Jesus Loves Families

Read the text and briefly discuss it together. Some discussion-starter questions are provided. Then read the closing text as a guide to your family prayer and finish by praying together and singing a hymn. Psalm 46 is a special song some Israelites who lived a long time ago wrote with the Holy Spirit’s help. The song tells everyone to trust in God no matter what is happening around them. Here's what it says in simple words: God is our protection and our strength. He always helps in times of trouble. So we will not be afraid if the earth shakes, or if the mountains fall into the sea. We will not fear even if the oceans roar and foam, or if the mountains shake at the raging sea. Think about this. There is a river which brings joy to the city of God. This is the holy place where God Most High lives. God is in that city, and so it will not be shaken. God will help her at dawn. Nations tremble, and kingdoms shake. God shouts, and the earth crumbles. The Lord of heaven’s armies is with u...

Read the text and briefly discuss it together. Some discussion-starter questions are provided. Then read the closing text as a guide to your family prayer and finish by praying together and singing a hymn. A typical family arrives at a church on Sunday and sits down. Mom and the kids slide into a pew, and Dad sits at the end near the aisle. They look around at all the new faces and feel a bit uncomfortable.  A young mom with two kids, a little boy of four and a girl who's two and a half, comes to church hoping to get closer to God. She struggles to keep her children quiet, worried she might be bothering others or that her kids might be too noisy.  Families from different church backgrounds come in. They're not used to our way of worshipping, which might confuse them.  We don't want them to feel out of place because if they do, they might not come back. Then there's someone who has never been to church before. They've already faced a lot of fear just to step inside. ...

Read the text and briefly discuss it together. Some discussion-starter questions are provided. Then read the closing text as a guide to your family prayer and finish by praying together and singing a hymn. Today, we're going to talk about how we can learn to worship God the right way, just like He wants us to. Imagine you're playing a game, and there's a rule book. You want to play the game right, so you read the rules carefully. That's kind of like what we do with the Bible. The Bible is like God's rule book for life and how we should worship Him. The Bible tells us to do our best to understand what it says (2 Timothy 2:15). Think of it like trying to solve a puzzle. We want to put all the pieces in the right spots, not make up our own picture. The puzzle of Scripture has two sections, the Old and New Testaments, and three big steps God used to teach us His whole will for us to live by. The First Step was when God was teaching the very first people on Earth about H...

  Read the text and briefly discuss it together. Some discussion-starter questions are provided. Then read the closing text as a guide to your family prayer and finish by praying together and singing a hymn. Attending Bible class, also called Sunday School or Bible Study, is really important. It's when church members attend classes together before or after worship to learn more about God and the Bible. Here are 12 good reasons why you should go all the time unless you’re sick or something like that: (1) God is pleased when we get together to study His word (1 Timothy 4:13; 2 Timothy 2:15). (2) Your friends at church want you to come because they know it's fun and you'll learn a lot. (3) The people who teach work hard to make sure they have good stuff to share. (4) Sermons are essential, but you can only learn a little from listening to one sermon a week. Bible class gives you more. (5) As you learn more, you can also help your friends understand things. (6) If you've ev...

Read the text and briefly discuss it together. Some discussion-starter questions are provided. Then read the closing text as a guide to your family prayer and finish by praying together and singing a hymn. Be careful how you judge if someone else is right or wrong! In Matthew 7:1–6, Jesus teaches us about how not to, and how to judge rightly. Read the passage together now. We all have to decide what's right or wrong all the time, even if it's hard. If you want to be a good person, you need to know what's good and what's bad so you can make the right choices. Jesus said, “Don't judge others, or you will be judged too.” But he also said more about what He meant: 1. God will judge you the same way you judge others, so be fair and merciful. 2. Don't speak judgment against someone if you do the same bad things. First, stop doing the bad, yourself, and then, it's okay to tell them they're doing something wrong. 3. Be careful who you try to help. Some peo...

