The Circle of Blessing

Tonight we discussed Ephesians 6:1-9 with the kids and the importance of obedience in our lives.  Both kids and adults fall short of this command.  Our hearts have not always given honor and love to our parents...or to God, our heavenly Father.  We used an object lesson from Ted Tripp's Shepherding A Child's Heart book for tonight's lesson.

To demonstrate why obeying parents is so important, we put a 3' diameter circle on the floor in our room.  We asked kids to take turns standing inside the circle, which represented the place where they were safe because they were walking in obedience to their parents, and ultimately God.  Outside of the circle of blessing, danger awaits us, which always leads to negative consequences....or in this case, a squirt bottle!

We read several case stories then to give the kids actual examples of obedience and disobedience.  Here are a few of the stories we read:

• Kristy’s Story:  Kristy is a nice little girl in the second grade.  She loves horses.  She loves them so much she has big posters of horses in her room.  Down the road from her house there is a farm that has horses, but her parents don’t know the owner so she’s never seen them up close.  Her mom says that it would be wrong to try to pet those horses without the owner's permission.  [Is she still in the circle?]  One day, when Kristy is playing outside in her front yard she decided to walk down to see the horses – she knows her mom will say “NO” so she doesn’t bother to ask.  [Is she still in the circle?]  Kristy walks down the road and gets very close the horse fence.  She thinks about turning back and running home.  She feels like God wants her to do the right thing and run home, but instead she decided to get close to the horses.  [Is she still in the circle?]

Bobby’s Story:  Bobby doesn’t like his math class.  For some reason it just seems too hard for him to do all that work.  Everyday he comes home from school and his parents have him do his math homework before he gets to play his video games.  On one Tuesday after school, his friend Joey comes over to play for a few hours.  [Is he still in the circle?]  He knows he needs to do his homework, but really wants Joey to help him beat the new level on his video game.  His parents might let him save his math work for after dinner, but Bobby doesn’t want to take chances.  He decided to leave his math book at school and pretend that the teacher did not give out any homework.  When the get back to his house he looks his dad in the face and lies about it.  [Is he still in the circle?]

• Joey’s Story:  Joey loves it when people pay attention to him.  His favorite thing is to tell a funny story at recess when kids gather around to listen.  It makes him feel important.  [Is he still in the circle?]  One day he started telling a funny story about his dog.  Everyone laughed and asked him to tell another one.  He couldn’t think of any, but he did remember something embarrassing about his grandfather.  His grandfather had been sick and sometimes had accidents using the bathroom.  He knew is was something his parents wouldn’t want him to spread around, but as he told it the kids kept laughing more and more.  [Is he still in the circle?]

• Sara’s Story:  Sara is so excited that her new school has a vending machine.  The best part is that it has her favorite snacks that her mom never buys at the grocery store.  As soon as she discovered it she spent all her allowance money in one day.  [Is she still in the circle?]  That night she asked her mom for more money, maybe even an advanced payment of next week’s allowance.  Her mom said no and reminded Sara to be more careful about how quickly she was spending her money.  The next morning she found some money layout out beside her dad’s favorite chair.  She was certain it had fallen out of his pocket the night before.  Without asking, she took this money so she could have more snacks the next day.  [Is she still in the circle?]

Each time the kids stepped out of the circle of blessing, they received a blast from the squirt bottle.  We talked about why and how each of these kids was or wasn't obeying.  We discussed what they could have done differently to remain in the circle of blessing.  We also talked about how ignoring these instances of disobedience and chalking them up to "no big deal" could lead to bigger cases of rebellion and what some of those might be.

Then we quizzed them a little with some trickier True/False questions and discussed their answers:

• Disobeying is okay if you know your parents will say NO.
• Since your parents put the school in charge of you, to honor your parents means to obey your teacher too.
• If you always obey your parents, your life will always be perfect.
• Once you disobey, you can’t get back inside the circle.
• God doesn’t care if we have a bad attitude when we obey.
• God promised a better life for those who obey.
• It’s not really disobeying if you parents didn’t actually say NO.

We also let the kids know that it was not solely up to them to try and remain in the circle of blessing.  They need help every single day.  That's why God gave them parents to train and encourage them.  That's why God gave us His Son, our Savior.  And it's not just about kids obeying parents.  It's ultimately about all of us obeying our heavenly Father.  We talked about what that looks like in the life of a believer and some of the consequences/rewards for walking or not walking in that obedience to Him.