Children's Stories

Kids Korner: Everyone can share Jesus’ message (September 26th)

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Read Mark 9:38-50 with your family. Jesus told the disciples that someone else teaching about Jesus and God is not a problem. Jesus came with a very big message, and it takes all of us sharing it to make the world a better place. Do not worry about mistakes or anything bad, just share Jesus’ good news.

Jesus showed the disciples how silly they were by using sarcasm and exaggeration. He challenged them to cut off their foot, or their hand, or pluck out their eye if they got in the way of others sharing Jesus’ message. The disciples were being ridiculous. We choose to follow Jesus with our whole body, our whole heart and our whole mind. That’s how God made us.

Kids Korner: Jesus asks us to forgive (September 19th)

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Read Mark 9:30-37 with your family. Jesus loved children, and in our story today Jesus took a child on his lap and taught the disciples. He said everyone has to welcome children and people who were as kind and open as children, because when they welcomed children, they welcomed Jesus, and when they welcomed Jesus, they welcomed God.

The disciples had been arguing about who was the most important amongst them, and Jesus used a child to show them it didn’t matter who was most important, because that was not the way God looked at people. God looked for how kind people were, and how willing they were to do things for other people. That’s what really matters in God’s world.

Kids Korner: Jesus asks us to forgive (September 12th)

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Read Matthew 18:21-35 with your family. Forgiving others is hard, especially if they really hurt you deeply.

Sometimes people say “Forgive and forget”, but that isn’t in the Bible, and that’s not what Jesus said. (‘Forget and forgive’ comes from the play King Lear in the 1600’s, and the novel Don Quixote in the 1700’s.) We are not asked to forget, because sometimes when we are hurt that becomes a learning experience for us. Jesus did not tell us to forget our hurts.

Instead, Jesus said forgive others 70×7. Seven in the Hebrew culture was the number of completion, of perfection (i.e. God made the world in seven days), so those sitting with Jesus would understand why Peter and Jesus picked that number specifically. And because Jesus said 70×7, we should understand that as never ending, not 490 times.

Forgiveness is how we get rid of our hurt because carrying that hurt makes us angry and cranky, and that’s not who God wants us to be. So every time we are reminded of that hurt, we have to choose to forgive the person again. Even if we remember 70 times a day, each time we have to make the choice to forgive. Over time it gets better.

Kids Korner: Jesus heals more people (September 5th)

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Read Mark 7:24-37 with your family. There are two stories of healing. In the second one Jesus uses dust and spit to heal someone so they can see, hear and talk again. It is a great story.

The first healing, however, is the really special one. Jesus is tired and doesn’t want to deal with anyone, so when he is asked to help a little girl, Jesus says he wasn’t sent to help her or her mother. What is most interesting, however, is that the mother doesn’t leave, she pushes Jesus and reminds Jesus what God’s love looks like, even for those from a different culture.

The church often teaches that Jesus always made the right choices, but sometimes he didn’t. This is an example where Jesus said something he shouldn’t have and had to realize he was wrong. The woman didn’t get angry with him, she simply showed him that she knew about God’s love too, and it was for everyone.

Jesus did heal the little girl and thank her mother. Jesus made a mistake and when he realized it was a mistake, he fixed it by changing his mind and his attitude.

Kids Korner: His closest disciples knew Jesus taught the truth (August 22nd)

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Read John 6:56-69 with your family. We have read all the way from the 1st to the 69th verse of this chapter over the last five weeks, and some things keep being said over and over:
1. Jesus saying we have to consume his body to have eternal life (this is a metaphor for bringing him into our hearts and minds).
2. Jesus and the crowd talking about manna from God during the times of Moses and acting like that was the ‘good old days’.

The metaphor of eating Jesus’ body and drinking his blood is weird and hard to understand today, just like it was hard to understand when Jesus talked about eternal life back when he was alive. People had to learn to think differently and that can be hard.

However, the talk about manna as if that had been a perfect time is a bigger problem. Often adults think back to the past as being almost perfect and better than things are today. The word we use for that is ‘nostalgia’. The adults around Jesus forgot that the people following Moses were cranky and complained all the time, they wanted something other than manna, and it didn’t take long before they were worshipping a statue of a golden cow instead of God, and Moses was so upset he threw the stone tablets with the Ten Commandments on the ground and smashed them.

The new followers of Jesus showed they wanted nostalgia, not the words of Jesus. They wanted the ‘good old days’ rather than just having faith and trust in God. The followers who had been with Jesus for longer knew the difference and knew there was no better way to live than believing in Jesus and trusting what he had to say.