Object: a jar of sweet pickles and a jar of dill pickles

Good morning, boys and girls. Do you like pickles? Do you eat them all by themselves, or do you put them on sandwiches and stuff? There are two major kinds of pickles, sweet and dill. (Might want to taste these yourself, or give samples to the kids, or have another adult demonstrate the facial expressions associated with eating the pickles) Sweet ones are good and tasty and I could eat those kind all day. Then there are the dill pickles. Dill pickles taste really sour and they'll make your belly button pucker! Ooooeee! What makes the difference? Sweet pickles and dill pickles look the same. They're both made with cucumbers, and water. But the difference is in the spices in the pickle jar. If you want sweet pickles, you put sugar and sweet spices into the jar. If you want dill pickles, you put sour spices in the jar. So everything depends on the spices you put in the jar. You can decide if you want sweet or dill pickles.

Have you ever thought of yourself as a pickle? You can be a sweet person or you can be a sour person. You can be good and loving, or you can be mean and selfish. It all depends on what you put in your life. If you put God and love and good things into your life, then you can be a sweet person.

But if you keep God and all His good things out of your life, then you will be a sour person. How do we put God and all His good things in our life? By coming to church and praising God. By reading the Bible and learning about God. By praying and talking to God. Those are the "spices" we can put into our lives to make us sweet people. This new year, let's choose to put God and good things into our lives, so we can be the sweet people God wants us to be.