This is a testimony about two six-year-old boys:  Mark and Anthony.

Mark and Anthony are respectively in the bottom left of the photo.

On May 22, 2008, we studied this verse:

Psalm 57:2

I will cry out to El Elyon: The Most High God,
To God who performs all things for me.

Now a bit of back story.  We’ve known some of the kids from the Arena motel for the past five years.  Some are new, but a lot of them we’ve known most of their lives.  One of those is Anthony who we’ve known since he was a baby.  He’s six.

Since we moved from the Arena to the Valencia Inn in July 2007, we’ve had ministry with the children because we have the room.   We started memory verses.  Many of them you can find on this site.  With those 5 and under I always help them recite their verses; they just repeat it after me.

We started with candy as a reward system but have found that they love stickers even more so we buy assorted Bible stickers.

Mark is new to us.  We met him this year and he usually is picked up by Pastor Wyatt or Mr. Sherman.  He’s very bright and, like Drustan, another six-year-old, has picked up on the memory verses extremely well, without very much help from me.

Mark first came when we studied Psalm 57:2 in late May and he latched on to it.  Every week, he wanted to perfectly recite the verse as he proudly stood and smiled.  It was a great accomplishment, for sure.

So, last night we asked the kids to recite the memory verse from last week (Philippians 4:13) then the verse from the week before (Joshua 1:9).  Once we’ve done this part of our class, we have what I call “popcorn.”  They can recite any verse they know.

We went around the room with the usual suspects, Matthew 4:4, Mark reciting Psalm 57:2, “When Abram was 99 years old..,” etc.

Then Anthony raised his hand.

Imagine my surprise when he, without prompting, perfectly recited Psalm 57:2!

It was the first time EVER that Anthony had done a verse on his own. Maria, my helper, gave him two stickers.

The whole class errupted in applause and cheering.

Then Mark spoke up.

“I taught him that verse,” he proudly proclaimed.

“And I taught it to you,” I mentioned adding, “and that’s the normal church life.”

That was that and we moved on.

After the meeting I told Mr. Sherman the story and called Mark over to tell of his account.

So I asked Mark, “How did you teach him the verse?”

He told us that another church picks them up on Sundays.  “And don’t you know the bus ride is long, so I asked Anthony,” he recounted, “Do you want to practice our memory verse?  He said, ‘yes,’ so we did.”

And that was Mark’s story.

Without embellishment or over-spiritualization, without the Christianese, jargon, or hype, he literally was moved by the spirit to “redeem the time” as Ephesians tells us, and unknowingly was, literally, disciplining Anthony, his brother in the Lord.

For me, there is no greater encouragement, no better sermon illustration, no better example of why I do what I do.  Why I spend so much time with the verses.  Why I spend Friday nights with a bunch of rowdy un-churched kids, most of whose parents are in jail or prison.

And isn’t this just the “reasonable service” that Paul alludes to in Romans 12:2?

I think it is.

Bridget