What or who is your top priority?

Sunday School, even for adults, is a wonderful blessing and a great opportunity for us all to come together in fellowship, to study the word of God and grow our relationship with Jesus. All too often, for various reasons, many of us miss out on this blessing. We wake up too late, the kids are a struggle to get ready, or any number of other things of life that cause us to not be able to make it to church an hour earlier. The reality is that we all make time for the things in life that we prioritize. We are able to get the kids up, ready, and to school on time every day. We are able to get up and make it to work on time every day. We are able to get to the ball game, the movie, concerts, parties, etcetera on time. That’s because we prioritize those things.

As believers, we are called to make Jesus the top priority in our life, above all other things. Can you say that is the case in your life? I’m ashamed everyday that I cannot say that. I find that the hour we spend studying God’s word in Sunday School helps me reflect on the way I live and it helps me to re-prioritize what’s important. Through our studies I’m able to strengthen my relationship with Jesus, draw closer to Him, and move Him farther up my prioritization list.

Mrs. Donna has graciously offered to allow me to write some Sunday School lesson recaps for this wonderful quarterly newsletter. My prayer is that you will be blessed by the lessons as much as I was, and, that you might be encouraged to move Sunday School up your priority list and make it a point to attend regularly.

This past spring we studied a series of lesson on the signs that point to Jesus. The signs of His glory, grace, authority, provision, presence, light and His power over death. The study was from the Gospel of John and covered many of the miracles that He performed.

The first lesson was on how Jesus’s work in our lives is for His glory. When Jesus’s mother asked Him to do something about the low supply of wine at a wedding, in which they were attending, Jesus indicated that the time was not yet right. Jesus did go ahead and change water to wine, but not because His mother asked him, nor because he was concerned for the ruler of the feast. But rather, for His glory, and to show a real manifestation of who He really is, the Father’s promised messiah. In our lives, we often pray for things that we need and usually expect an immediate response from the Lord. The problem for us is that we want what we want when we want it. We don’t usually have the patients to wait for God’s perfect timing. Sometimes, when we have to wait on God, we can get discourage and, perhaps, lose some our faith that Jesus hears our prayers and is truly concerned about us. The lesson for us is that God’s timing is perfect and learning to trust Him in adversity helps us grow closer to Him.

We then studied about Jesus’s grace and authority over the natural world when He healed a man’s son that was near death, and made a lame man walk again. Neither of these signs were performed on people that followed Jesus, but he healed them anyway, because He works on behalf of all who come to Him and in ways that we could never imagine. Have you ever experienced Jesus doing something in your life that was beyond anything that you could have asked for, or could have even imagined it? God is still in the miracle business, and He still manifests His glory through miracles and wonders in today’s world. He’s still showing His grace and authority over the world, every day.

We also studied about His provision, presences, and that only through the light of Jesus can we truly see. Jesus provides for our needs and in His presences the storms of our life are calmed. As he fed the 5000 and clamed the seas, so will He do for us, when we call upon His name and put all of our faith and trust in Him. Sometimes we just need Jesus to open our eyes so we can see, just as He did for the blind man that had been born blind. When He does that for us, we are able to clearly see how much we need Him and how much He loves us. This knowledge should bring us to a point of true repentance and a sense of profound gratitude for all that Jesus did for us on the cross to make a way for us to be reconciled, through Him, to the Father.

The last lesson we studied was the sign over the power of death. With His resurrection, Jesus offers us the hope of a new life. This last sign was the greatest of all. Jesus proved, beyond any doubt, that He was and is God. With these glorious manifestations of His power over all things, we have the assurance that everything He said is true. When He said that all believe in Him will have everlasting life, the resurrection proves that it is true. When we said that He will be with us always, until the end of the age, the resurrection proves that it is true. When He promised to come again and bring us to where He is, the resurrection proves that it is true.

Jesus, throughout His life, demonstrated that He is the Son of God, the promised messiah, the way, the truth, and the life. Through these miraculous signs, He showed to us that we can trust Him with everything. He demonstrated why He should be above all things in our life, our top priority.

Ref: Lifeway Bible Studies, Spring 2025