Children’s Sermon

Luke 3:1-6

Something New is Coming!

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Luke 3:1-6
Something New is Coming!

By Dr. Carol J Miller

Today’s Gospel reading has a lot of really big words in it; especially strange and hard-to-say names! Listen to these names, (what were their mothers thinking when they named them?) Tiberius (he was the Emperor and pretty tough), Pontius Pilate, (he was the governor, but he didn’t like being in Israel and wanted to go home to Rome); Herod (he was the king of the Galilee area–Herod was a scary guy! Everyone tried to stay away from him). Lysanias, Annas and Caiaphas (Caiaphas had a lot of power!). Some of these were men who liked people to be afraid of them—like a bully at school. A bully acts tough and might even threaten to hurt you if you don’t do what they say. The kings and governors kept the people afraid. It gave them a feeling of being powerful. They were like school bullies, only they could make a whole country afraid of them.

God sent a man named John to the scared people in Israel. He told them that God was about to do a new thing; a very, very happy thing! God was going to send someone very special to the people. Who do you think it will be? [Accept all answers, but Jesus is the one].

John told the people that Jesus would do some really wonderful things. BUT the grown ups needed to get ready first. How do you have to get ready when important people (your grandparents or far-away relatives) are going to come to your house? What does your mom make you do? [Respect all answers].

How do you think those grown ups had to get ready for Jesus? [Accept all answers].

John didn’t tell them to clean their rooms or make some cookies, or change their clothes. John told them that they had to change some of the things they were doing, like being selfish, not caring about poor people, being grumpy. John said that in order to be ready for someone special like Jesus, they had to show that they were going to be better people. They had to think hard about the things they had been doing. God sent John to tell the people to get ready before God did the new thing—sending Jesus. Next week we’ll see what the grown ups did when they heard John’s news.

What about the people with the hard-to-say names? They are in for some surprises. But this is the Advent season and advent means “waiting”. So we’ll just have to wait for the rest of the story.

Scripture quotations from the World English Bible

Copyright 2012, Richard Niell Donovan