Free Bible School Materials

Look and Live: the Snake and the Son

Wednesday:	Look and Live: the Snake and the Son
Story Passage:	Numbers 21:4-9
Other Passages:	John 3
Objective:	We should look to Jesus, trusting in God for our salvation.
Visuals	Available (updated 2016)
Memory Verse:	John 3:14-15, Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.

Introduction: Footsteps

This week we're learning about people in the Bible, whose footsteps we should follow. Following their footsteps means doing the same kinds of things that they did, or being the kind of people that they were. Today's lesson is about some people who had to learn to trust God, just like people today also need to learn to trust God. We aren't born trusting God. We need to follow in their footsteps and make the right choice to trust God, just like they did.

Story: The Bronze Snake

When the Israelites were wandering in the desert, they started to complain and grumble. They blamed God and they blamed their leader Moses for their unhappiness. Because they spoke against God, God punished them by sending poisonous snakes to bite them!

So the people ran to Moses and begged for help. We're sorry! We were wrong. Pray to God, and ask him to make the snakes go away. Moses did pray to God, but God didn't take the snakes away.

Instead, he told Moses what to do, to keep the people from dying from the poison. He told him to make a metal snake, and put it up high on a pole, where anyone could see it. God said that if someone was bitten by a snake, they should look a the metal snake on the pole, and then they wouldn't die. And because God said it, it worked: when people who were bitten by the snakes looked at the metal snake, they didn't die. But people who didn't look at the metal snake died from the snakebites. It was their choice. They had to believe God and trust in his ability to save them.

Looking at the snake on the pole didn't work because metal snakes are magic. If you get bitten by a poisonous snake today, you wouldn't look for a metal snake. You'd look for a hospital. So why did looking at the snake on the pole work for the Israelites?

The snakes weren't their real problem. Their real problem was that they needed to trust God. That's why God sent them the snakes in the first place: because they needed to trust God. Looking to the snake, like God said to do, was something they could do to show that they were trusting in God to save them. Metal snakes don't save people from snakebite venom. But God can.

Application: Salvation

In the New Testament, a man named Nicodemus came to talk with Jesus. Nicodemus knew that Jesus was from God. Jesus told Nicodemus that he needed to be born again, but Nicodemus didn't understand what it meant.

So Jesus explained: Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. Jesus was saying that in order to be saved from our sins, we have to trust in him, just as the Israelites in the desert who needed to be saved from snake poison had to trust in God's ability to save them, by looking at the metal snake on the pole. Jesus was going to be lifted up on the cross, and when we look to him and believe that God can save us through him, we can be saved from our sins.

Invitation: Salvation

Invite any children who want to be saved to stay after the lesson and discuss it further.

Do What It Says

Tuesday:	Do What It Says
Story Passage:	Nehemiah 7-8
Other Passages:	Leviticus 23:33-43, Numbers 29:12-39, Deuteronomy 16:13-17, 2^nd Chronicles 36:21, Hebrews 3:7-4:2
Objective:	We should study God's word and obey it.
Visuals	Available (updated 2016)
Memory Verse:	James 1:22, Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.

Introduction: Background

Two books of the Bible, Ezra and Nehemiah, are named after two men in our story today. Nehemiah was the governor, and Ezra was a priest.

Nehemiah was in charge of rebuilding the city of Jerusalem. It had been seventy years since the Israelites had last lived in the city, and now that they were back, the city was in bad shape. Nehemiah was concerned about the city – buildings in poor condition, the city's defensive wall crumbled to pieces, and so on – but Nehemiah was also concerned that the people had not been able to study God's word or worship God properly while they were away.

Story: Reading from the Book of the Law

Back then the people didn't all have their own Bibles, and many of them couldn't read anyway. So they planned for a day when they could all gather together and hear Ezra the priest read from God's word. They knew that there would be a big crowd, so they built a special platform for Ezra to stand on so he'd be high enough for everyone to see and hear him.

When the day came, everyone gathered together, and Ezra got up on the platform and read aloud from the book all morning long. For about six hours, the people stood quietly and listened carefully, even the kids, everyone who was old enough to understand. Ezra praised God and read to the people from God's word.

As the people listened to the word that Ezra was reading, they started to cry, because there were things written in God's word that they had not been obeying, things they didn't even know about. For seventy years they had not heard from God's word like this. Many of the people weren't even that old, so they'd never heard these things.

Ezra and Nehemiah told the people to stop crying, because this was a good day. They had heard God's word, and now they knew what it said. It was a good day. So for the rest of the day they celebrated. They ate, and they shared, and they celebrated because they had learned from God.

