1 Kings 19:19 – 2 Kings 8:6
Last week’s story was centered around the prophet Elijah. In this week’s story, the main character is Elisha.
Elisha is Elijah’s successor and this prophet does some fascinating miracles. What’s even more remarkable is the kind of miracles he does and who does similar miracles later in the Bible (hint: Jesus).
1 Kings 16:29 – 1 Kings 19:18
Last week the kingdom divided. Ten tribes in the north remained Israel, while two tribes in the south, Judah and Benjamin were renamed Judah.
Elijah was a prophet to the northern set of tribes, Israel, primarily during the reign of King Ahab, who did evil in the eyes of the LORD. When there is rampant evil among the kings and all the people of the north, Israel, there is disdain for anyone, especially a prophet claiming to speak for God, who advocates for good. Well, Elijah was a prophet who spoke the words of God to King Ahab, who didn’t like what he had to say: there were consequences God was going to enact because of Israel’s disobedience. However, instead of being responsible for their wicked and evil actions, King Ahab and the northern kingdom blamed Elijah for the famine that ensued.
In a triumphant display of the power of God, Elijah challenges King Ahab’s false idols to a challenge on top of Mount Carmel. The outcome is pretty cool.
source YouTube
I was posting some training materials over at wesleyankids.org about a month ago and came across an interview of a man named Dr. Tim Elmore. He had some phenomenal things to say regarding technology and a growing “artificial maturity” he sees among late adolescents and young adults. You can watch the interview here.
A project he’s been working on for a while is called Habitudes: Images that Form Leadership Habits and Attitudes. Sort of a merged word on habits and attitudes: Habitudes. It looks like there is a faith-based version as well as a public school-based version. I ordered the first Habitudes book on Amazon used for a couple of bucks, and it is phenomenal. There is nothing earth-shattering about the content, rather what is trend-setting is the method he is using to transmit these leadership principles:
Experiential – People are not looking for a sage on the stage, but a guy on the side with experience.
Participatory – Students own what they create.
Image – Learning is driven by images. “A picture is worth a thousand words.”
Connected – Students are connected socially and technologically. Whenever you can group students together to learn, it is extremely beneficial.
It seems Dr. Elmore really understands teenagers and young adults in our current culture and wants to use their digital medium to communicate leadership habits and attitudes. I’m considering using these for Youth group somehow next year. At the very least, Dr. Elmore has helped me think about what mediums I use to teach in our image-saturated world.
source Habitudes
Ray Vander Laan is a phenomenal teacher and historian. His understanding of the world of the Bible has impacted thousands of people.
I’ve been impacted by him through his “That the World May Know” videos, where he does teaching segments of Jewish history while on location with a group in Israel. I’ve learned fascinating things that help bring the Bible to life.
I am not Jewish, nor do I understand or intuit Jewish culture. I also have not been to the land of Israel so I have no idea how far Jesus walked when he traveled from Jericho to Jerusalem (from Mark 10:46 to 11:1). Ray Vander Laan shares such insight.
Not only geographically, but culturally, Vander Laan is able to communicate the appropriate culture background to the stories of the Bible. I’ve been recently reading his book Echoes of His Presence. I was going to purchase the book, but found that it is freely available online at his website: followtherabbi.com
If you are at all interested in a greater understanding of the cultural background of the Bible, you will find this book to be an incredible resource. It is written in narrative form so you feel like you are completely immersed in a Jewish world. It’s awesome!
source followtherabbi.com/guide/detail/echoes-of-his-presence-pdf
1 Kings 10:26 – 12:33
Last week we saw the height of glamour, prestige, and influence in the world for the Israelites. King Solomon is leading God’s people in wisdom and people from all over the world marvel at Solomon’s reign. Israel truly is being a light to all the nations and displaying that their is a God in Israel and that God is the LORD of heaven and earth.
This week’s story shows the downfall of King Solomon and what happens when you don’t fully obey the LORD. After Solomon’s death, his son Rehaboam becomes king and doesn’t listen to the wise advice of his elders (his father’s advisors). Instead, Rehaboam listens to the inexperienced and unwise advice of his peers and causes a split, a divide in the nation of Israel. Jeroboam takes the northern 10 tribes and places its capitol in Samaria, and Rehaboam takes the southern 2 tribes (Judah and Benjamin) and remains in Jerusalem.
