Why is doing what is right always best?

KIDS TALK ABOUT GOD

Why is doing what is right always best?

By Carey Kinsolving and Friends

 Part One of Two

     “When you have a baby sister, and sometimes you trick her, then God will not like that,” says Victoria, 8.

Baby sisters seem to have radar for discovering they’ve been duped — at least my baby sister did. Parents also possess this same radar, as Katelyn, 8, can testify: “I was faking sick, and I got grounded for three weeks. I got in trouble with my dad, and that’s bad.”

Katelyn, your life will be much more peaceful and fun if you do the right thing. Take a tip from Keeleigh, 11: “If you do right all the time, you won’t get in trouble, you won’t get fussed at, and you will have more fun. That means you will make God happy and have a better relationship with Him.”

Doing the right thing and having fun may sound contradictory to many. The Bible calls this fun state “blessed.” Many people think fun comes when they break rules. Many movies depict lawless people having all the fun.

Remember the movie “Bonnie and Clyde”? Robbing banks looked like so much fun in the movie. In real life, the “fun” ended when Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow drove into a hail of bullets fired by lawmen waiting in ambush along a tree-lined Louisiana road.

Shortly before her death, Bonnie Parker gave a poem to her mother, which proved to be prophetic. Here’s how the poem ends: “They don’t think they’re tough or desperate./ They know the law always wins./ They’ve been shot at before/ But they do not ignore/ That death is the wages of sin.

“Someday they’ll go down together/ And they’ll bury them side by side. To few it’ll be grief/ To the law a relief/ But it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.”

You don’t have to be a bank robber to know that the Bible says, “The wages of sin is death.” We’ve all earned those wages. Many times, the second part of that scripture is not quoted: “but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23). If Bonnie had known the second half, she might have avoided a life of crime.

“Doing what is right is always best because once you do it the first time, you almost can’t stop doing it,” says Cecile, 10.

Psalm 23 speaks of the Lord leading his people in paths of righteousness. A biblical proverb promises that the Lord will direct the paths of those who acknowledge him in all their ways (Proverbs 3:6).

Doing good or evil begins with the decisions we make. Paths, the directions we travel in life, start with pathways in the brain. Whatever we fix our minds on will influence our brain’s pathways and our life’s paths.

The results of a 17-year study in the journal Science reported that 5.7 percent of youths who watched less than one hour of television a day committed aggressive acts against others in subsequent years. That figure jumped to 22.5 percent for those who watched one to three hours a day and 28.8 percent for those who watched more than three hours a day.

Think about this: You are what you think. Parents who consider television a benign babysitter should think again. Children are vulnerable to the strangers who invade your home through television. Doing right begins by thinking right.

Memorize this truth: “For as a man thinks in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7).

Ask this question: If you feed on a diet of television violence, what are you prone to do?

“Kids Talk About God” is distributed by Creators Syndicate. To access free, online “Kids Color Me Bible” books, “Mission Explorers” videos and all columns in a Bible Lesson Archive, visit at www.KidsTalkAboutGod.org. To read journey-of-faith feature stories written by Carey Kinsolving, visit www.FaithProfiles.org.