David Batchelor Ministries: What I Discovered From Sermons For Kids

Children have a faith that is ready to go. Let's not waste that opportunity by delivering a humanistic Gospel.

We talk a lot about contextualization Gospel communication. How do we share the eternal truth of God in specific locations for specific people who have a specific shared experience?

The Gospel does not change. The message should remain the same, regardless of whether we are doing sermons for kids, object lessons for kids or sermons for youth. The methods may be adjusted for effectiveness, but not the message.

How well do we proclaim the Gospel to children in our sermons for kids? I'm not asking how well we teach children Bible stories, or how well we have taught the moral truths of Scripture.

Are we contextualizing our Gospel communication for children as well as we are for the hipsters in Brooklyn or the tribes in Tanzania?

The Bible as a Collection of Good Stories. Too often we teach the Bible as a series of isolated morality tales, like Aesop's Fables. We want our children to learn how to live well, so we draw from the Bible stories of people who did the right thing and those who did the wrong thing. We hope they are getting the idea that good is of God, leading to success, and bad is of Satan, leading to failure. If the kiddos can then live out and retell the story with the main points and right names, we feel like they have a grasp on the Gospel.

Churches have told children tons of good stories, but have we told them the Story? It is easy to tell the stories within the story, but there is a big picture here. When we offer a slice of the Gospel as if it is the whole pie, we miss some important points.

I think about it this way.There's this huge story with basically four major acts. Creation, Redemption, fall, and restoration. I teach these at my church. You might be wondering, how do you teach this to children?

The reality is I just don't want them to know one part of God's big story. He's given us His Word that tells the story of His grand and awesome plan, from the first verse to the last. The Gospel is About What God is Doing. If we just take the Bible in isolated parts, we miss the flow of God. And the flow is important to understanding that the Gospel is not just a group of ideas, but rather a plan that has been designed and implemented by a loving God for the saving of humans.

The plan runs the length of Scripture. For example, we hear Jesus say in 1 Corinthians 11, "This cup is the New Covenant in My blood.

We don't remember that Moses said, "This blood is a symbol of the covenant" in the Old Testament. We don't understand why Abraham would be called to sacrifice Isaac if we don't understand what would happen as God the Son is sent by God the Father to be the perfect sacrifice for our sins. This interconnectedness happens all through Scripture.

When we take the Bible as a series of isolated morality tales, we think about 66 books with hundreds, if not thousands, of stories contained within them. In actuality, there are not thousands of stories. There are not 66 stories. There aren't even two stories with the Old and New Testament. There is one story and that is the story of what God is doing-- redemptive history.

In our sermons for kids, object lessons for kids and sermons for youth, we want to teach morals to kids, but we don't want them to become moralists. The Gospel is Not a Self-help Program.

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Stay blessed,