I’ve been quiet on the blog front over the past month or so – primarily because I’ve been reading up and preparing for my first ever sermon – very exciting! I’ve been asked to deliver the sermon which will follow the annual kids Christmas production in mid-December. The passage I’m going to be looking at is Luke’s discussion of Anna the Prophetess. I won’t go into any more details yet, but will link to the sermon once it’s up on the church website.
Anyways, a few weeks ago I did another kids’ talk at church. My focus this time was on prayer and perseverance, particularly looking at Romans 12:12. To help illustrate this theme, I used Momo, the sleep training clock we’ve been using to [mostly] good effect with Son #1. The talk transcript is below.
This is Momo, the sleep training clock. When you’re younger, especially if you’re still learning to tell the time, it can be tricky to know when it’s time to wake up. Sometimes, if you wake you too early, Mum and Dad might not be too impressed, so that’s where Momo can come in handy. When he’s awake, it’s okay to be out of bed and playing – when he’s asleep it’s still sleep time for you too.
I need someone to test this out – who wants to have a sleep in this cosy bed up on stage?
[tuck kid into the mock bed set up on stage, set Momo to sleepmode]
Momo is asleep now, so you need to stay in bed until he’s awake, okay? Sleep tight!
While X is sleeping, let’s talk about waiting. As I said earlier, when you’re younger and can’t tell the time, it can be hard to wait in bed until it’s time to get up.
That’s true in other parts of our life too. Waiting for something to happen, especially if you really want it to, can be tricky.
The Bible talks a lot about waiting for things that you really want to happen.
I think God knew it would be tricky to wait so the Bible talks a lot about perseverance – does anyone know what that word means?
Potential definition: Continuing to do something even though it’s really tricky, or it’s taking a long time to happen.
In Romans 12:12, Paul, the guy who wrote the book, talks about perseverance:
Be joyful because you have hope. Don’t quit in hard times; pray all the harder.
No matter what’s happening while we wait, God wants us to be patient, to not quit in the hard times, and, and this is important, to keep talking with him through prayer.
Just like Momo helps us wait until it’s time to get up from bed, God gives us prayer to help us while we’re waiting. God’s always there while we’re waiting and he loves it when we pray and talk to him – he wants us to be talking with him all the time!
On that note, let’s pray before you head off to the kids programme.
I’m enjoying coming up with ideas for kids’ talks. This one had a few spanners thrown into the works on the day (PowerPoint slides not working; Momo’s alarm going off a bit earlier than I expected; the toddlers becoming fascinated by Momo once his alarm did go off), but they hopefully didn’t hurt the communication of the message, and really, when you’re doing a kids’ talk you kind of need to expect the unexpected!
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