To Live is Christ (Paul): Week Four

"If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone. The new has come!" - 2 Corinthians 5:17

Studying Paul has been really good for the kids, and for me to be able to see how much these kids retain and how well they're learning and adapting our lessons to their lives. We start every lesson with a review of the previous lessons. It's been four weeks of lessons (over a six week time frame), and it still amazes me that the kids can tell me details of what we talked about the first time we talked. I ask them about how Paul grew up, and they tell me the bible verse, and then about the clothes he wore and what he had to do. And they seamlessly ease into the following stories. This week was interesting because it was the mark of the turn from Saul to Paul. When the kids were explaining, one of them said, "Well Saul was a bad guy and was trying to stone Stephen!" Another girl corrected him and said, "No, he wasn't a bad guy. He was just a guy that did a bad thing. He didn't know about Jesus yet!" It was really cool to see them thinking on that level and helping each other in that respect.

We started are lesson by breaking into three groups. The first group read in Genesis about when Abram and Sarai's names were changed to Abraham and Sarah's, and when Simon's name was changed to Peter. The other two groups read about the time where Saul's name becomes Paul. One group had the question of why, and the other group had the question of when. We went over those two as a big group, and then we talked about names in the Old Testament. We talked about how a long time ago, people named their children based on the meaning of the name, not on how pretty the names were. The first group presented what they found out about Abram, Sarai, and Simon, and then we talked as a group about the importance of names.

Here are what the kids came up with:

• You can't just say "hey you" and still be polite.
• It's how you can tell people apart.
• It helps you know who you are.
• When somebody knows your name you're better behaved

After all these, we talked about how every name has a meaning, and in this time period, people named their children after how they wanted their children to perceive themselves. For instance, how Jesus' name means "Salvation". I talked about my name, and how it means "God's gift", and how the reason I was named that was because my parents wanted me to know that I was "God's gift" to them. We talked about how God referred to Saul by Paul from then on because he wanted Saul to know that his identity was new, now that he was in Christ. We talked about how Saul and Paul are the same name (Saul is Hebrew, Paul is Roman), and how the changing of it also meant that Christ wasn't just for the Hebrews, but for everyone.

I'd done some research and looked up the meaning of all the kids' games, so we spent a lot of time playing Memory with their names. They were in teams and had to pick the matches. It was really fun, and the thing that kept the kids' attention was the wait to find out what their names meant. Then we cleaned up, and they all got a cookie if they could come up and tell me one thing they learned and what their name means.

We talked about what it means to be a new person in Christ, and the bible verse for the week, and that was that!