Is Jesus the Messiah?: Week Seven

This week we talked about the two prophecies in Isaiah 53:2 and Zechariah 9:9. One of these is a kind of difficult prophecy to digest, and the other is just kind of silly and random, so we had fun with it. We brought the kids downstairs, opened up the bible, and while kids were finding the lessons, we brought up a few things...

The kids and I discussed how God is all powerful and really mighty, and how it makes sense to us that if God could come down as anybody in the world, he would choose to be a King or someone really powerful and awesome. These people were expecting somebody to come in and kick some butt and have a lot of money, but they were in for quite a shock.

We read Isaiah 53:2. We talked about what a "tender shoot" is, and how the prophecy meant two things: 1) Jesus was not attractive (wouldn't you want to be attractive if you could choose how you looked? strange, God) and 2) Jesus was gonna not have a home. Hardly the kind of life you would think the God of the universe would choose for himself. Then we read Zechariah 9:9, where it says the Messiah's gonna come riding on a donkey. We talked about clunker cars... How at one point, those cars were really awesome and like "THE THING" to drive in. Donkeys are the same way. At some point, they were the advanced kind of ride... But then time passed, and people started realizing that donkeys poop everywhere and don't quite do what you want them to do, and they started being kind of like a clunker car... The poor people's ride. With that in mind, we focused our attention on this Jesus guy that people are saying might be the Messiah.

We read Luke 9:58 and Matthew 4:12-16, where we found out Jesus was a homeless dude who had to borrow a donkey. The kids were all shocked to find out they're following a homeless guy. These people thought Jesus was a big deal, and they were so surprised to find out that he was just a homeless guy with no donkey. We talked about WHY God would choose to come down as a homeless man. And one of the things we realized is that we shouldn't treat people any different whether they are homeless or not. They're all the same.

We listened to the song "One of Us" by Joan Osborne and were all kind of sobered by how we might have reacted to Jesus, had he come the same way now. We talked about how to show love to everybody, prayed, and went upstairs for worship.