This past Sunday, I had children's sermon. For the beginning of March, I had to think for a little bit. I looked at what I had been doing most of the week. I had been boiling maple sap down into syrup. As I looked at a kettle, the verse from psalms kept coming to me, refined like silver. So I looked up the verse Psalms 66:10, "For you God, tested us; you refined us like silver." I started from this thought. I took to church with me, a maple syrup pan that happened to be empty, a small jar of maple syrup and some small pieces of bread for the children to drip and taste when we were done.
I had the children come forward, asked about their week and explained that I had been busy making maple syrup. I told them that a verse had come to me while I was working. Let's look at the verse Psalms 66:10-12. As we read through it, we looked at the " we went through fire and water and came to abundance."
First what does abundance mean? One little boy answered " a lot". Exactly, it means that you would have a lot! So when they refine silver, they heat it in the fire and remove all the junk. Well that is kind of what we do with the maple sap. We collect it, pour it through a filter to remove any dirt and then we put it in a pan and boil it. Just like the verse says about through the fire, we boil and boil and boil and boil. There is steam rolling, but when we are done we have abundance of maple syrup or at least something delicious! So we have taken the sap and heated it to "refine" or purify it and converted it into maple syrup.
We need to remember that God will test us through problems or difficulties in life and by doing that he is "refining" us. He is taking out more and more bad things and making us more pure, more like him. So the next time you have syrup remember that God will work on us too, to
make us sweeter!
We closed in prayer and then I gave each child a piece of bread and let them dip it into the small jar of maple syrup and taste it.
