dream

Joseph in Egypt

~ hebidsthemcome ~ Leave a comment

Hey all! Today’s story can be found in Genesis 39-41. Our story from last year can be found HERE.

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At this point Joseph had been sold by his brothers and was living and working in a new place called Egypt. It was far away from his home and his family. But Joseph started working for one of the king’s helpers named Potiphar. And he was a very good worker. Everyone liked him. Even, the worker’s wife. She wanted Joseph to love her and kiss her but he said, “No way! You are married to Potiphar, the king’s helper that I work for! I could never love you or kiss you. That would be wrong. You are supposed to only love HIM!”

That made her MAD so she LIED and told her husband that Joseph had tried to kiss her (when really SHE had tried to get him to kiss her). But Potiphar had Joseph put in jail anyway.

Joseph hadn’t done anything wrong when his brothers got rid of him…and he hadn’t done anything wrong when he got put in jail. This story doesn’t seem fair, does it?!

But Joseph started working in the jail and because he was such a good worker he was soon in charge of the jail! While he was in jail, God gave him a special talent. That’s something you’re really good at like singing or drawing or playing sports. (My kids understand talents because of the Tinkerbell movies–so if you’re familiar with that you can use the fairies’ talents to explain.)

Joseph’s talent was that he could understand dreams. A dream is like a story you think about when you’re asleep. But sometimes dreams can be silly or not make any sense. But Joseph could help people understand their dreams.

While he was in jail, two of the king’s helpers were also put in jail and they each had dreams. Joseph told the helpers what their dreams meant and they both came true! Joseph asked one of the men to remember him and how he had helped him when he got out of jail. He asked the man to tell the king good things about him so he could get out too, but the man forgot to say anything for TWO YEARS!

For two.more.years. Joseph sat in jail. Until one day, the king himself had two tricky dreams. All of his usual helpers didn’t know what they meant…but Joseph did.

Joseph replied, “Your dreams both mean that there will be 7 years of good food and then 7 years of famine (or no food, usually because there’s no rain.) You should find someone very responsible and put them in charge of saving up food, so when the bad years come, you’ll have leftovers and no one will be hungry.”

The king liked this idea very much, so he put Joseph in charge of saving up the food…in fact he put Joseph in charge of all Egypt!

Isn’t that amazing?

Joseph has had a pretty rough road….he hadn’t done anything wrong but bad thing just kept happening?! God had a good plan all along. And now Joseph was the 2nd biggest leader of all of Egypt!

But God is still not done with Joseph. Tomorrow we will see what else happens!

(For media see yesterday’s post.)

 

Thanks for joining us! Love to you all!

God gives Jacob a dream

~ hebidsthemcome ~ Leave a comment

Hi all! Welcome back! Today’s story is from Genesis 28 and last year’s lesson can be found HERE.

If you remember from last time, Jacob tricked his older brother Esau into giving him all his stuff AND his father’s special blessing. And his brother was MAAAADDDD! So mad he wanted to KILL Jacob. So Jacob ran away.

One night he laid down outside on a rock, fell sleep, and had a dream.

In his dream he saw some stairs. The bottom of the stairs was earth and the top of the stairs was in heaven. Angels were going up and down the stairs, going back and forth up and down the stairs to and from heaven.

Jacob saw stairs going to up to heaven to connect us to God, but now we have Jesus who we can talk to all the time. HE connects us to God. Jesus is like the stairs 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 say, “I am God. I promised your grandpa Abraham, and your dad Isaac and now YOU, that you will get to keep this land where you are sleeping. 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.) 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 yelled “AH! I found God’s house! He lives HERE!” He gave God an offering (like a special present) 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.)

We know God ALWAYS keeps His promises. He kept His promises to Noah, Abraham, all the way down to Jesus and to US!

 

For our craft today we took black construction paper and some wavy brown paper. We glued the wavy brown to the bottom of the black and then used oil pastels (you could crayons or markers too) to draw a sleeping Jacob. Then we cut out a blue cloud shape–his dreaming bubble. (My kids recognized this from Daniel Tiger when he does his make believe.) In the dream cloud we drew some steps and angels going up and down. Our text reads: Jacob’s dream Genesis 28

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Thanks for joining us. Love to you all!