Week of 09-18-22

We encourage you to use the resources below to follow up on what your kids and teens learned at Sunday School and Wednesday's Student Ministry Gathering and as a guide for having some Christ-centered conversations with your family this week.

For Kids:
Unit 12: Session 3 - Solomon's Sin Divided the Kingdom

Bible Story Summary:

• King Solomon loved God, but still made wrong choices. He worshiped false gods.
• God said that Solomon's son Rehoboam would only be king of one tribe.
• When Rehoboam became king, 10 tribes followed a man named Jeroboam.
• Jeroboam became king of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Rehoboam became king of the Southern Kingdom of Judah.

Christ Connection

• Solomon sinned, and Israel was divided into two kingdoms. God's people needed a perfect king. God sent his son, Jesus, to be King. Jesus is a perfect King who brings God's people together.​

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This Unit's Key Passage Phrase: The Lord is a kind and loving God. - Exodus 34:6

This Unit's Big Picture Question: What is mercy? Mercy is when God does not give us the punishment that we deserve.

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For Students:
“I will say to the LORD, ‘My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.’” - Psalm 91:2

REFLECTION QUESTIONS:
1) What do you fear?
2)How is God greater and stronger than that fear?
3) What would it look like for God to be your safe place in the midst of fear?
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QUESTIONS FOR PARENTS:
1)  When have you been afraid?
2)  How has God been a refuge and safe place in times of fear in your life?
​3)  How can you encourage your student to turn to God in times of fear and to see Him as a place of safety and rescue for them?

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For Family Worship:
New City Catechism Question 39: With what attitude should we pray?
With love, perseverance, and gratefulness; in humble submission to God’s will, knowing that, for the sake of Christ, he always hears our prayers.

Philippians 4:6
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.

Reading:
Hypocritical prayer is an oxymoron; hypocrisy and prayer just don’t go together. Anything that we properly call prayer should be divorced from hypocrisy. The Lord teaches us this in the Gospels when he talks about those who pray for an audience; for them prayer is a show. And if you’ve been praying any length of time, you know that you don’t need an audience for your prayers to be a show. Sometimes we’re watching ourselves pray. We’re admiring the eloquence of our appeal. We like the turn of phrase. So our prayer can go from being an act of communion with God to a demonstration of pride.
But real prayer is an expression of love. Real prayer is an expression of perseverance. It’s an expression of gratefulness.
Why love? Because in prayer we’re communing with God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. We’re praying to the Father in the name of the Son through the Spirit. And in the act of prayer, we’re meant to enjoy them and to get to know them and to commune with them. How can prayer be communion without love?
In prayer there should also be perseverance, steadfastness, pressing in, continuously knocking at the door. This perseverance is necessary to prevail against our flesh. Our flesh wars against the spirit. And, boy, I tell you, when we pray, don’t we sometimes experience a wandering, distracting mind? When we pray, don’t we sometimes experience our frailty, our weakness, our fatigue? I’ve fallen asleep praying just as our Lord’s apostles did in the garden of Gethsemane. So we need perseverance, and we need that pressing into the things of God, that pushing out the distractions of the world, that crucifying of the flesh, again, that we might have this fuller communion with the Lord.
Finally, prayer ought to be an expression of gratitude. Let us count the blessings of the Lord. Let us mark his providences. Let us observe the divine interruptions that have broken into our lives, such that we might receive not only Christ but everything in Christ, and receive and experience it in surprising ways, in opportune times, in times later than we had hoped for or expected. The divine interruptions of God, which are blessings and distributions of his kindness to us, ought to cultivate gratitude in us. Our prayers ought to express that gratitude so that we’re conscious of the kindness and goodness of the Lord.
Even when we can’t trace God’s hand, as the saying goes, we can trust his heart because we know God is good, and we’re grateful for his goodness. That spurs us on in our prayer and perseverance, and it turns us again in love toward Christ our Savior, God our Father, and the Spirit our Comforter.
- Thabiti Anyabwile

Pray:
Loving Father, we come to you in the name of your beloved Son. Give us perseverance in prayer, even when we do not immediately see answers. Let us believe that you will not keep back any good thing from us, and trust that you will withhold those things we seek that would harm us. Your ways are higher than our ways, and we entrust our requests to your sovereign kindness. Amen.