The Christmas devotionals continue. Tonight’s devotional with the kids really got their attention—well, it got Bradley’s attention, anyway. We talked to them tonight about the blessing of being a part of the church. And to do this we used a couple dolls. Yes, dolls. (In a house of all boys, we don’t have too many quality dolls laying around, but we pulled it off.)
We wanted to emphasize the idea that the church is the body of Christ, so we used a doll as our visual aid. At first Bradley was pretty turned off when he opened his package and saw the same baby doll that’s been sitting around the house as long as he can remember. But then we started pointing to different body parts on the doll and asking what each part did. What do you do with your nose? Your ears? Your eyes? Your feet? Then we asked the kids what would happen if we tried using parts of our body for something they weren’t meant for. Can we walk with our lips? Can we chew with our eyes? Can we grab things with our ears? (This was quite an entertaining line of questions for them.)
Then we turned to 1 Corinthians 12:12-26 and Colossians 1:18-20 and told them about how the church is the body of Christ. Each person has special gifts with which to serve others. Each part is valuable because of the gifts the Spirit gives. As such each person should know the valuable place they have in the church and should appreciate the valuable gifts everyone else have. We also talked about how Christ is the head of the body: his resurrection life flows in the church’s veins.
Bradley really impressed us tonight when he recalled Romans 12:4-5 from memory—another verse about the body of Christ. We had him memorize all of Romans 12 last year. Not only did he recall the Scripture portion and recite it flawlessly, but he recalled the portion relevant to what we were talking about. It reminded us, again, of the value of stuffing our children’s minds with Scripture while they are young.
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