Sunday 8th November | The Parable of the Good Samaritan
A Game for the Whole Family
Divide into teams or work together. Take turns for each player to run to the FIRST AID TABLE and will grab a plaster, unwrap it, and place it on the arm or leg and then run back to the team for the next player to do the same! (Children’s plasters with pictures on them will make the game more fun.)
Before you begin, parents will need to hide pieces of paper with a scrambled word from today’s lesson on each paper. (Suggestions: Samaritan, parable, neighbour, priest, Levite, lawyer, robbers, love.) The children will run to find a hidden word and bring it back to the table and try to unscramble the word. When the word is unscrambled, the child can write the correct word on the back side of the paper and quickly run to the GOOD SAMARITAN poster and stick the word to the poster.
Story - The Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37)
Questions to talk through together
(You may need to explain what we usually mean when we use the word ‘neighbour’ and what Jesus is showing His disciples in this story – that everyone is their neighbour)
- What did the first two people do when they saw the injured man? Why do you think they didn’t help?
- What did the Samaritan man do? Explain that this would be seen as strange as Jewish people and Samaritans weren’t usually friends!
- Who can you be a ‘good neighbour’ to? How can you do this?
- When have you been like the victim in the story? Who was your Good Samaritan?
- When have you been like the priest or the Levite in the story? Why was it hard to help someone in need?
- When have you been like the good Samaritan in the story? What made you want to help someone in need?
Reflection
Who deserves to be helped and loved? It’s easy to be kind and loving to our friends and people we like, but perhaps not as easy to be kind and loving to people who are different from us or who may even be unkind to us.
Jesus uses this story to show His disciples that our ‘neighbour’ is EVERYONE. Not just people who live near us or who go to our school or who we are friends with. God made and loves EVERYONE, and so he wants us as His followers to love them too. No person is more or less important to God, whether they’re rich or poor, nice or nasty, big or small. He loves everyone equally.
Sometimes it’s hard to help people who aren’t like us or who may not help us back. When this happens it’s good to ask for God’s help, to remember how much God loves us and how much he has forgiven us when we’ve done wrong things. Remembering how BIG God’s love is for us helps us to love others too!
Prayer
(Suggestion: Do this after the ‘Plaster People’ craft).
Ask the Holy Spirit to show us the people who need our help right now, whether they are individual family members or friends or general groups of people (poor, homeless, sick). Pray that God would show us how to help these people and show His love for them. Ask the Holy Spirit to fill each family member to do this.
Worship - You are Good
Worship - Love Like You
Craft
Here are some ideas you might want to try!
PLASTER PEOPLE:
Think about people who need help right now. This could be friends and family who are in pain or more general groups of people like the sick, the poor, the elderly, etc.
Write down or draw the people and label them. Use plasters to write down/draw what you can do to help and stick them on the people.
FRIENDSHIP BRACELETS:
Children can make a bracelet out of beads and string to give to someone to remind them that they love them and Jesus loves them.
