By Joel Hilliker

Does it matter who you hang out with?

Maybe your school is full of cliques. Everybody seems to have their group that they hang out with, oftentimes shutting others out.

Have you ever stopped to think about how people choose their friends? Yes, people with the same interests or tastes in clothes or music gravitate toward each other—but, just as often, the group you’re in tends to shape your interests or tastes. In fact, the people you spend time with can change your life, for better or worse.

Think about who you spend time with—at school, after school, on the weekends. Not your family, but your friends. What kind of people are they? What draws you to them? What do you do together? How do you usually act around them? What do other people think of them? Do your parents like them?

You may not realize this, but who you choose as your friends says a lot about you! Choosing the right friends is an important responsibility. That doesn’t mean becoming part of a clique and shutting others out. It means being smart about who you spend the most time with and allow yourself to be influenced by.

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By Ryan Malone

So, we’ve recommended the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible to you. But perhaps that is one of the hardest to understand—purely because of the ancient wording that it uses. Here is a simple guide that should help you in making sense of some of those old words.

You:

In modern English, we use “you” when speaking to one person (singular; like the word “I”) and when talking to many people (plural; like the word “we”)—although some use the expression “ya’ll” and “you guys” for that. Also, modern English doesn’t differentiate between “you” when it is the subject of the sentence (Ex.:”You are smart”) and when it is the direct object of the sentence (”I know you“).

The English used in the KJV has different words for each type of “you.”

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Moses and the Israelites crossed the Red Sea channel—on foot—during the Days of Unleavened Bread. What does that awesome event mean for you?

By Philip Nice

Egyptians. The word burned through their ranks like wildfire.

More than 2.5 million people massed in 13 tribes camped under the shadow of the rocky and foreboding Pihahiroth Mountains. This teeming sea of people had just experienced a liberation so phenomenal that many still couldn’t believe it was happening. In living memory, they had known nothing but oppression under a harsh, discriminating regime that squashed freedom, especially freedom of religion, and crushed them under grinding slavery.

But in just a few months the national economy, the vaunted religion and the evil despot of the world’s most powerful state were broken. The agriculturally and religiously vital Nile River became blood; frogs, lice, locusts and other insects, all symbolizing pagan gods, infested fields and residences; and other unnatural disasters wracked the nation until finally the honored first-born Egyptian children, as well as beasts, suddenly died all in one night.

Then, the humiliated Egyptian dictatorship finally caved in. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people packed up tools, clothes, livestock, cookware filled with unleavened bread, and valuables presented to them by Egyptians and flowed out through the streets and past houses, businesses, plantations, temples, palaces, sky-scraper pyramids and broad fields decimated by the God of Israel.

And one man had prophesied it all.

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God, the Creator of our wonderfully designed human bodies, says He judges people by what’s on the inside. To Him, what goes on in your mind is far more important than what you look like. Let’s notice an example of this in the Bible.

The Shepherd Boy

Many years ago, one of God’s prophets, Samuel, was told to visit a certain house in the city of Bethlehem and there he would find the man God wanted to be the next king of Israel (1 Samuel 16:1).

Samuel was guided to a home at the edge of Bethlehem. Jesse, the owner, was an elderly but hardy livestock raiser who was surprised and pleased that the prophet had come to visit his family.

Samuel explained that he was told that Jesse had several very fine sons, and that he was looking for a young man to anoint for a special position in Israel. Jesse gladly obliged, and called for one of his sons.

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By Joel Hilliker and Michael Dattolo

You’ve probably spent time helping your parents deleaven some of the house in the past.

As you’ve no doubt heard, leaven is a type of sin (click here to read more). However, what specifically does deleavening teach us about removing sin? Let’s look at some lessons from deleavening that relate specifically to youth.

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You know the Bible uses leaven as a symbol for sin during the Days of Unleavened Bread. But have you ever thought about what characteristics of leaven are similar to sin? Here are three ways that leaven is like sin:

1. It Puffs Up.

When you mix leavening agents with other ingredients, they create carbon dioxide and air. When you put leavening in bread dough and heat it, those gasses form bubbles that get trapped in the loaf, causing the product to rise. Likewise, sin puffs us up with vanity and selfish pride. Just like that bloating caused by leavening, sin causes us to lose godly perspective, and we become more and more inflated with ourselves—puffed up with the substance-less gasses of arrogance and self confidence. 1 Corinthians 5:1-2 shows how tolerating sin caused the Corinthians to become puffed up.

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