In Kids Church, the Lord provided a wonderful lesson idea with the chapters of Isaiah that our church is reading and preaching through. Two weeks ago the Sunday before Christmas it was ‘find baby Jesus,’ in light of the many Messianic prophecies about Jesus, we, in a dark room, hid a small manger’d baby Jesus and searched for him with a flashlight, sometimes able to see him clearly and other times shining directly on Him but unable to see if it’s Him. The following week, we used an overhead projector (a real non-digital one from the 90’s with transparency paper!) to play a form of Bible-word Pictionary, where in light of Isaiah 49:18-19 (and others) where God is doing a new thing, challenging us to be able to perceive or imagine it, and the students were challenged to find a verse or a word and take turns drawing it and imagining what it could be before it was fully formed. The lesson for this one was that despite the barriers or hard situations that we may face, God is able to do a ‘new thing’ and challenges us to trust Him and even imagine the ways he could or is working to make it happen, like making a way through the sea. Back to this last week, the Lord gave the idea of using some webbing (rope) to a) help the kids to learn each other’s names, and b) to use as an object lesson when talking about Isaiah 61:1-2.
The lesson began with talking about the things that tangle us up, are hard for us and we feel ‘stuck’ by, whether homework, family conflict, or school / friend issues. Describing a hog-tie or a rodeo event where riders lasso calves and tie their legs, once all legs are tied they are helpless unless someone else unties them. I used the webbing to ‘tie/tangle’ myself up, requesting that I need two volunteers to untie me because I can’t do it myself. ‘Tying’ that to Jesus, we too, I shared, according to scripture, are unable to help ourselves, and have all sinned and need Jesus to ‘untangle’ us, both for salvation and in our daily lives. We then moved to studying the first verses in Isaiah 61, where we identified that all Christians who have accepted God’s forgiveness through faith in Jesus’ death on the cross have God’s Holy Spirit living inside them, and are empowered to both be untangled and, like Jesus, help untangle others.
We looked at the verbs ‘proclaim,’ to ‘release’ and to ‘bind up’ as important acts for Christians to partner with God in doing, and reflected on how ‘proclaim’ is repeated 3 times, and how primary sharing the Good News is for us as Christians.
We then moved into some basic icebreaker and name games using the webbing. We moved the rope knot around to each person and did a name alliteration exercise where we said our names and another word using the same first letter of our names to help memory (mine was ‘Ben Bear.’ And it works, I can still recite every child’s name and other word!) We then put down the rope in a circle and standing outside it, played what I’ll call ‘inner circle’, where we took turns answering the question prompt ‘what’s something that has been tangly or tough for you?’ and whoever shares that experience steps inside the circle, great for being able to observe shared experiences and building trust, and then we played (or attempted) human knot, which regardless of outcome is always fun.
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