Is Your House Built on Rock or Sand
A Galaxy? Or maybe an eyeball?
Snake Skin?
Close-Up of Elderly Indian Man's Skin? Or Elephant Skin?
We played a little game tonight called Fact or Fiction. We started out easy with things like:
- This room is yellow.
- The church address is 9620 Bullard Parkway.
- The chief end of man is to glorify God and praise Him forever.
- Terrace Palms' goals are to know God, live out the gospel, and proclaim His kingdom.
- Kirsten is the youngest in her family.
- Mrs. Tara has been eating too many Twinkies and that's why her stomach is growing.
- Terrace Palms Community Church wasn't always in this building. It used to be next to a bunch of stores and offices.
Then we threw in some trickier, less obvious facts or fiction using some picture cues. For example, we gave the kids a picture of a leaf up extremely close and told them it was a snake's skin (which it really did look like). They had to assess whether that was fact or fiction.
We even tested their Bible knowledge a bit with statements like:
- Abel killed his brother Cain.
- Noah had 4 sons who went into the ark with him and his wife.
- Bathsheba was taking a bath the first time King David saw her.
- Gideon and 200 men defeated the Midianites.
- Job used broken pieces of pottery to scrape his infected sores.
- Stephen was a martyr who was burned at the stake.
- Goliath was a giant in the Ammonite army.
- God fed the Israelites manna in the wilderness.
- Moses raised his staff for God to part the Black Sea.
- Jesus could walk on water.
- A little boy gave his lunch of five fishes and two loaves of bread so Jesus could feed the multitudes.
- After four days, the whale vomited Jonah out of his stomach and onto the shore.
- Proverbs 12:1 says that, whoever hates discipline loves knowledge, but whoever loves correction is stupid.
- God shut the mouths of the lions in the den so they wouldn't kill Daniel.
- Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were consumed in the fiery furnace for not bowing down to the image Nebuchadnezzar made.
- Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt when she turned and looked back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
- As long as you do lots of good works and are a good person, you will surely go to heaven when you die.
- Repentance from our sins means we turn 360 degrees from them.
As you can see, some were more obvious than others. It was also interesting to see where each child was in their knowledge of the Scriptures and truth.
So we gave the first statement to a specific child. If they correctly named it fact or fiction, we moved on to the next child and statement. As soon as a child incorrectly identified a statement, they were asked to stand while their hands were bound behind their backs with a scarf and they were also asked to hold in their hands an 8-pound weight. To say it was uncomfortable for them is an understatement! They then had to wait until two of their friends correctly identified fact or fiction statements before they were "set free" from their predicament.
We then talked about how living in Christ's truth and subsequent freedom prepares for us a solid foundation to stand on when life gets difficult. This we actually demonstrated with two Lego houses, one on sand, and one on a rock. We then poured water into a narrow valley between the two houses and watched as the house on the sand tumbled down (Matthew 7:25-27).
