Grace

Grace - God's undeserved and unearned, love, favor, and mercy.

Our main verse for today was:
Ephesians 2:8 - For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith-and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God-

We started out class with the game, The Price is Free. One child was picked to come up and choose one of three envelopes. They were told what was in each envelope, one had a nickle, another had a quarter and the last one had a dollar. Which ever one he picked he could keep what was inside. It was his. This seemed so easy that some of the children were second guessing which envelope he should actually choose. He did end up with the envelope with the dollar inside and some of the kids were shocked to find out it really contained a dollar. To them it was just simply to easy. That's all there was to the game, no lies, no tricks, just basically a free gift.

As we moved into the lesson, they learned the true meaning of grace, and we looked at examples of God's grace that are in the Bible. The Israelites definitely did not deserve or earn God's grace as they lacked faith, grumbled and complained, and built a golden calf to worship. Even after they had started witnessing God's power.
God built their faith until they were able to trust him and were ready to obey. God rescued them by grace through faith - the same way Jesus now saves people by his dying on the cross for our sins. We did not deserve that from Him, but out of love, out of grace it happened.

As a closing activity a box of broken glass was placed in the front of the room. I asked for a volunteer, several kids raised their hands. I explained to our volunteer he needed to take his shoes and socks off and walk around in the box of glass. He didn't think this was a good idea, but I assured him that I had a first aid kit in the other room to fix him up afterwards. Well, of course no one walked in the box of broken glass but we did use it as an object lesson that just as it is not smart to walk around in the broken glass and hurt ourselves and rely on the first aid kit to fix us up, it's not smart to do things we know are wrong and just figure that Jesus will always be there to fix our problems and take away our sins. Jesus will always be there, he will always forgive us from our sins, but to do to things we know we shouldn't do and rely on Him for forgiveness just doesn't make since either.