Abraham Trusts God

When Abraham and Sarah had a baby, it was a miracle. It didn't just happen by itself, God made it happen.  God had to make it happen because Abraham and Sarah's bodies were so old they couldn't make a baby without God.  Abraham was so happy.  He loved his little boy.  His son's name was Isaac, which means laughter.  Isaac got bigger. Soon, he could run fast, he could throw a ball, and he could get his shoes on all by himself.  Abraham loved Isaac very much, but he loved God even more.  God was the one who had made it happen, and God was his best friend.  Abraham always agreed with God.  God was the smartest, and God was powerful, and God was good. When God is our friend we worship him.  At church we sing songs to God to show him our worship. Another way that people used to worship God was to make a sacrifice.  A sacrifice is when you would take an animal, a healthy, strong animal and give its life to God by killing it.  When it was dead, you would burn it so that all of it would go up in the fire into the invisible place where God is.  The animal was yours, but you wanted to give it to God as a present.  We always want to give presents to our best friends to show our friendship. One day God told Abraham to take his son Isaac, and go to a mountain far away.  On the mountain, God said, he wanted Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. God was asking Abraham to give him Isaac's life.  He was asking Abraham for the very best present that he could give.  This was Abraham's only son! Abraham didn't want to keep anything from his best friend God.  He obeyed God.  The next morning, Abraham got up early and chopped some wood for the fire.  He took Isaac and a few helpers and started toward the mountain.  When they got to the mountain, Abraham told his helpers to wait, and he and Isaac started climbing the mountain together.  Isaac didn't know that he was going to be a sacrifice.  He said to his dad, "Father, you have a knife, and I have the wood, but where is the lamb for the sacrifice?"  Abraham answered him and said, "God will give us a lamb, son."  At the top of the mountain, Abraham built an altar with stones, and arranged the wood for the fire.  Then he took his son, and tied him to the altar.  He raised the knife to sacrifice Isaac, but just then he heard God say "Stop!"  God told him not to do it.  God didn't really want him to kill Isaac.  Now, God knew that Abraham loved God more than he loved his son.  If he was willing to give God his son, then that meant that God was his number one friend.  And guess what?  Abraham was God's number one friend, too.  They were very special friends.  Whatever Abraham had belonged to God.  And whatever God had belonged to Abraham.  Abraham's heart belonged to God, and God's heart belonged to Abraham, too. 

Abraham and Sarah have a baby

God promised his friend Abraham that he would have his own family, but Abraham was really old. And how could his wife Sarah have a baby? She looked like a grandma. Abraham looked like a grandpa.  Abraham was 100 years old.  When our bodies are 100 years old they stop making babies. But God made a promise, and if God said it, He would do it. God and Abraham were friends.  Abraham knew God was telling the truth.  He believed God even though his body was old and Sarah's body was old.  His heart and God's heart agreed because they were friends.  Here is the story.  Sarah and Abraham lived in a tent.  One day while Sarah was in the tent, Abraham saw three men coming down the road.  It looked like three men, but Abraham knew that it was God.  God was coming to visit him.  He bowed down to the ground and asked the men to stay and wash their feet, and rest under the tree.  Abraham wanted to give them some food.  That's a good way to be friends, isn't it?  We like to share our food. While the men ate, one of them asked Abraham where Sarah was. Abraham said she was here, in the tent.  Then the man, who was really God in disguise, said that Sarah was going to be a mommy.  When Sarah heard that, she laughed inside the tent.  How could she be a mommy when she was old?  Then the Lord said to Abraham, "Why did Sarah laugh?  Is anything too hard for God?"  No, that's not too hard.  God can do anything. He can make a baby grow in an old grandma. Sarah was embarrassed, and she tried to lie - she said "I did not laugh."  But God said, "Yes, you did!"  God was going to make them have a baby whether she laughed about it or not.  Abraham and Sarah believed what God said and God counted them as his best friends forever.  The next year, Sarah had a baby.  She named her baby Isaac, which means laughter.  Now Abraham had a family, and his child would be a father someday and have more children, and those children would grow up and have children, until there would be so many in Abraham's family you couldn't count them all.   

