the Jews.  Esther was challenged by her Uncle Mordecai that she needed to tell the king she was Jew and that her people needed to be saved.   Esther would have to present herself to the king without being called by the king – this was unheard and might cost her life.  Mordecai pointed out to her that God may have just put her in this certain time in history for His special purpose.  It was true then and even so true now.  Esther pleased the king and thus he extended his golden scepter, as an invitation, to her which was the sign that she could approach him.  Esther was able to save her people from death after she accepted the king’s scepter  (invitation) to inform him of the plot to kill the Jews.    Again we see the picture of God’s salvation for us!  He extends the open invitation to us to come, to approach Him.  The “golden scepter” that He extends for us is Jesus, and we are allowed to approach God when we accept Jesus.  And when we accept Jesus, we are saved from eternal death – the certain punishment of our sin.   Esther saved her people from physical death, and Jesus saves us all from eternal death.

You are welcome to join us anytime at Sparks!    You can also check out the AWANA program at www.fbc.littletonil.org.    

Mrs. Jennifer Schroeder, Mrs. Barb Stein.