Every Sunday for the past 11 years we have walked through the stories of the Bible in a linear, chronological fashion in our children’s ministry environment we call Main Street. Back in early 2008, we decided to start recording these weekly teachings for posterity sake as well as sharing with others how we did this weekly storytelling. This past year, because of some technical issues and timing problems, we stopped recording for a couple of months, but we have recently started back up again.
1 Kings 5:1 – 10:25
Last week, King Solomon asked God for wisdom and God granted it to him.
This week’s story is about how King Solomon mobilized God’s people, the Israelites, to build a grand Temple for the LORD. We show a video walk-thru the Temple to show what it might have looked like.
This story also serves as the pinnacle, the climax of the Israelite kingdom and influence in the world. From this on, through the rest of the Biblical narrative, Israel is on a downward trajectory toward obscurity and irrelevance and non-influence in the world for God because they perpetuate the worship of idols and do some pretty wicked things.
I’m feeling convicted and convinced:
One is for myself that my heart would be so captured by the God of the Bible and Jesus’ radical Gospel. The second is to better study, understand, and teach Scripture. The third is to help Christians in our day and age better understand how to live out the Gospel and be a relevant witness and voice for God’s kind of world.
source YouTube
I got asked to contribute a chapter to a soon-to-be-published book called Pulse: Pumping Life into Your Kids Ministry. Here is an excerpt from the chapter I wrote:
Engaging children in the chronological, linear, and unfolding biblical narrative.
“The biblical tale, through the most rigorous economy of means, leads us again and again to ponder complexities of motive and ambiguities of character because these are essential aspects of its vision of man, created by God, enjoying or suffering all the consequences of human freedom. Almost the whole range of biblical narrative, however, embodies the basic perception that man must live before God, in the transforming medium of time, incessantly and perplexingly in relation with others; and a literary perspective on the operations of the narrative may help us more than any other to see how this perception was translated into stories that have had such a powerful, enduring hold on the imagination” (Alter, 1981, p. 22).
For me it all started with a side comment by my professor, Mark Jalovick (2000), in his Old Testament History Two class: “Children need to learn the stories of the Bible.” To most this remark would have sounded obvious, and it is. Humanity’s young progeny need to learn the basic content contained in Scripture and, thankfully, this content is primarily narrative in nature. Stories seem to be a near universal medium to transfer both history and information. There’s a reason why my own children beg my wife and I to tell them stories of when we were kids. They are fascinated by their parents’ histories and they want to come to know us more deeply by our transferring that knowledge through the narrative literary device.
It’s no wonder that God chose narrative, storytelling, to be the primary literary device to communicate both the knowledge of Himself as well as the account of His interaction with His people. It’s been said that “the Bible is about God, continually working to fix this world through His kind of people in order to make His kind of world.” If the Bible is primarily narrative and this is the literary device of choice to transmit, according to Alter (1982), “its vision of man, created by God, enjoying or suffering all the consequences of human freedom” (p. 22), then the stories are interconnected and dependent upon one another, and are not intended merely to be principalized nor disconnected from the environment in which they are found.
As a children’s ministry professional I encounter curriculum that has been organized into human constructed topics and themes with disparate Bible stories included that have been disconnected from the narrative environment in which they are found. These topics seem to be of high value to its adherents. Topics like: generosity, friendship, faith, leadership, service, attitude, and prayer. Topics might even be organized in theological categories like: Who is Jesus? Who is God? Who is the Holy Spirit? What is the Bible? The standard approach seems to be: find a relevant topic, theme, or characteristic that needs to be taught and engaged in with children and find Bible stories that seem to speak to those particularities. In other words, the curriculum writer or practitioner finds a problem or issue that needs to be addressed in life and looks to the Bible for the answers to that particular problem or issue…
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This quick accumulation of snow caused a section of our town of Hayward to go black… no electricity. And this blackout lasted from 9pm on Thursday night till around 5pm the next day. Not only did we get this huge amount of snow in one day, but we already have about 4′ of snow on the ground. So when there is a down powerline buried deep behind someone’s house it takes the power company a while to get their boom trucks into position in order to fix it. This leaves the electrical customers waiting patiently for that eventual fix.
source YouTube