Well hello there! Y'all... I am amazed at the responses and feedback from Day 1 of the Fruits of the Spirit study! Welcome to Day 2! I'm so excited you are here!
Before we get started, I'd love to share a little background on this study. Little Man and I were consistently doing some Bible time at night before he went to bed. However, what I noticed was that he was tired and cranky and it sometimes felt forced. I want our time with God to be amazing and beautiful and wonderful! It should never be forced or a chore. I don't ever want our time with God to be a negative thing. I'm sure you could agree. Fast forward to the past few weeks. At the beginning of the summer, I was teaching some remediation courses (I teach online from home). I had a one hour break at 10:00. This is when Little Man and I got to sit down and chat over breakfast. We slowly started incorporating our devotionals from church into this time. I had been working on putting this study together since last summer. I couldn't seem to get my head wrapped around exactly what I wanted to do. (Note to self: God gives you the words when you ask. Funny how He does that...). So with that, Breakfast with the Bible was born! We still review our memory verses (look for a post soon on our process for that), talk, and say prayers at night, but our more in-depth studies happen at breakfast now. I have loved it and Little Man does too. I look forward to watching the process evolve as Baby Boy gets a little older. I loved putting this together and look forward to doing several more. I trust that all of you will help me stick to that! :)
Here's how the Fruits of the Spirit study works. First, get some breakfast. Not going to lie... in our house, cereal seems to be the go-to. Then, get comfy at the table and get to work! This is a basic outline of what we did each day. I'll go into detail about each of these in the separate posts.
While we were eating, I had Little Man watch two YouTube videos. One is a song that we watched each day. The other is a great series by a man called Hi Hi the Bible Guy. He is fantastic! He does objects lessons for everything and he does them big! I'm talking fire, explosions, power tools, all of it. Total boy stuff.
After the videos, we would review the page in the story for that particular fruit and give him the descriptive phrase. I'll go into that more later. I would then read our verse of the day. We would talk about it and I would guide him to make the connection between the verse and the fruit. This was just conversation over breakfast. In all of our talks, I tried to be very intentional about relating the fruit directly to Little Man. We talked about things he specifically did or didn't do. I made him come up with examples of how he could demonstrate the fruit. All in all, they were good talks.
After we finished eating, we would do an object lesson. He LOVED these! After the lesson, we would go back to our verse of the day and add our final thoughts. If you have a child that is old enough, this would be a great time to journal. Little Man isn't quite there yet. I'm hoping after a few more units he will be.
As we closed our lesson, we would pray over the verse, using our names to pray it specifically for us. Finally, as an extension, he would work on the stained glass cutouts. These were discussed in the Day 1 post. If you missed it, you can get caught up here. This was the time I would usually clean up breakfast. Sometimes, he'd let me continue the conversation. Other times, he felt he was all talked out. If you really want to extend it, have them watch a Veggie Tales episode while they're doing the stained glass and point out examples of the fruits in the characters.
And that's that! I know it sounds like a lot, but it really isn't. Eat, video, verse, chat, object lesson, pray, extension. Maybe 20 minutes?
So with all that said... here's the next lesson in our Fruits of the Spirit study! The first fruit is love. Honestly, this was a little tricky. The story we read daily, Pups of the Spirit, is super cute, but it keeps love at a surface level. Hugs and kisses and whatnot. I wanted Little Man to know that love in the Biblical sense is deeper than that. With every fruit, I found a short phrase that describes it in ways our little ones would understand.
LOVE ~ I will put others first.
Our verse for love was 1 John 3:18.
Dear children, let us not love with words or speech, but with actions and in truth.
I asked some pretty basic questions. How do you know Mommy loves you? How do you show Mommy or Daddy how you love them? How can you show your friends you love them? I asked him about some specific situations we had recently dealt with... were you showing love then? I read somewhere that whenever a certain mom saw her children arguing, she would stop them and ask, "Who are you showing love to right now? Yourself, your brother, or God? God first, then others, and then ourselves. This is the primary point I wanted Little Man to leave with.
We've talked about how we love others because Jesus loves us and His love overflows from us into others. When we are filled with His love, it's much easier to put others before ourselves. That led us to our object lesson.
For this lesson, you'll need a paper towel, a red marker, a pen, and a bowl of water. Draw a small heart down at the bottom with the pen. "We all have hearts that need to be filled. When we ask Jesus to live in our hearts, he fills them with love."
We colored in the heart with the red marker. "Jesus lives in our hearts and He loves us very, very much. We always know that we are loved because we are His children."
Draw some tiny little hearts around the top of the red heart. "We have Jesus' love in our hearts, but not everyone knows about His love. They're hearts are still empty."
I asked Little Man how we could show love to those people. He gave me answers like playing with them, being kind to them, telling them that Jesus lives in us. "When Jesus loves us, that love can overflow into the people around us! Because He loves us soooo much, we have lots of love to share!" Dip the paper towel into the bowl where just the red heart touches the water.
"Look how Jesus' love filled all those other hearts! He loves everyone and wants their hearts to be filled too!"
Throughout the next several days, I focused on asking Little Man about showing love. In the grocery store, a man knocked some stuff off the shelf... "How can we show him some love right now?" As Little Man had a *teensy* bit of an attitude with me... "Are you showing love right now or anger?" Some friends were over and playing at our house and wanted to do something different than Little Man... "Can we show him love by choosing to play his game first?" I'm sure you can think of a few (or more than a few) moments that these questions could be asked on a daily basis.
To conclude our Breakfast with the Bible time, we prayed over our verse (using the "ACTS" model and the words from the verse) and Little Man began to work on his torn paper stained glass.
"Jesus, it's awesome that You have so much love for us! I'm sorry that I didn't show love when I ______. Please forgive me. Thank you for always loving us no matter what we do. Please help me not to just tell my family I love them, but to show them with my actions. Help me to know how to love people that aren't my friends. Help me to show them Your love. Amen."
So there's Day 2! I know I talked A LOT during this post. I wanted to give some background though. I promise not to ramble so much next time! :) I'd love to hear your thoughts about this study! Is this something you could do with your little ones?
Don't miss Day 3! Follow us on Bloglovin'!
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