God Makes a Friend

God likes to make things. Remember, how he made the sun and the moon?  He made all the animals.  And he made people, too.  One thing he likes to make, that you like to make too, is friends.  God likes to make friends!  But, how can God make friends if He is invisible?  Invisible means you can't see him, but He is there.  How do you know He is there?  Sometimes you can just feel Him - like you know your mom has come into the room even though you can't see her.  When God is invisible, you can't see Him but sometimes you can feel Him in the room - we call that feeling His presence.  Not like a present that you open, but a presence, a feeling someone is there.  You could try being very quiet and then sneak up on someone and see if they can feel your presence!  God can be with you even if you can't see him, and sometimes he might say something to you.  God talked to Abraham.  God wanted Abraham to be his best friend.  He wanted Abraham to be his best friend forever.  If Abraham would be his friend, then God would do something for Abraham, too.  This is what God said: if Abraham wanted to be God's friend, he would have to do leave his home, his country, and his father's family, and travel to a new place that God would show him.  If he would do that, God would be his friend forever, and God said he would make Abraham into a daddy, too, with a big family.  How big would Abraham's family be?  God told him to go out in the middle of the night and look up into the sky at the stars.  How many stars are there?  Abraham started to count them. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen.  There were so many stars that Abraham couldn't count them all. God said that's how many children, and grandchildren, and all their children there would be.  So many people in Abraham's family that you couldn't even count them.  How big would his family be?  Think about this.  Take a handful of sand like you get at the beach.  Look at all the little grains of sand.  Can you count them?  You can try, but you couldn't even count them all, it would take so long.  This was a very special promise to Abraham, that he would have a big family, because right now, he had no children at all.  He and his wife, Sarah, had tried to have children, but they didn't have even one baby.  So Abraham really wanted to believe God.  He knew God could make people, so God could make it happen for him and Sarah.   So, Abraham trusted God.  That means, he believed that God was telling the truth. So, he decided to be God's friend.  He packed up his wife, and his nephew and they started on their way.  They took tents with them so they could camp out.  They took animals with them, so they would have food to eat on the way.  They took some extra clothes, and their pajamas, and their toothbrushes, and Abraham believed God, and God and Abraham became friends.  Wow! Now, if one of your friends tells you to leave your home, and your mom and dad, don't you do it! Only God could tell you to do something so exciting.  What an adventure that would be - to go somewhere with God and not even know where you were going!

God Knows Best

Can you count to ten?  Let's count together.  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.  Good!  Now let's see who knows how to count in Spanish. Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho nueve, diez.  It's fun to learn another language.  The words sound funny to us at first until we learn what they mean.  Uno means one, dos means two, and tres means three.  Uno, dos, tres.  See?  Why don't we all speak the same language?  The Bible explains what happened a long time ago.  People used to speak all the same language. They all had the same words. They all had the same words for counting.  They all said mommy and daddy the same way.  They could understand each other no matter what they said.  They found a big place, a place big and wide with enough room for everybody and decided to make a city there. They made plans together and nobody fought about it.  They all wanted to do the same thing.  They decided to make bricks out of clay and build a big tower. They said, "We can make a tower that reaches up to the sky! Then we will be famous. Everyone will think we are the best. If we all stick together we can do amazing things!" That is what they said.  Does that sound like a good plan?  Well, let's think about it.  If you make a tower with blocks and your dad says - "Good job, Jacob," or "That's good Ella," then you feel good about yourself, don't you?  But what if you and your friends could make a tower as big as your house?  You might think you could do everything yourself. You might think that you were so smart, and so strong and so good at making towers that you don't need anyone else.  You could make big buildings, and be on TV and be the boss of everybody, and everyone would think that you were the best.  But really God is the best. So God saw what the people were doing, and thought, "If they stay together and make big towers, they will forget me.  They are finding a way to get right up into heaven without me. So, God wanted to mess up their plans a little, so they would need him and not just do everything without him. God is really smart.  And he has a lot of power. So he gave the command - he said it and it happened - that different people would speak different languages.  The people started talking to each other and now some of them spoke English, some Spanish, some French, some Italian, and some Chinese. They couldn't understand what the other people were saying!  So they stopped building their city, and started going in different directions.  People that could understand each other stayed together and made their own place, and other people lived somewhere else.  God knows what's best for us.  Sometimes we have ideas that are not good for us. We might think, I'm going to be a great fireman someday.  But God knows you are not very careful and you might get burned. If God wants you to be a teacher, then he will turn your head that way and show you what to do. He might make you really love the alphabet, so that you would want to teach other people the alphabet.  We need to pay attention to God's plans for us and not get carried away with our own ideas.  God knows what's best for us.

