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THE LORD’S PRAYER

Week 4 - ‘Forgiveness’

For Leaders:

PowerPoint slides accompanying this week’s material are downloadable from the bottom of this page.

SLIDE 1 - ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ series theme slide
SLIDE 2
- Is the Impact Kids version of the Lord’s Prayer written especially for children. (Copyright)

Each week during this series it would be good to say the Lord’s Prayer at an appropriate point early on in your programme. You can make this the opening prayer of the evening.

SLIDE 3 - If required this may be used to remind kids of last week’s theme.

SLIDE 4 - This week we’re looking at the fourth part of the prayer reflecting on forgiveness. We’ll consider God’s forgiveness to us and how we too should be ready and willing to forgive others.

PART 1   

LEAD-IN SESSION DRAMA

Kids this week we’re looking at the 4th part of the prayer ‘Forgive us for the bad things we do and help us to forgive others’
Get everyone to read this week’s line from slide 4

So kids, today we’re talking about forgiveness.
Let’s watch two dramas to help us understand what it is to forgive.

(There’s a couple of mini drama ideas below to demonstrate forgiveness.)

DRAMA 1 - ‘THE QUEUE’

Props: A table to act as a counter, a buy tickets here sign hung below the table, some tickets.

4 - 5 people standing in a queue waiting to get a ticket from a person standing behind the counter. Another person comes along and barges into the queue. This upsets the people in the queue and their facial expressions and comments show this. The person at the end of the queue gets particularly angry, goes up to the queue jumper and tells them what they think about what they’ve done and how everyone else is patiently waiting their turn. There’s a bit of an argument and the queue jumper eventually moves to the rear. Everyone in the queue settles down and smiles again, except the person who particularly showed their anger. This person continues to have an angry face, clenched fist and angrily mutters to themselves, even after the matter has been settled.

So kids, did the person who had the argument with the queue jumper forgive them. No. How could you tell? Do you think they felt any better for continuing to be angry? No!

DRAMA 2 - ‘The handbag’

Props: Three seats, handbag with various bits and pieces including a phone, pen, notebook. One of the team (not in drama) will need to ring the phone in the handbag at the appropriate point.

This second drama has two endings the first demonstrating the result of unforgiveness, the second, how much better things are with forgiveness.

Drama 2 - With unforgiveness ending

Three girls sitting together chatting. The middle girl has a bag with some of her things in it. The middle girl’s mobile rings. “Must take this it’s my mum.” She stands up to take the call. Whilst she is on her phone the other two friends rummage through her bag and take out a pen, hiding it behind them. When the middle girl comes back the three girls carry on talking together. “Oh, I must write down a note of what mum has just told me.” Says the middle girl. She starts looking in her bag for a note book and pen. “That’s funny, I’m sure I brought my pen with me, where could it be.” Suddenly she looks at her two friends. “You haven’t been in my bag, have you?” The other two girls look sheepish and hand back the pen, to which the middle girl responds. “Call yourselves my friends do you?” And with that she storms off in a huff.

Oh dear. What shouldn’t the girls have done? That’s right they shouldn’t have gone into their friend’s bag. That is definitely wrong. Our property is personal and without permission we should never look into other people’s things. Do you think the two girls were trying to cause real trouble or was this a prank? Whatever their intentions it was wrong. What about the girl with the phone, would storming off really help? She didn’t even give the others opportunity to say sorry.

Let’s see a re - run of the drama.

Drama 2 - With forgiveness ending

Three girls sitting together chatting. The middle girl has a bag with some of her things in it. The middle girl’s mobile rings. “Must take this it’s my mum.” She stands up to take the call. Whilst she is on her phone the other two friends rummage through her bag and take out a pen, hiding it behind them. When the middle girl comes back the three girls carry on talking together. “Oh, I must write down a note of what mum has just told me.” Says the middle girl. She starts looking in her bag for a note book and pen. “That’s funny, I’m sure I brought my pen with me, where could it be.” Suddenly she looks at her two friends. “You haven’t been in my bag, have you?” The other two girls look sheepish and hand back the pen, to which the middle girl responds. “Hey what kind of friends are you to steal my pen like that? Is that what friends do?” The other girls respond, “Oh, we are sorry, we really didn’t want to upset you. Will you forgive us, promise not to do it again?” “Oh, I suppose so, you’re forgiven but no more poking around in other people’s bags huh.” Says the middle girl. “Yeah, you’re right” say the others. “Still friends” they say “Still friends” says the phone girl.

