mercy

Believe and Confess

~ hebidsthemcome ~ Leave a comment

Hello again! Today’s lesson is Romans 9 and 10.

This is another lesson from Paul’s letter to the Romans.

This time he wanted the people to remember that we are only given forever life in heaven because God loves us. We can’t do enough good things to earn our way there. If we could, then people would always say “look at all the good things I’VE done. God loves me MORE. But God doesn’t have favorites. He loves everyone and because He loves us, He gave us His son Jesus to die for us. THAT is why we are saved from our sins.

This is grace. When we are supposed to get bad consequences and we don’t it’s called mercy. But God does even better than that. He doesn’t just forgive our sins, He also calls us His children and says we will live forever in heaven with Him! That is grace. God gives us more than we could ever earn. The Bible says God is like a good Father who loves to give His children gifts. The best gift God gives us is eternal life in heaven with Him.

Paul said “Some of the Israelites don’t want God’s grace. They want to go to heaven because they follow all the rules. But nobody follows all the rules all the time, we all sin. We NEED God’s mercy and grace. And there’s nothing we can do make Him let us into heaven….it is a gracious gift from God to us.”

Romans 10:9 says all we have to do is accept God’s grace. “If you confess (say) with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

Jesus already did all the work! Of course when we love Him, we WANT to do good things, to be like Him….but those good things are never good enough to forgive our sins…only Jesus can do that. We just need to believe and say “Yes, you ARE Lord, I believe.”

For our craft today we cut out little hearts, put on some lipstick and kissed them (confess with our mouths and believe with our hearts), then we wrote today’s memory verse.

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Thanks again for joining us, love to you all!

HE IS RISEN!

~ hebidsthemcome ~ Leave a comment

Hi all!  We are doing our Easter lesson today! He is Risen!

This story can be found in the Bible in Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24 and John 20.

It was now Sunday morning. Jesus had died on the cross on Friday. The leaders who wanted Him dead were laughing and happy He was finally gone! The people who loved Jesus missed Him terribly and even though He had told them LOTS of times that He would die and be alive again 3 days later (Matt 17:22, Mark 8:31, John 2:19, Matt 12:39-40, Matt 16:21, John 10:17, 18, see also: Isaiah 53:5-12, Psalm 35:19, Psalm 69:4, Psalm 22:16, Zech 12:10, Psalm 22:1, Psalm 16:10, Psalm 49:15) …they didn’t really understand and they were very sad AND they were scared the leaders would come after them next.

After Jesus died, the soldiers and leaders remembered Jesus saying He would live again and they set up guards in front of the tomb (kind of like a cave) where Jesus’ body was put after He died. They put a HUGE stone (bigger than your dad!) in front of the tomb…it would take a LOT of people to move it. They kept watch day and night because they thought the disciples would try to come take Jesus’ body and pretend He was alive. (They didn’t believe Jesus would REALLY live again!)

That Sunday morning, a few of the women who loved Jesus went to the tomb. They were going to put oil and spices on His body and pray. But, one of God’s angels came, rolled back the stone and sat on it. The guards were so scared they fainted!

The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; HE HAS RISEN, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’”

So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid but SO EXCITED, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my disciples; I will see them soon.”

This is THE story of the Bible. God is all powerful. He is perfect. He made all things and is in all things. He is stronger than anything, even death. God has the power over life and death. Our sin keeps us from God and we should die forever in hell away from God. But God sent His son Jesus to die in our place so we don’t have to. We know Jesus died and lived again and because He did that for us, when we die, we will live again in heaven if we believe He died for us and make Him king of our hearts.

Jesus dying AND living again shows God accepted Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf. It proves that God has the power to raise us from the dead. It shows that those who believe in Christ will not remain dead, but will be resurrected unto forever life.

AMEN!

 

Today we made a diorama (or dino-rino as my kids called it). Basically a little theater and characters to tell the story.

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We used two pieces of green and 2 pieces of blue construction paper to make the grass and sky in our box. We cut out a sun and taped it to the ceiling with a string. We cut out a tomb and folded under the end to tape to the floor of our box. Then we crumpled up a piece of brown paper to be the stone. We also made a flat empty bed inside the tomb.

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The guards are guarding the tomb. (We drew them scared).

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The women are coming to visit the tomb.

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The angel is on the rock, inside the tomb is empty. The guards have passed out and the women are listening to the angel. Jesus is waiting to see them!

 

Thanks for joining us today. Love to you all! Happy Easter!

The Unmerciful Servant

~ hebidsthemcome ~ Leave a comment

Hello all! This month we are learning about the things Jesus taught. Today is another parable (a story meant to teach something).

Today’s story can be found in Matthew 18:21-35.

One day Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times should I forgive someone who is mean to me? Seven times?”

Jesus answered, “No, not seven times, but seventy-seven times!” (He was saying a LOT!)

Then He told this story to help Peter understand, “There was once king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. There was one man who owed him ten thousand bags of gold. The man was not able to pay, and the king ordered that all that he had be sold to repay the debt.

But the man fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’  The king master took pity on him, forgave the debt and let him go. ‘I will forget all the money you owe me.’

But when that man went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him just a little bit of money. He grabbed him and yelled, ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.’

But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into jail until he could pay back the debt.  When the other servants saw what had happened, they were angry and went and told the king everything that had happened.

Then the king called the man in. ‘You wicked man,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ Then the king sent the man to jail too, because he had not forgiven the servant.

This is how God has forgiven us and you are to forgive those who hurt you too.”

 

The first man owed a LOT of money but the king said, “I will have mercy on you and forget what you owe me.” Mercy means saving someone from a consequence they deserve. The man SHOULD have had to go to jail and sell everything to pay back the king. But instead, the king said, “I will forgive the debt and forget all about it.” Thats just like God. We owe God everything…and we can NEVER repay Him for loving us. We can never make up for our bad choices that disobey Him (sins). BUT, He is the Good King and when we ask Him to, He forgives us and forgets what we owe Him. Isn’t that wonderful?! We should have to be apart from God forever because of our sins. We owe Him everything. But He shows us mercy and says, “I will forget all you owe.”

But then…sometimes if someone hurts us, we are not as quick to forgive. Just like the servant who owed the man just a little money…he grabbed him and yelled “GIVE ME MY MONEY!” Sometimes when someone is mean to us we want to grab them and yell at them. “You hurt me! You owe me!” BUT, God says, we should remember how much He has forgiven us and that will help us show forgiveness to others. The man did NOT show forgiveness and he ended up in jail too! We need to forgive others like God has forgiven us. We can forgive the hurtful things people do to us because God has forgiven EVERY bad thing we’ve ever done.

 

For our craft today, we drew out the story as we told it (and afterward I made a copy since we have two kids), then cut the story into 6 pieces, mixed them up and glued them in the correct order on another piece of paper.

 

(Youtube does have a LOT of videos of this one…but I couldn’t find one I especially wanted to highlight. Feel free to go poking around though!)

Thanks for joining us! We’ll have two more lessons and then we’ll begin our Easter countdown!