Starting Over

It's an amazing thing to be alive.  You can see with your eyes.  You can hear with your ears.  What else?  You can smell with your nose!  And your fingers can touch.  Our bodies are wonderful, and God made us that way because he loves us. We can do wonderful things, to help people and to say nice things.  With our hands we can touch someone gently to show them we love them.  We can smile at people and make new friends.  When our heart is connected to God, we are thankful, and we can love other people. But what would happen if we forgot about God, and just wanted our own way?  What if nobody obeyed their mommies and daddies?  If we were all really bad, we wouldn't let anyone else play with our toys, and we would try to take things away from other people. We wouldn't want to live in a place like that, if people acted that way.  And it would make God sad, too.  Here's what happened. After Adam and Eve left the garden, they had many children.  And their children grew up and had children, and got married and had more children until there were lots of people living on the earth. Did they want to share and be gentle and kind?  No, the people started to be bad all the time. Even after they got a spanking they just wanted to do the same thing again.  When God looked in their hearts all he could see were bad ideas about how to be mean and hurt their friends.  God was sorry that he had made people.  He only found one man who was still listening to him and wanted to obey.  His name was Noah.  God told Noah what he was going to do. He was going start over.  There was going to be a flood of water that would cover the earth and end the life of everyone on the earth.  The water would get so high that it would destroy everything.  He wanted to save Noah and his family and the animals, so he told Noah to build a giant boat, called an ark.  He told Noah to make it out of gopher wood and cover it with tar, which is kind of like plastic, so that it wouldn't leak.  Noah and his family made the boat just like God told them to.  When it was ready God told Noah to get into the boat with his wife and his three sons, and their wives, eight people altogether.  Noah took animals into the ark with him, too.  Birds, sheep, horses, goats, pigs, you name it, he took it on the boat.  He took a male and a female, a mommy and a daddy.  Other animals followed Noah into the ark, too.  Two of every kind of animal went into the ark. Every kind of cow, every kind of creeping animal like lizards, frogs, and turtles, and every kind of bird.  Then it started to rain.  It rained for forty days and forty nights.  That is a long time t rain.  Can you count to forty? Let's rain down with our fingers and count the days. (to 40) The fountains that were under the land came up, too, and water covered the whole earth.  But Noah and his family were safe because the ark floated on top of the water.  The water got higher and higher until finally even the mountains were covered up.  The people and the animals that were in the ark stayed alive, but everything else died because there was so much water.  The ark came to a stop on top of a mountain.  It stopped raining. Noah opened the window and sent out a bird to see if there was a place to land, but the bird came back to him.  There He waited another week and tried it again, but the bird came back again. The water finally went down and down, like it does in the bathtub.  It keeps going down until the bathtub is dry. At last, he sent out a bird again, and when it didn't come back he knew the ground was dry.  God spoke to Noah and told him it was time to get out of the ark. All the animals got out, too, so that they could spread out and have babies again all over the earth.  Noah and his family came out and worshiped God.  God was glad. God loves people, and when the flood was over he said he would never do that again, no matter how bad people got.  God put a rainbow up in the sky to remind us that he loves us.  When you see a rainbow after it rains, you can remember how much God loves you.         