One of the things that they learned about that they had not been remembering to do was the Festival of Booths (Sukkot), which God had told the Israelites to do every year. In the seventh month they were supposed to gather sticks from the countryside and make temporary shelters, and live in them for a week instead of their regular houses, to remind them of the forty years that their great-great-great-... grandparents lived in tents wandering in the desert, because of their unbelief, when God brought them out of Egypt and into their own land. The Israelites were supposed to celebrate this holiday every year, but they hadn't been doing it.

So the next day, they went out and started gathering branches and making the shelters.

Application: Obeying God's Word

The Israelites understood that it wasn't enough to just read the Bible and then go about their lives just like they had been. They needed to do what it said. That's still true today: when we study the Bible, we should be looking for things we can apply to our lives. We should do what God's word tells us. We should follow in the footsteps of Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Israelites who listened to God's word and wanted to obey it.

Invitation: Obedience

Invite any children who want to learn to obey God's word to stay after the lesson and discuss it further.

Two Obedient Men: Caleb & Joshua

Monday:	Two Obedient Men: Caleb & Joshua
Story Passage:	Numbers 13-14
Other Passages:
Objective:	We should trust and obey God.
Visuals	Available (updated 2016)
Memory Verse:	1^st John 2:5, But if anyone obeys his word, God's love is truly made complete in him.

Introduction: Footsteps

This week we're going to be learning about some people in the Bible, whose footsteps we should follow. What does it mean to follow in somebody's footsteps? [Accept some answers.] It means doing the same kinds of things that they did, or being the kind of person that they were. Today, we're going to talk about following in the footsteps of two men named Caleb and Joshua. God honored them for what they did, because they obeyed God. So we know these are good footsteps to follow.

Story: Caleb & Joshua

The Lord told Moses to pick out twelve men from Israel, one from each tribe, and send them to investigate the land that God was going to give them. Two of them men Moses chose were Joshua and Caleb. He also sent ten other men. They explored the land for forty days: they looked around to see how strong the people were who lived there, what kind of cities they had, and they took samples of the fruit that grew there.

When they came back to the camp to report to Moses, they told him that the land was very good. They showed him one cluster of grapes that was so big, two men had to carry it. But ten of the men were afraid to go take the land, because they were afraid of the people who lived there, and the strong walls around the cities. Now, Joshua and Caleb knew that God had said he was going to give them the land, so Caleb said, We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.

You see, Caleb believed God, and wanted to obey what God had told them to do.

The Point: Obey God

Why did Caleb say that they should go take the land? He wanted to obey God. Caleb trusted God, and knew that doing what God said to do was the best thing.

Story: What Happened Next?

Caleb and Joshua wanted to obey God, but the other ten men were afraid, so they started spreading rumors, exaggerating how big and bad the people were. They said that they felt like grasshoppers next to them, even though really they were only a little smaller. Also, they lied about the land, and said that it wasn't very good land.

God punished the people for their disobedience. Because they were unwilling to obey, they had to wander around in the desert for an extra forty years. Of the twelve men who had explored the land, only Caleb and Joshua, the ones who had wanted to obey, were the only ones who lived through the forty years and got to go into the land. God rewarded them for their obedience.

Application: Group Disobedience

Have you ever been in a group of people who were all disobeying? Imagine you're playing with your friends, and they all decide to start doing something you're not supposed to do. Let's say you're at a birthday party with ten friends, and they all decide to start watching a movie that you know your mom said you shouldn't watch. Let's say you go ahead and watch it with them, because, hey, they are all watching it. What would you tell your mom when she finds out you watched it?

It's hard to obey when all the people around you are going the other direction. But Caleb and Joshua obeyed. When their friends said, we can't do it, we can't go into that land, it's too scary, Caleb and Joshua spoke up. They tried to remind the people of what God had said. They didn't get the people to obey, but God honored Caleb and Joshua for their obedience. So even if you can't get all your friends to do the right thing, it's still important for you to obey.

Invitation: Obedience

Invite any children who want to follow in the footsteps of Caleb and Joshua to stay after the lesson and discuss it further.

Second Round of Fishing for Christ Decoration Photos

While we're waiting for the aforementioned Footsteps lessons to be reviewed, I thought I'd post the second round of photographs from 2009. This first shot shows a section of wall with fish and bubbles. We actually made all those fish back in 2004, when we used this theme the first time: we photocopied various outline-style images, colored them in with markers, cut them out, and laminated them. When we took them down after VBS, we saved them, because we knew we'd be using the theme again. The bubbles are just little circles of blue construction paper in about three different sizes.

