PRETTY ON THE OUTSIDE

Last night I taught the Bible lesson for the Olympian kids. It was so much fun that I wanted to tell you what I did in case you want to try it sometime. The lesson was about Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus. At the last supper he looked like all the other disciples. No one suspected that he was filled with greed and would turn Jesus over to the guards for thirty pieces of silver. So appearances on the outside can be deceiving. God sees the heart and knows what is hidden there.

I filled up a shiny, silver gift bag with garbage. Among the things in the bag were: cat litter, coffee grounds, a tea bag, orange peels, a brown banana peel, dryer lint, food wrappers and what really disgusted the kids the most was a diaper (which secretly had mustard not poo). The bag looked beautiful on the outside with iridescent tissue paper hiding what was beneath. I told the kids if they could guess what was inside, they could have it. Every child except two raised their hand and said they wanted to win the bag. Most of them thought it was chocolate or something for Valentine's Day. Sam Young, however, thought it was too good to be true and said he was suspicious of the contents of the bag. I proceeded to take things out of the bag and put the garbage on a carefully covered table. They said it was so gross. The two children who had volunteered to be my assistants suddenly changed their minds when I asked them to put the garbage in a trash can.

The point that the kids will probably not forget is that many people look good on the outside just as Judas did. But God sees our heart. At the end of the lesson, I prayed for the children to be careful not to put garbage into their minds through TV, Internet, video games, movies etc. Hopefully they will remember this lesson in the future and think twice when tempted to put garbage into their minds.

Pat