TBC Youth Group

This was our first Youth Group after the summer break, so of course, it was a planning meeting. There were very few kids there, compared to last year, so when 7:30 rolled around we decided to just go ahead and start planning, and not wait any longer.

We went until around 8:00, and then David wanted to start the devotion. But when he went downstairs, to grab a couple of stragglers, he was surprised to find a dozen guys down there, playing basketball. They had apparently come into the church without us knowing, and started a game. So we brought them upstairs, and did the devotion.

David did the devotion, and we talked about Matthew 14:13–21, and Matthew 15:29–39. David mentioned the following:

• In the Matthew 15 passage, Jesus asks the disciples to feed the people, and the disciples tell Jesus that there is not enough food—even though they’ve already seen Jesus perform a miracle, which fed more people with less food. David suggested that this is not because the disciples are stupid, but because it’s a natural human tendency to not have faith in God, even when He has been reliable to us in the past.
• David also wondered aloud why Jesus bothered to perform the miracle in this way. Why not simply “zap” the people, and take away their hunger? David suggested that Jesus wanted to make it obvious that this was a miracle, so that the people would give God the glory. If he had simply zapped their hunger away, it would have been easy for the people to dismiss it—“we must not have been that hungry in the first place,” or, “we must be imagining things”—but by performing the miracle in this way, there was no way the people could deny what was happening: they began with very little food, and still somehow managed to feed everyone and have leftovers.

After the devotion, we played Boneyard until it was time to go.

We left not knowing what we’d be doing next week; David will have to put a schedule together, based on the suggestions for events, and let everyone know.