The Boy and the Sunday School: A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday School with Teen Age BoysAlexander, John L.
Religion
The Boy and the Sunday School: A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday School with Teen Age Boys
Alexander, John L.
Sunday schools
an opportunity for the best social adjustment. The Kingdom of God is a
saved community of saved lives. It is best represented in the Scriptures
as a city, a golden city, without death, crying, or sorrow, all of them
intensely social things, as are their opposites, also. Every lesson the
school gives the boy socially, every chance it affords him to learn by
contact with his fellows of either sex, means just one more effort for
the Kingdom. Moreover, the Kingdom is a community of saved bodies, saved
minds, saved social relations and saved spirits, or a place or group
where the best dominates--the will of God rules over all lesser things,
changing and making them over into the best. Thus the Kingdom is where
life appreciates, enjoys, respects, and honors all of God's gifts,
whether it be body, mind, social relations, or material or spiritual
things. The task of the Sunday school, then, is to reach out
unswervingly, enthusiastically after these ends for the adolescent boy.
Like the commandments, he that transgresseth in one fails in all, in
the largest, truest sense.
The work of the Sunday school, summed up briefly, is to round out the
boy by all good things that he may see and know and acknowledge Jesus
Christ, the Master of Men, as the Master and Lord of his life, too. Any
step less than the joyous acceptance of the Son of God as Saviour of his
life is to miss the mark entirely. This is the end of all Sunday school
principle and method.
Further, Jesus Christ, as Saviour of Life, is not an idea, a theory, a
belief, but a practical, everyday, every-minute influence. "For me to
live is Christ." From this time forth everything in life is done in the
Christ-spirit. The boy does not cease to be a boy in the acceptance. He
is now a Christian boy, not a mature, Christian man. He still loves
play, but play is not marred now by the tricks that minister to self.
Play ministers now both to self and others. It does not nor cannot leave
out self, however. It saves self. So, with all things else in life, real
life that is lived seven days in the week, twenty-four hours in the day
among his fellows--and one week following without break the other.
Saviour of Life means saviour of body, of mind, of social contacts, of
spirit. It means more than formal religion, the attendance of services,
the saying of prayers, the observance of customs--these are all
excellent and necessary, but to be saved by the Saviour of Men means new
life, or life with a new, saved meaning: "I come that they might have
life and that they might have it more abundantly" (overflowingly). This
is the great objective of the Sunday school.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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