This week we talked about Abraham and Lot. There are three different stories involving Lot and Abraham reacts differently for each. I talked about this a lot with my 3rd/4th graders, but not so much with my kids. With my kids we mainly talked about the consequences of not following what God wants.
First is the story of Lot’s men and Abraham’s men fighting. The solution Abraham comes up with is to let Lot choose where he is going to move.
Abraham reacted in faith here. He knew there was a chance Lot would choose the land God had promised him, but he was gracious and let Lot choose first.
The second story Lot has been captured because he moved into Sodom and someone attacked Sodom.
Abraham is a man of action in this story. He sees what needs to be done and he does it. Afterwards he gives thanks to God and gives an offering to God. But, he didn’t sit around and wait to decide what was right.
The third story is of Sodom and Gomorrah. Here God tells Abraham what he plans to do. Abraham knows his nephew is in Sodom, and he prays to God asking him to protect his nephew and to change his mind about the city.
As a side note, what does it say about the wickedness of Sodom if the angels are not able to find 10 good men in the city, and that includes the people in Lot’s house at this point.
After reading this with my kids we talked about how there are consequences if we don’t follow what God wants us to do, and sometimes those consequences are terrible and can’t be reversed.
And then, here’s where my plans got silly. I wanted an activity to do with the story, and my brain was fried from everything that week, so I let them build a box city, and they threw boxes at it and destroyed the city.Honestly, I don’t think it’s a great activity. The kids really enjoyed destroying things, but I don’t want them to think that destroying a whole city is fun, or that this was something done lightly by God.
So, in terms of the kids this was a big hit. In terms of understanding the point of the story, this was a big fail.But, let’s face it this is a hard story to explain to kids, even if it is an important story to understand. There are consequences to sin, and we want to make sure our kids know that.
