Seek first His Kingdom

1. Icebreakers

• Play a simple age-appropriate icebreaker. Some examples:
• Freeze!
  Play praise music and lead the children in movements (stepping side to side, clapping their hands, stomping their feet, tiptoeing, following the teacher in a circle, slapping their legs, doing jump and jacks, reaching up high and down low, etc). Have an assistant shut the worship music off and have the students freeze, standing completely still.  Play the music again and repeat multiple times.  For an added challenge, while students are freezing, recite a memory verse and begin again.

• Simon says 
  One teacher is Simon.  Simon yells out a command such as, “Simon says, march in place!”  The students would then follow the command because “Simon says” to do it.  If Simon does not use the phrase “Simon says” before stating the command and a child still follows, then that child will be seated and is out of the game until the end of the round.  Play continues with eliminations until one child remains who will become the next Simon.

• I spy with a little eye
  Get kids to take turns spying out objects or people in the room. You may want to put some props around (e.g. stuffed animals, pictures from Bible lessons from last year etc) or get kids to sit in a circle and spy out each other. E.g. “I spy with my little eye someone wearing a red dress.”

• Blanket game
  Get all the kids to introduce themselves. Divide class into 2 teams. Hold a large blanket in between. Each team sends a representative to sit in front of the blanket. When blanket is dropped, first side to shout out name of the other wins a point for their team.

2. Lesson

• At Christmas time, some of you had a list of presents that you wanted. Maybe it’s a new Transformers. Or a Barbie doll. Or a truck. Or a book.
• As we enter this new year, what is it that we want? Is it good results? Favour with your parents? Good health? Nice new clothes? A holiday? PSP?
• We all want and need good things in our lives. And God our Father wants to give us good things. He wants to bless us tremendously every day. We just need to look to Him. He is the source of everything.
• Jesus tells His disciples (Matt 6:25-33): DON’T WORRY! 
• Don’t worry about: 
• What you will eat 
• What you will drink
• Your body
• What you will wear

 

• Jesus gave us 2 examples: 
• Birds of the air: They don’t sow or reap or store, but the Heavenly Father feeds them.
• The flowers of the field: They don’t labour or spin. They are here today and gone tomorrow. Yet God dresses them in more splendour than King Solomon.

Christmas: Magi come to worship Jesus

1. Lesson

• We’ve been looking at various Biblical prophecies about Jesus’ birth: 
• A Messiah from the line of David will come 
• A virgin will be of child
• The Messiah will be born in Bethlehem

• Today we look at another essential part of the Christmas story — the Magi/ Wisemen / Kings that visited Jesus (Matt 2:1-16)
• Usually in Christmas cards and nativity plays, we see a picture of 3 Wisemen who visited baby Jesus in a stable, together with the shepherds.

 

• But in reality:
• We don’t know how many there were; at least 2 or more (Matthew uses the plural “we”). There were 3 gifts mentioned — gold, frankincense and myrrh — hence the idea of 3 kings. 
• The wisemen visited Jesus in a house (Matthew 2:11), not the stable. So it was not at the same time as the shepherds.
• Jesus was probably aged between 40 days to 2 years old at the time of the visit.

• The wisemen from the east travelled to visit Jesus because they saw a sign — a supernaturally bright star. They entered Jerusalem and asked around, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” 
• The star led them ahead and stopped over the place where Jesus was staying. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Christmas: Shepherds heard the Good News!

1. Lesson

• Last week, we talked about a special visitor for Mary and Joseph and how a government ruling made them travel all the way from Nazareth to Bethlehem. This was done so God’s prophecy would be fulfilled — the Saviour will be born in Bethlehem.
• Let’s find out what happened the night Jesus was born, according to Luke 2:8-20.

• The lowly shepherds heard the good news first
• The first people to find out about Jesus’ birth were not important dignitaries or VVIPs. They were lowly shepherds who had to spend the night in the fields to keep watch over their flocks and ensure their safety. 
• We don’t know why God decided to announce the birth to the shepherds first. Perhaps He wanted them to know that the Good Shepherd of the world has come! Do you remember Psalm 23? The Lord is my Shepherd …

Prophecy: Jesus will be born in Bethlehem

1. Lesson

• Last week, we talked about a special visitor for Mary and Joseph. Who visited them? An angel, that’s right! What did the angel tell them? That they would be having a baby! Their baby would be special because He was from God. 