This one shows a different section of wall, this time with seaweed (made from green construction paper) in addition to the fish and bubbles.

Here you can see one of the nets that we hung from the ceiling. (We bought half a dozen of these nets from the Oriental Trading Company.) In the background you can also see mobiles. The mobiles are a kit that someone bought for us in 2004, and the fish and things hanging from them, and the other ones hanging from the ceiling, are also from a purchased kit. They're double-sided, which is why we hung them from the ceiling rather than on the wall. We use fishing line to hang them, because it's cheap and durable and easy to work with and sufficiently transparent that you mostly don't notice it.

In the auditorium we hang flags of the countries where we have missionaries.

Here's another of those nets, this time by the front entrance. We originally tried to use masking tape to stick it up, which didn't hold well, as you can see. So we switched to the blue tacky stuff, which worked much better.

In the stairwell we had some ceiling tiles out, due to an ongoing renovation project (something to do with the new lighting fixture being a different form-factor from the old one, I think, and also we were putting some of the existing wiring into conduit, because it should have been that way in the first place). So I figured we'd make the best of the unsightly mess by hanging a decoration from it! Indeed, the open ceiling made it really easy to hang the net in exactly the configuration I wanted, because I wasn't restricted by tile-boundaries and could tie up bits of the net more or less wherever I wanted.

We also hung a net from the preschool-room ceiling.

I think that about wraps it up for the 2009 decoration photos. I expect the Footsteps lessons will be forthcoming soon, now, and then we can start gearing up for 2010.

Footsteps Lessons Planned

Okay, it's been a bit of a long haul, but we now have a pretty good idea where we're going with the sixth theme. Some of the lessons that we were thinking of doing turned out not to be workable for most of the age groups, so we ended up scrapping the idea of sticking with the patriarchs and have instead broadened it to Biblical role models in general, renaming the theme from "Footsteps of the Fathers" to the more general "Following the Footsteps". We have three of the elementary lessons basically written (and memory verses picked out for them), know for sure what the fourth one is going to be, and have several reasonable ideas for the fifth. So we should be finishing up the lessons soon now and start posting things. Thanks for your patience.

Update (November 16): All five lessons are now essentially complete and have been presented to our Pastor for review. (We always run the Bible lessons by the Pastor to have them checked for Biblical accuracy.) So we should have something to post here soon.

Fish Gack Recipe Updated

I've updated the Fish Gack Recipe with more precise measurements.

Decoration Photos, First Installment

This is our main bulletin board for the elementary group. The items on this board are images out of the main Bible lessons. For example, the fish on the left with the coin in its mouth comes from the first day's story, about Peter and the temple tax. To make these, we trace line drawings (mostly out of coloring books) onto overhead transparencies (using wet-erase markers), project them up onto posterboard, trace the lines with pencil, and paint. Once the paint dries, we outline with black marker and cut them out.

This is the bulletin board in the preschool room, which is built around the Wordless Book lessons. Each strip of color represents the concept for one day's lesson, with a corresponding picture.

In the teen room we don't have a bulletin board, so instead we just put posterboard directly on the walls. This year we went with a missions theme for the room, hence, continents with people on them.

Between the auditorium and the foyer, our building has some internal windows. For Bible School we always do a three-panel scene made to fit. Putting them behind the glass really brings them out, we think. Anyway, this scene is supposed to represent following Jesus, which goes with one of the Bible lessons.

I don't know when or why those cuphooks were put up over the auditorium doors, but they sure came in handy for hanging this net. This is just the first batch. We've also got wall decorations (fish), decorations hanging from the ceilings (more fish), and a couple of other things, but I'll save those for another post.

Now What? Discussion Questions

Friday:	Now What?
Missions Concepts:	Missionaries disciple new believers, plant churches, and train pastors.
Missions Examples:	Project Timothy (Uberlandia, Brazil)
Bible Passages:	[needed]

In the skit, what did the fisherman need to do?
What do people need after they come to know Jesus Christ as savior? Why?
What do the missionaries in Brazil do once people accept Jesus?
What can we do here?

Reel 'em In Discussion Questions

Thursday:	Reel 'em In
Missions Concepts:	Missionaries must present the gospel to unbelievers.
Missions Examples:	India (starting churches).
Bible Passages:	Romans 2:12-13, 3:20-24, 5:15-18, 6:10-18, 7:22-8:11, 10:10-15, 12:1-8.

In the skit, what did Bob need to do once a fish started nibbling at his bait?
When we're talking to people, what do we need to do once they're interested?
How can we do that?
What do the missionaries in India do once the people in a village become interested?

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