Wednesday 30 July 2014

Sunday School Secrets: Heaven


Welcome to our first little bit of Sunday School Secrets, where we get to come together and share our ideas and inspirations for teaching our little and yet very important students some very foundational life lessons. 

I’m not sure about you, but I would rather sit down and come up with a lesson from scratch than follow a book. Actually, I’m not sure about that.  Perhaps I would like to follow a book but none of the books I’ve tried other than Eyes that See and Ears that Hear have really worked.  

My students don’t seem to be the type that want to sit still and write in a book and match words together or find them in word searches.  It all needs to be a bit more interactive than that. 

Recently I introduced the concept of a Sunday School Board, where we pin our lesson up and then carry it out and hang it up on the wall where everyone coming downstairs after the service can’t help but see it, and sometimes the kids even pull them over and do a ‘presentation’ and, I’m amazed actually recite the lesson nearly perfectly.  (If you are despairing that the children in your class aren’t learning anything, get them to give the adults a presentation, you’ll *hopefully* be amazed.) The children love arranging it on the board, pinning it on and then showing the adults.

So for the past two weeks we have done a lesson on heaven.  I’ve got the picture here of our board and I’ll just go through and explain what we did. 

First I cut out the letters H E A V E N at home and brought them in, and because we had mainly girls that day, they decorated them with glue and beads, while I read to them out of ‘Revealing Heaven II’ by Kat Kerr.
There are quite a few books about these days of children or adults who have either died and gone to heaven and come back to life, or been in a serious accident and had an experience of heaven whilst in a coma, or simply had dreams or visions about heaven.    So the pictures I used were illustrations out of the fore mentioned book that the author herself had drawn.  

When I was a youngster and asked questions about heaven I don’t remember getting many solid answers other than that I would go there when I die.   I wanted to inspire these kids with some stories of heaven and then use it as a platform to share the salvation message.



I specifically read to them about the baby nursery in heaven where aborted or miscarried babies go, about the mansions God is preparing for us and about our pets who have died.

Then I asked some questions.  Who can go to heaven, where is it, how do we get then and when? And in there I slipped the salvation message to these children. 

Where – somewhere in out of space God has prepared a place.  (Dad used to sing that to me). 

How- through Jesus who died on the cross for our sins, and Stephen explained this more in depth with this little illustration on the chalkboard. 
(In the beginning God created the earth and we were straight on our way to Heaven, but then sin came in and we fell and we were straight on our way to Hell, but then God sent Jesus to die on the cross and bridge the gap.  Now we have a choice to walk with Jesus or keep going on our own to hell)

When – either when we die, or sometimes God might choose to give us a dream or vision.

Who – Those who ask Jesus to be the boss of their hearts and say sorry for the bad stuff they’ve done. 

So what else is on our board? 

The bits hanging off the bottom are part of a Psalty song ‘Heaven is a wonderful place, filled with glory and grace, I want to see my Saviour’s face because Heaven is a wonderful place’

A little prayer ‘I want to be heaven minded, like you God’.   This is actually a part of a Bethel song from their album ‘Be Lifted High’.  At one stage I was listening to this album every morning as part of my quiet time and particularly that song and I found that I was seeing things differently than before.
 
"I want to be heaven minded"

 

The next week we chatted about how we are three parts, body, soul and spirit, which was actually building on/reviewing a previous lesson.

Our body is our physical part, our soul is our mind, will and emotions and our spirit is the part of us that connects to God and goes up to heaven when we die where we get a new body.

We coloured in a couple of pictures that I just found on the internet, about Jesus being our strong tower, and how He is the door.

Oh and yes, both weeks we did touch briefly on hell and who goes there and why.  It’s a tricky one because I didn’t want to scare their little socks off because when I’ve read books about hell I’ve had nightmares for months, but I did want to make sure that they understood that heaven isn’t the only place people go after death. 

So what are your Sunday School Secrets?  Please link up below :)
 

 



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