A Bad Choice

In the beginning, when God made the world, he made the first mommy and daddy, Adam and Eve.  He made a garden to be their home.  God told them to be the boss of all the animals.  Can you imagine telling the lions it was time to go to sleep now?  Or telling the rabbits to come close so you could pet them?  God told them to take care of the plants in the garden, too.  There was fruit growing on the trees, and Adam and Eve could eat whatever they wanted, except for one tree in the middle of the garden.  That tree was called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God told them if they ate from that tree, they would die. God didn't want us to die, so he warned us.  Every day when it was cool, God came and walked in the garden with Adam and Eve and talked with them.  Adam and Eve didn't have a mom and dad, but God was a father to them.  Their hearts were connected to God's heart.  But there was a very sneaky animal in the garden who did not love Adam and Eve.  Or God.  It was a snake.  One day the snake made trouble come to the garden.  He said to Eve, "Did God really say not to eat from every tree in the garden?"  Eve answered,"God said you shall not eat from the tree in the middle of the garden, because you will die."  The snake said to Eve, "You will not die."  He said that God was telling a lie.  Do you think that God would lie?  No, God is good, and He tells us the truth.  But the snake said, "God doesn't want you to eat that fruit because if you eat it you will be smart like God, and you will be able to make your own choices about what is good and what is bad."  He was telling Eve that God wasn't a good Father, and that she should disobey him.  Oh no, now Eve was going to make her own choice.  Should she obey God?  Or would she obey the snake?  If the snake was right, then she wasn't going to die, she was going to be smart!  She decided to stop letting God be the boss of her.  She took some of the fruit and gave some to her husband, too.  When they had eaten the fruit, their hearts were no longer connected to God.  They knew there was something wrong with them, and they were sad and afraid.  They looked at each other and wanted to hide.  So they made clothes out of leaves to cover themselves up.  Then they heard God coming, so they hid behind some trees.  God called out, "Adam, where are you?"  Adam answered God and told him he was afraid, because he wasn't dressed, and that he was hiding.  God said, "Is there something wrong with you now?  Did you disobey me and eat from that tree?"  Adam pointed his finger at Eve and said "The woman that you gave me, Eve, - she gave me fruit from that tree."  Adam was telling on her!  So God asked Eve what she had done, and she told on the snake!  She said, "The snake lied to me, and so I ate."  God was upset with the snake, and he told the snake that from now on he would have to crawl on his belly and eat dust.  He said because the snake had been bad that from now on people and snakes would be enemies.  He also said that the woman was wrong. From now on her husband was going to be the boss over her, and now she was going to have extra pain when she had babies.  When we do something wrong, there is a punishment, isn't there?  Sometimes we get a spanking, sometimes there is a time out.  There was a consequence for Adam, too.  God would have to send them out of the garden.  From now on, the man would have to work very hard and it wouldn't be easy.  Because the man had disobeyed God, the ground was going to grow weeds and stickers, and the man would get really sweaty.  And the worst thing of all was that death now had come into the world. Before they ate from that tree, the man and the woman were never sick and they wouldn't die.  But now, because they disobeyed, the man and the woman were going to die at the end of their lives instead of staying with God.  This is a sad story.  We want to obey and be connected to God.  God wants to be close to us, too.  If you have disobeyed God, or your mom and dad, tell them you are sorry and ask them to forgive you.      

God Made People

In the beginning when God made the world, He made the land and the sky, the sun and the moon, plants and animals, and the last thing he made was a man.  The Bible says that He made man like you would make somethng out of playdough.  God took clay out of the ground to make a man.  God pushed it and rolled it and formed it into just the right shape.  He made man to look like God.  God has a face, so he made the man have a face, too.  What is on your face?   Eyes.  God wanted the man to see, so he made eyes.  What else?  God wanted him to hear, so he made the man with ears.  God can smell things, too, so he gave us a nose.  And God wants us to talk to him, so he gave us a mouth.  God feels, too.  He gets angry, and sorry, and so he gave the man a heart, too.  He formed him with arms and hands, legs and feet and toes, and he made his whole body out of clay.  He wanted the man to be alive. So He breathed into the man, so that he came to life.  That was the very first man and God named him Adam. God put him in a garden with rivers and trees and lots of good things to eat. Then God said, it's not good for the man to be alone.  There were animals in the garden, too.  God brought the animals to Adam to see what he would call them.  So Adam gave names to all the animals.  When he saw an animal that could swing in the trees, and eat bananas and make a laughing sound, Adam called that a ______.  A monkey, yes!  When Adam saw an animal with a long neck that ate the leaves up in the tops of the trees and had long legs he called that a ________. Giraffe! Then there was a huge animal with a trunk for a nose and big floppy ears.  Adam called that an _________. Elephant.  Do you know what he named a little furry creature that wiggles its nose like this?  With long ears?  And hops around?  A rabbit.  How about the one that lives in a shell, and sticks out its head and feet and goes really slow.  That's right, a turtle.  The man named all the animals, but even with all those animals there wasn't anyone there who was like him.  God knew the man needed a helper that he could talk to, someone who could understand him.  So the Lord God made the man go to into a deep sleep.  He made Adam sleep so good that he didn't even feel it when God reached in and took one of his ribs out.  Can you feel those long bones that grow above your tummy?  God took one out of Adam.  He closed up the skin so that it wouldn't bleed.  And God took the rib and made it grow bigger and made a beautiful shape.  He made it into a woman, a mommy.  And he brought her to the man.  When the man saw her, he said this one is for me.  Her bones are my bones, and her body is from my body.  I will call her a woman, because she was made from me.  God made a man and a woman to join together and become like one person.  That way when they grow up they can leave their mommy and daddy and they won't be alone because they will have each other.  The man and the woman can be together and share their food.  They can give each other a hug and keep each other warm when it gets cold.  God loves us very much and He knows what we need.  He made mommies and daddies, and he made you, too.