Matthew 19:4-6 "Marriage"

This is a children's talk for a sermon series on marriage that my local pastor has begun. The theme of the sermon was the foundation of marriage.

Objects: Your or another person’s wedding photos, a marriage certificate, and a wedding ring.

Put up your hand if you have been to a wedding service before? Ask children where the wedding took place. Sometimes people get married in a church building, in a garden, a beach or even some strange place like parachuting out of a plane (show photos of your own or another person’s wedding). And sometimes pastors conduct the wedding service and at other times people call celebrants marry couples.


Today Pastor is preaching on marriage and what its means for us as Christians. How the bible tells us that marriage is a gift from God. You might know already that sometimes marriages last a long time but sometimes marriages don’t last very long. Sometimes people don’t even get married. Do you know how to tell if someone is officially married? They have a wedding certificate like this and they usually wear wedding rings like this.


Jesus said some important things about marriage? Things that a pastor says in the service every time a man and a woman get married through the church. Jesus said this; Haven’t you read that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’, and said, ‘for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh?’ Jesus is repeating here what we read in the book of Genesis. Then he goes on to say; so they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let no-one separate.


Talk about the parts of a wedding service that people love to watch, the bride and groom vowing their love to one another, putting on the weddings rings, the kiss, the pronouncement of them as husband and wife and introducing them as Mr and Mrs after the signing of the register, and the greeting of relatives and friends as they leave the church for photos and confetti or flower petals or rice.


Action: If you have enough kids and time, stage manage a mock wedding service with a boy and girl as the bride and groom standing beside each other at the front of the church, have other kids as the  father of the bride walking her down the aisle and other parents standing in the congregation who give their blessing to the marriage. Play the part of the pastor and ask the father of the bride; “Who give this woman away in marriage?”

Jesus reminds us that when a man and a woman come to be married, they leave their old families behind, the close ties they have with their parents and they form a brand new family, a new relationship between a husband and wife. A relationship that’s all about being one, one flesh. When people get married today they spend a lot of money on the service, the pretty aspects of the day but they need to spend more time and energy on the rest of their marriage relationship, their oneness together. That’s why their wear wedding rings, it symbolises that oneness, their never ending love and more importantly God’s never ending love which they need to keep their marriage alive and healthy.  Let’s find out if there is anyone out their congregation land who has been married. Put up your hand if you are married or about to get married? Hands up if you have been married ten years, twenty years, thirty years, forty, fifty, sixty or more years? Isn’t that an amazing thing worth celebrating, honouring and giving thanks to God for.


Prayer:  Faithful God, since you have established marriage, unite all married couples to love each other, and help them to remain faithful throughout their lives. Amen.

(Based on a marriage collect from the LCA Marriage Rite)

Ten tips for delivering an engaging children’s talk:

1.     Be creative

2.     Meditate on the text and the key thought in it days in advance

  

3.     Pretend that you are a kid yourself, get on their level, literally sit on the floor with them

4.     Proclaim the gospel, don’t moralise, make God the doer of the sentence. Tell them what Christ has done for them, don’t ‘should’ on them.  

5.     Use more than two of the senses (How can they smell, taste and touch the text?)

6.     Allow kids to kids participate in the text rather than just listen or observe it

7.     Get the kids up doing things, moving their bodies, acting out the biblical story

8.     Invite adults into the experience, encourage the kids to interact with them

9.     Make the most of the seasons and holy days of the church year and your worship space and furnishings

10.  Remember the primary purpose is to engage the kids with the word not make the adults laugh

Matthew 16:13-20 "Peter's good confession"

Objects: A gigantic 3M Post-it Note or Butcher’s paper, 8 cards with each of the phrases below written on them, some thick texters:

 Jesus was born in a hospital

Jesus is our teacher

Jesus picked 10 disciples

Jesus likes children

Jesus died and stayed dead

Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ

Jesus is God’s Son

Jesus is our Saviour

Today I want to talk to you about confession. Already in the service we have confessed our sin and also confessed our faith. In the confession earlier in the service we said sorry to God for our sin and the pastor on behalf of God forgave us. And in the creed we confessed God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is the type of confession Jesus’ disciple Peter made in the gospel reading.

Jesus asked his disciples a very important question; “Who do you say that I am?” The disciples said some say a prophet others a teacher. Lots of people in the world say today that Jesus is just a prophet or a great teacher, but he’s much more than that.

I have some cards here that ask you who Jesus is? What I want you to do is answer true or false as I read them out:
Jesus was born in a hospital.....


Let’s look at those last three questions; Jesus is the Messiah, God’s Son, the Saviour. For the first Christians it was very dangerous for them to confess, to talk about their faith. They had to bow down and worship the Roman emperor, who was a king who had to be treated as god. So what they did apparently if they wanted to signal to another person that they were Christian was draw an arc in the dirt or on the road like this:
Then if a Christian saw it they would respond by drawing an arc on the other side of it like this:
(Encourage the children to draw a fish on the butcher’s paper/post-it note too)

The fish became a symbol for the early Christians and even more than that it became a confession of their faith. The Greek word for fish is IXTHYS. Each of those letters stand for something. The I is for the Greek word for Jesus. The X is for Christ which means Messiah. The TH is for God. The Y for Son and the S for Saviour. So in that word for fish icthus is the wonderful confession that Jesus is the Christ, God’s Son and Saviour.

(If you can attach the butcher’s paper/post-it note to a wall in the sanctuary/church for everyone to see)

Let’s pray, Thank you God for people who have faithfully confessed Jesus, people like the early Christians. Help us also to confess Jesus and point people to him. Amen.

(If there are any fish depicted in your church’s furnishings or altar, lectern or pulpit paraments, Pastor’s stoles or banners ask the kids to go back to their seats and count how many fish they can see in the church)