What do you get when you cross a card trick, juggling, Mr. Bean, King David and Roseanne? Must be Mr. H's turn to do school chapel!
Let's start from the beginning. In both services (middle and high school) I opened with a new card trick in which a randomly chosen, signed playing card instantly apprears tied to my shoelace. I was very pleased that this new trick - a Christmas present - worked perfctly twice. It is way more complicated than the safe card tricks I normally do. Then, after a little juggling, I did the dollar in the lemon trick, setting up for the biblical lesson I was working towards: "Man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart." This sentence is said in ! Samuel when God wants David to be the king of Israel when everyone else wants someone more authoritative looking. The passage in I Samuel 16 even makes a point that David: a poetry writing, lute strumming, dancer -had beautiful eyes.)
From here I went into a talk about what this verse does and doesn't mean (It doesn't mean let your hygiene go, middle school boys!) and how this verse should and shouldn't be applied today. Then I told them what God sees when He looks at their hearts: A masterpiece made in God's image! But a masterpiece, like everyone else on earth, marred by sin. Here I showed a clip from the movie "Bean" in which Mr. Bean sneezes on"Whistlr's Mother", and, with each attempt to fix th damage he caused, it got worse and worse until it ended up a cartoon characiture draw by marker. In a sense, this is us: God's masterpiece, but a masterpiece in need of redemption.
From here I developed the idea of redemption further. God sees the heart, for example, that is drawn to pornography because of lonliness or feelings of inadequacy (Yes, sometimes lust just comes from a lustful heart, but other times there's a lot more to it.) This gave me a chance to quote Roseanne in one of her early TV episodes. She is talking to her daughters about why guys look at porn, and she said, "They actually think those girls are looking back at them." Funny, yes, but indiciative of the insecurity that has gottn many a guy hooked.
I didn't just use pornography as my only example; there are plenty of others that could be relevant to tens in a chapel service: unforgiveness, bullying, materialism, ego. All these can have underlying heart 'conditions': insecurity, past hurts, inadequacy and more.
God sees these things and wants to get us all to a place of healing from these things, which will in turn lead to outward changes. It was a good opportunity to remine them of my frequent advice: "Stop trying to be good." Of course, I follow that up with, try instad to know God better and let Him heal and nurture those things at our deepest level that can stunt our spiritual growth.