Children’s Message, Sunday, July 3, 2011—God’s promise starts here! Genesis 22-24-ish--3rd Sunday after Pentecost

(Note: today's message kind of steps back to grap the parts of the story that were skipped over in the lectionary, rather than specifically the story of Isaac and Rebekah)

I have two questions for you:
• How many stars do you think there are in the sky?
• How many grains of sand do you think there are on the seashore?

Now, you could probably google these questions and get a number, but the truth is, we don’t really know the answer. I think the best we could do is to say lots and lots and lots!

The reason that I ask you this question is because God made a promise to Abraham that his descendants (or his children’s, children’s, children’s, children. . . well you get the idea. . . .) would be “as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore” (Genesis 22:17).

What a promise! Can you imagine how many children and people that would be?? What if I told you that we were a part of that promise? That the counting of those children’s, children’s, children goes right up through us and even will continue on!

The first step of that journey, of course happened long, long ago. Abraham and his wife Sarah, to whom the promise was made, never thought that they would have children, but they did! Their son was a boy named Isaac. And when Isaac grew, he married a woman named Rebekah. Well, you can guess the rest. . . Rebekah and Isaac had children. . . and they had children, and with each generation, more children were born and grew and soon, you lost count as to how many great-great-great-great grandchildren Abraham and Sarah had! Like trying to count stars or sand, you couldn’t do it!

So today, in church and in Sunday school, we will learn about the beginning of the promise as we learn the story of Isaac and Rebekah.

Let’s pray:
Loving God,
We thank you for your promises.
Because we are a part of the huge family of God,
We give thanks
that we, too, are part of the Story.
Amen.

its been a while!!!

Yikes, how embarassing that I have not updated this blog in 18 months! Whoops!

OK, so I'm going to try to re-claim this blog, so watch this space for some new children's sermons, starting with one for Sunday, July 3 (coming soon!)
:-)