Bring 52 marbles in a bag.
This is just from Dollar Store Children’s Sermons. Click that link and watch it!
I’m so happy you’re here today!
So I want to talk today a little about the story we’re going to hear about Jesus today and we’re going to use this: a bag of marbles. There’s a lot of marbles in here and we’re going to pretend that each marble counts as one time when we forgive someone. So this is a bag full of forgiveness marbles.
Now Peter, one of Jesus’ friends, asks Jesus “how many times am I supposed to forgive someone? If Someone breaks a promise to me or my trust, and it hurts, as long as I’m safe – should I forgive the other person more than once? Should I forgive them like…7 times?” So we have this bag of forgiveness – so let’s count out 7 marbles. Have the kids count out with you seven marbles. Phew! We did it. 7 is something we can do.
But Jesus doesn’t tell Peter to forgive someone 7 times. He says forgive them 77 times. 77! That’s a big number! So okay….let’s see if we can use this bag of marbles to count out 77 times forgiving someone. Count the marbles. As you go higher, get tired and talk about it being hard. And then…run out. Oh my gosh. We’re out of forgiveness. And we didn’t make it to 77! So what can we do? What can we do when we run out of forgiveness? Ask kids. Accept answers. What we need is God’s help. God invites us to forgive and love like Jesus does and that’s usually more than we can do. So we ask God to help us love and love and love. Because God and Jesus forgives us all the time. That isn’t hard for God. But it’s sometimes hard for us. When a friend breaks a promise, that’s hard. There are sometimes things that happen to us that we might not be able to forgive right away or for awhile. So we ask God to help us forgive like God does. To help us be safe so we can forgive those who might hurt us and also ask God to help those we might have hurt. And we ask by saying our prayers and praying – something I do all the time and something we’ll do later in this worship service. We ask help God always to help us love like God loves – so that this world can be a kinder, gentler, and more forgiving place.
Thank you for being up here and I hope you have a blessed week!
Each week, I share a reflection for all children of God. The written manuscript serves as a springboard for what I do. This is from Christ Lutheran Church’s Worship on the 15th Sunday After Pentecost, 9/17/2017.