Is Jesus the Messiah?: Week Eight

This week, our prophecy studies lead us to a part of Jesus' character that the kids might not have known before. We looked in Psalm 69:9 where it says that the Messiah would have great zeal for his father's house. We talked about what zeal means, and here are some of the words the kids came up with as synonyms.

• love
• enthusiasm
• passion
• happy
• excited
• longing

The Messiah had all of these things for God's house. This is our clue! Then we turned to Luke and read the story of when Jesus was a young boy. His family went on a trip to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. They were there for awhile, and then when the festival was over, they headed back to Bethlehem. Jesus stayed behind (whoops!) and Mary and Joseph assumed he was just hitching a ride with someone else. So they got home, and they realized they'd left him, so they turned back around and a few days later, they finally found him.

At this point, we asked the kids if they'd ever been lost before, and if so, where they thought their parents looked first thing. They all said "inside the house", so we made the situation a little bit different. You get lost in Target. Where's the first place your parents look? One of the kids got it spot on when he raised his hand and said "THE TOY SECTION!" We asked him why, and he told us it was because that's where his favorite part of the store was, so he would be there most likely!

We shifted back to the Bible and talked about how Jesus was found in the temple, talking with Rabbis and other people, and they were amazed by him. When Mary came up to him and asked him where he'd been, Jesus was like, "Lady, why didn't you realize I'd be in my favorite place EVER!?" This makes total sense. Duh, of course Jesus would be in the temple!

The kids and I all decided that this story was definitely an example of Jesus' zeal for his father's house. He'd rather be there than anywhere else-even though his pets, video games, and all of his toys were back home. Jesus chose the temple over everything else, constantly. If that doesn't show love, enthusiasm, passion, longing, excitement and happiness for the temple, what does? Jesus was zealous about the temple, just like the Old Testament said he would be.

We could have looked at another story where Jesus overturned tables in the church as an adult, but we didn't get a chance. If you want to read it with your children on your own and talk about how it proves Jesus was zealous, it can be found at John 2:12-25 (or in any of the other Gospels, but John is my favorite if we're talking about zealousness!)