Read the text and briefly discuss it together. Some discussion-starter questions are provided. Then read the closing text as a guide to your family prayer and finish by praying together and singing a hymn. Deuteronomy 33:27 says, “The everlasting God is your place of safety. His arms will hold you up forever. He will force your enemy out ahead of you. He will say, ‘Destroy the enemy!’” These are comforting words to spiritual warriors fighting “the good fight” we learned about last week. King Jesus defeated the enemy and exposed him to open shame by dying on the cross for our sins and rising from the dead to live forever. Now, all who trust and obey Him will live forever with Him. No one can defeat our King Jesus! He will return and judge the whole world so we can keep on with the mission He left us without fear or worry. We will be victorious in the end. But we can delay the victory. Jesus commands us to tell everyone about the gospel and try to convince them to believe in Him and obey...

Read the text and briefly discuss it together. Some discussion-starter questions are provided. Then read the closing text as a guide to your family prayer and finish by praying together and singing a hymn. As we learned in last week’s devo, there’s a war going on in our world between good and evil. God is good, and all who want to be good must be on His side. God doesn’t expect us to fight without His help, though, so read Ephesians 6:10–20 together and then think about these things: When we're fighting for what’s true and right, we need to remember, we’re not alone. God gives us His strength to make us able to keep on keeping on. In fact, He promises never to leave us (Hebrews 13:5). All He asks of us in return is to trust and obey Him.  Pray for protection! Evil spirits serve Satan and somehow tempt people to evil and deceive many in the world. We can’t see them, but God can, and He can keep us safe. All we have to do is ask Him to, James 4:2 says so. A little later in James 4, i...

Read the text and briefly discuss it together. Some discussion-starter questions are provided. Then read the closing text as a guide to your family prayer and finish by praying together and singing a hymn. This life is a battleground in more ways than one. It is a fight between good and evil. God is good. The devil is evil. We all pick sides whether we mean to or not. If we don’t mean to, we’ve picked the wrong side. There’s only one way to join God’s good army and that’s to mean to through faith in Jesus. We sometimes talk about “fighting the good fight,” a biblical term (1 Timothy 6:12; 2 Timothy 4:7) that doesn’t mean a literal fistfight at all. It usually means teaching, influencing, and working to overcome and replace something wrong with something right. It means we’re not just trying to do what pleases us selfishly but doing what will benefit many people. That’s what we call “the greater good,” and it’s what “the good fight” is all about. So, when the Bible talks about fighting ...

Read the text and briefly discuss it together. Some discussion-starter questions are provided. Then read the closing text as a guide to your family prayer and finish by praying together and singing a hymn. The hymn Leaning on the Everlasting Arms was written by Anthony J. Showalter and Elisha A. Hoffman in 1887. The creation of this hymn was sparked by a tragic event when two of Mr. Showalter’s former students' wives passed away on the same day. Deeply affected by this, Showalter, a music teacher, drew inspiration from Deuteronomy 33:27, “The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” Like the Bible verse, the song was intended to convey the comfort and strength one can find in God's enduring care, even if there’s sorrow and grief. The hymn's lyrics share a deep sense of joy, peace, and security that comes from relying on God's power and love. The song teaches us to lean on God as a source of strength and protection, which people facin...

Read the text and briefly discuss it together. Some discussion-starter questions are provided. Then read the closing text as a guide to your family prayer and finish by praying together and singing a hymn. In a family ordered according to the Bible, each member has a unique and important role to play. A family should be like a team, where everyone has a job to do, and when all the team members work together, everything goes smoothly. In a proper family, the man is the leader. He's like the ship's captain, guiding and protecting his crew. The Bible tells us in Ephesians 5:23 that “the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church.” This doesn't mean that men are better than women or that they get to boss everyone around. It just means that God has given the husband and father in a family the responsibility to lead in a loving and caring way. He provides, guides, and teaches his family the way of the Lord.  On the other hand, the woman is like the heart ...