Let's say I have a huge delicious chocolate chip cookie and I am to take THAT cookie to a friend who REALLY REALLY REALLY needs a huge delicious chocolate chip cookie. The cookie I have is made up of my life experiences. The ones from which I have grown incredibly.

As I am taking the cookie (The cookie represents a ministry that will meet a need or the way we live life to help others.) to my friend, I fall. (Falling may represent sinning or getting distracted from the mission.)

The cookie becomes smaller, because it was dropped when I fell. (I will never forget my life experiences, but coupled with God's Spirit in my life, the two can become a beautiful opportunity to minister to someone else. Walking with God day by day will help me to use the experiences I have encountered combined with the gifts of the Spirit and the fruit of the Spirit for a more lasting and meaningful impact.)

I get up,dust the dirt off, and begin walking with the cookie again, and this time I try really hard to protect the cookie because I understand the importance of meeting a need and accomplishing my purpose/mission.

As life goes, I get distracted again and a portion of the cookie gets broken off. This happens over and over until when I arrive to give the cookie to the person who really needed it, I have barely a crumb left to offer.

The idea is:
We MUST protect our ministry/our life in Christ (our cookie) because someone may really need (to see) it. If we are careless about God's purpose in our lives, our HUGE cookie will become nothing but a crumb, and it may not be able to meet the need as perfectly as it could have, if we would have stayed on course and kept our eyes set toward maintaining a strong relationship with Christ.

Influence comes in here... others are watching us - we were supposed to have something to offer, but we no longer have it - our influence begins to dwindle because it appears that we were not so serious about accomplishing the mission we were given. The person whose need we were supposed to meet, no longer trusts us and maybe their trust in God has also weakened because of our poor example.

We must keep our ministry/our life in Christ (our cookie) protected - so that when we arrive on the scene to help others, we have EXACTLY what they need: Our life experiences + God's perfect plan = the ability to confidently minister to others and lead them to Christ in a practical way.

I chose to create this PowerPoint for the next time I teach Teen Class and Life Skills Class at church. The next Power Point in this series will be focused on not wearing your feelings on your sleeve.


Feel free to use these slides - as picture files or I can send to you the actual PowerPoint so you can personalize this for your own class.





You can contact me if you are interested in receiving this PowerPoint to update this file for your class.