• The Bible tells us that God made a promise to King David. God promised him that one of his great, great, great, great, great children would be king forever. That was a promise from God that He would send Jesus.

• [extra info] In the Bible, we read that King David came from the very first man, Adam. He came by way of some other names you will remember: Noah (and his son Shem), Abraham (and his son Isaac), Isaac’s son Jacob, a man named Salmon (and his wife Rahab). Rahab’s son Boaz (and his wife Ruth). Ruth’s grandson was Jesse, King David’s father. Many kings followed David until a man name Jacob had a son whom he named Joseph. Joseph was the husband of Mary, the mother of the Messiah!

• Prophecy #3: Jesus will be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2) 
• God had given promises all along the way. The people believed and waited. One of those promises, though, was that the Messiah would be born in King David’s town, Bethlehem. It was a small town. 
• Not only was Jesus King David’s forever king, but God promised — through the prophet Micah 750 years before Jesus’ birth — that Jesus would be born in King David’s town, Bethlehem.  
• Micah 5:2
  “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,
  though you are small among the clans of Judah,out of you will come for me
  one who will be ruler over Israel,
  whose origins are from of old,
  from ancient times.”

Prophecy: Jesus will be born of a virgin

1. HOOK: Matching game: Animal & their young

• Prepare separate pix of animals and their young for kids to match them.
• E.g. What do dogs give birth to? Puppies.
  What do cats give birth to? Kittens.
  How about snakes? They lay eggs that hatch into baby snakes.

• Just like we get puppies from dogs, what do we get from sinners? Yup, more sinners. 
• Last week we heard about how when Adam sinned, sin entered the world. Because Adam sinned, his children, grandchildren, great, great, great, great children and everyone in this world are born as sinners. We know the result of sin is death. 
• But God promised that a descendant of the Eve will defeat the serpent. God wanted to change our family line so that we will not continue to be sinners but become righteous. Today we know He was talking about Eve’s great, great, great, great …. Great, grandson, Jesus.
• One thing we cannot choose in life is who our parents are. But long before Jesus was born — a few hundred years before, in fact — God’s prophet, Isaiah, had already told the people what sort of person Jesus’ mother would be.

2.  Lesson: We are part of a great family, thanks to Jesus!

•  Prophecy #2: Jesus will be born of a virgin 
• Isaiah the prophet said, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.”(Isa 7:14)
• The mother of the Saviour of the world would be a virgin. (A virgin is someone who had never had any sexual relationship with another person.) This was special because virgins don’t get pregnant. You need both a father and a mother to become pregnant. But in Jesus’ case, there will only be a mother. God Himself will be the father, not a man. 
• Hundreds of years after Isaiah, there was a young teenage girl lady called Mary. She was engaged to be married to a man named Joseph. 

The Big Picture: Prophecies about Jesus

1. HOOK: Guess the picture

• Show a picture bit by bit until it’s fully revealed. Get kids to guess what it is as soon as they can. 
• Can use this Kids Countdown or create your own pictures.

2. LESSON 

• The BIG PICTURE 
• Wasn’t guessing the pictures fun? Sometimes we see only a small part, and we don’t know what it is until all the many parts come together to form a big picture.
• That’s what God did for us. He had a plan from the beginning of time, and through thousands of years, He revealed bits of the puzzle, little by little, through His prophets.
• What was this big picture? That Jesus will come to save the world from sin. 
• There were more than 300 clues/prophecies about Jesus recorded in the Bible. We’ll look at some of them in the next few weeks. One of the earliest prophecies about Jesus was revealed early on, way back in the Garden of Eden.

Review of Solomon's Poetry Books

1. Lesson 

•  We’ve been looking at some of the books of the Bible that Solomon wrote:
• Song of Solomon 
• Proverbs
• Ecclesiastes

• Let’s see what you can remember from it:
  <use pix to associate each book>
   
• Song of Solomon 

• Who were the 2 main characters?
  The Shulamite girl and the shepherd/King Solomon

• How did the Shulamite see herself?
  Dark skinned, unwanted by her own family

• How did Solomon see the Shulamite girl?
  Fair, beautiful, flawless in every way >> God sees us the same way

• How did the Shulamite girl see Solomon?
  Attractive and full of love >> Picture of Jesus

• Key lesson: In Song of Solomon, we are reminded that God sees us as beautiful; We see Jesus as beautiful!