Hi friends.

Today’s story is from Genesis 28.

After Jacob had run away, he settled down one night to sleep and had nothing, so he used a rock as a pillow.

Jacob was alone. And running for his life. This was a very hard and sad time for Jacob. He had been sneaky, and even though he was given his father’s blessing from God, he still had not made very good choices and now he was having some bad consequences.

As he slept on the ouchy pillow, he had a dream. He saw some stairs. The bottom of the stairs was on earth and the top of the stairs was in heaven. Angels were going up and down the stairs, going from earth back to heaven and from heaven down to earth.

(God is always near us. He is working on earth and is always close to us. Jacob saw stairs going to up to heaven to connect us to God, but now we have Jesus who we can talk to and his spirit helps us. Jesus is the bridge between heaven and earth. We can trust in him and know that He is caring for us and that He loves us.)

Jacob was still dreaming and he heard God from the top of the stairs and God said, “I am God. I promised your grandpa Abraham, and your dad Isaac and now you that you will get to keep this land. This is your promised land. You will have SO MANY children and grandchildren and great grandchildren…more than all the sand by the ocean. And everyone on earth will be blessed by you” (because Jesus would come from their family later on.)

God said, “I will watch over you and take care of you. I will bring you back here. I will keep my promises.”

When Jacob woke up, he gave God an offering and promised to always give back to God part of everything God had given him. (Today, we give part of our money, time and things back to God by giving to others and supporting our church, our pastors and missionaries…people who go all over the world to tell people about Jesus.)

God’s promises continued and we know God ALWAYS keeps His promises. From Adam to Noah to Abraham, all the way to Jesus, we see God’s promise and Him taking care of His people.

We found this video posted by Kids Bible.

Our kids were not into a craft today, but we found several ideas to make stairs from pipe cleaners or popsicle sticks. You could also have pretzel sticks and make a ladder or stairs and have little paper angels go up and down and discuss that we can go from earth to heaven by believing in Jesus and trusting Him. (Then you get to nom on the pretzels!)

Thanks for joining us today! Love to you all!