Rounding up after the dramas:
It’s easy to get annoyed and sometimes we don’t feel very much like forgiving people who have wronged us or done bad things, even if it was only a prank. But when we do bad things, we like it when other people forgive us, don’t we.
Forgiveness is a good thing; we’ll talk about it more a little later.

PART 2   

BIBLE CHAT - (‘LISTEN UP TIME’ - SLIDE 5)

For Leaders:

The key words of forgiveness and sorry are included on this sessions PowerPoint slides. It’s good to mix and match the way things are presented to the kids so you may wish to us a Velcro board, whiteboard or chalkboard to display these key words instead of up on screen.

SLIDE 6 - Remind the children of this week’s theme.

SLIDE 7 - Display the word ‘Forgiveness’ on screen, Velcro board, whiteboard or other.

Kids this evening we are talking about forgiveness. what it means to be forgiven and to also forgive others.

To forgive someone means that you let them off, you stop being annoyed, you say it’s OK. you make up.

We all do wrong or bad things. Telling lies, being jealous, throwing a tantrum because we can’t get our own way. It’s so good when we are forgiven after doing something wrong. It doesn’t mean that we should ever just do as we like because we will be forgiven, but it feels good to be forgiven, particularly when we are sorry for what we’ve done.

SLIDE 8 - Sometimes we do wrong things that no one else sees, or we don’t get caught. But they are still wrong and we know it. Inside we have that feeling that we’ve done something bad.

Sometimes people do wrong things that are serious and they have to be reported to the authorities or the police. Just because people are forgiven it doesn’t mean that they don’t have to be corrected or even punished. So, forgiveness can never be a cover up, if someone does wrong that harms you or someone else you know it needs reporting. Maybe to a parent, carer, teacher or friend.

Jesus is the greatest ever forgiver. The cross is a symbol of forgiveness. It reminds Christians of the very reason Jesus came.

Jesus took on Himself all the bad things of the world and did away with them. But Jesus came back to life and is alive today. Jesus is the greatest forgiver ever. He is amazing.

(Images A & B below - You may like to use a little cardboard model of a cross on a stand and a paper cut-out of people and some rubbish to show how all the bad stuff we’ve done got transferred to Jesus on the cross. Use paper, odd bits of card for rubbish representing bad stuff of the world. This gets transferred to Jesus and His forgiveness frees people.)

SLIDE 9 - When we do things wrong it’s always good to say sorry to the person involved. And we can say sorry to Jesus too.

SLIDE 10 - We can ask Jesus to “Forgive us for the bad things we do”. And He will! That’s amazing and wonderful. Jesus will take from our lives all of the wrong things and give us a fresh start all over. And even better He will help us to live our lives doing good and avoiding what is bad or wrong. And when we do make mistakes, because we all do, remember we can always come back to Him and say sorry and He will forgive us. Jesus is a loving God and the greatest forgiver ever.

SLIDE 11 - Just like Jesus forgives us so He wants us to forgive others too. Jesus will help us to forgive others, they might be our friend or family. As we said earlier, it’s not always easy to forgive but it is best for everyone and having Jesus to help us makes all the difference.

SLIDE 12 - So let’s pray todays part of the Lord’s prayer together. Remember, if you like you can open your hands as a sign to God that you want Him to forgive you of the bad things you’ve done and help you also to forgive others.

PART 3  

RESPONSE TIME (IN SMALL GROUPS) 

  1. In your own words what does forgiveness mean?

  2. Who is the greatest forgiver and why?

  3. Is there anything that you need to forgive someone for, that you haven’t already done so?

Week 4 DOWNLOADS

WK 4 Lead-in Drama Script, Bible Chat and Response Time leader’s notes.
WK 4 Lord’s Prayer PowerPoint