Context for Kids

Love is a very complicated thing in the Bible and so we are going to treat it very seriously. The Bible shows us that God’s love is emotional and active and also very interested in justice and mercy. And of course, we can’t talk about love without mentioning Mister Rogers!

What is joy and how is it different from happiness? This week, I teach the kids about my own journey from sorrow to joy and we’ll talk about Jesus’s joyful life.

What does Paul mean when he talks about peace? What does Jesus have to say about peacemakers? Is peace a feeling or an action or both? To learn about this we will have to travel all the way from Galilee to Galatia and then to Rome.

Abraham just found out on the Mountain of the Lord that God will provide. God was getting ready to make His final promise to Abraham and He swears by Himself that absolutely everything He ever promised to Abraham is a done deal and will happen through Isaac and his descendants.

When is a sacrifice not a sacrifice? That’s the big question this week as the Angel of the Lord interrupts the sacrifice of Isaac. And what does this have to do with Jesus? We will also be discussing the ancient concept of the heavens in ancient Near Eastern context.

Transcript: https://contextforkids.com/2025/01/14/episode-164-god-saves-isaac/

Wait a minute—Isaac notices a red flag. They have the sacrificial knife, the coals for a new fire, and the wood, but there is no animal for the slaughter. As Han Solo would say, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” and Isaac is finally alone with his father and able to ask the question his father doesn’t want to answer.

Last time we were with Abraham, he had a terrible decision to make. Was he going to sacrifice Isaac in the Land of Moriah or was he going to refuse, or at least argue with God about it? Abraham's response is even more confusing than God's request--absolutely nothing for three whole days. We are starting to see hints about Jesus in this story, and so we will talk about the "type" of Isaac and the "antitype" of Jesus both carrying wood on their backs.

So, this year, I want to talk about Advent, which is a season on a lot of liturgical calendars but is often misunderstood as being another name for Christmas--which it isn't. Advent is a word meaning "the arrival of an important person or event" and because Advent almost always (but not this year) overlaps with Hannukah and many scholars believe Jesus was conceived in the winter and born during the Fall Festivals, I would like to think that the Light of the World was indeed conceived during Hannukah, beginning a nine-month season of waiting with anticipation for His birth for Mary and ourselves looking even more forward to His second coming.  Let's tell a "what if" story based on the Gospel of Luke to see what the beginning of Mary's wait might have looked like.

This week we are looking at the difference between being sad and being ungrateful. I am also talking to the kids about why Jesus was all He had to be and how anything less wouldn’t have been enough to save us.

Transcript: https://contextforkids.com/2024/11/26/episode-160-thankfulness-and-the-dayenu-of-jesus/

This week, we are beginning the last chapter of Torah Portion Vayers, where God says something shocking to Abraham in order to test him.