Children’s Sermon idea: I’m doing this “Love your enemies” passage the Sunday after Valentines Day.

Explain how it’s fun to hand out valentines to your friends. Give (red cut-out hearts) to each child. Part way through ask two other individuals (adults or teens) to come up and pretend to be enemies. (You could ask them to look angry and clench their fist.) Ask the children if these enemies should receive valentine hearts from you. Explain how Jesus said to love our enemies. Give the “enemies” a heart and see how they react.

 

Object lesson items: Enough red cut out “hearts” for each child.   

 

Children’s sermon / Bible lesson introduction:

Good morning children. Did you have fun on Valentines Day? Did any of you get a valentine? Did any of you give a valentine to someone else? That’s wonderful. Giving a little red valentine heart to someone is a nice way of showing your love and care. I’m going to give each of you one of these little red hearts because you are my friends. (Start handing them out.) Oh, I just remembered that I wanted to bring up some other people. Bill and Frank, would you come up here? I want you to pretend that you are an enemy and don’t like me. Let’s see you both make a mad face at me. Wow! That’s scary. Why don’t you clench your fist and hold it in the air. Oooo. That looks very mean. Now, let me keep on giving out my valentine hearts. (Keep handing out your hearts to your friends and then stop when you come to your two enemies.) Hmmm. What should I do now? These two people are my enemies. Do you think I should give them a valentine heart? (Some children will probably say No and so will say yes.) We might think that we shouldn’t because they are our enemies and they don’t like us. But do you know what Jesus said? He said that as Christians we should love our enemies (remind your actors to keep looking mean!) as well as our friends. That wouldn’t make sense to most people but Jesus said that our love was to be a very special type of love. The love of Jesus is to go out to all people – not just our friends. (Consider reading the text from Matt 5.) So, let’s give our enemies here a valentine’s heart and see what happens. (They will probably smile.) Wow. Did you see that? He smiled a bit. We want to show love to everybody because Jesus has shared his love with us. If we do, perhaps that love will help make them a friend some day.

 

Children’s Prayer: Dear God, we know you want us to learn to love all people, even our enemies. That’s pretty hard to do so please fill us up with your Holy Spirit and help us to know your great love.

In Jesus’ name – Amen!

 

Copyright 2011 Sundaychildrensfocus.com Andrew Hewlett Feel free to use this lesson on Sunday Morning but please give credit to Sundaychildrensfocus.com and consider linking to this site. Thank you! A.H.