Man After God’s Own Heart lesson
A few weeks ago, our Sunday School lesson was the Call of David, and specifically, we were focusing on how David was a man after God’s own heart. I thought of a fun way to teach this to my fifth-grade students and really teach them this man after God’s own heart lesson to them.
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Supplies for Man After God’s Own Heart lesson
Bible, Index cards, markers
Pass out an index card to each kid, and stick a stash of markers in the middle of each table. The kids need to be sitting in groups. When I did this a few weeks ago, I had one kid who insisted on sitting by herself, and she very quickly discovered why I was telling her she needed to sit at a table with other people. She was less than happy.
What we look at when looking for a leader
God sent Samuel out to look for a new king after Saul had messed up so much. Now at this point, I had the kids write their name on their index card and then pass it to the person on their left.
The very careful instructions I gave were, you were to write on the card something you can see about the person whose card you now have. You can only write something you can see about the person.
I gave several examples like “Mary wears glasses,” “Bob is wearing blue shorts,” “Sue is wearing a dress,” or “Frank has brown hair.” Very obvious things you can see. It cannot be anything about who they are because of things you know.
Lovely example of what I was wearing yesterday when I took the pictures.
Then we started telling the story of Samuel, looking at each of David’s brothers. I had the kids raise their hands for each of the brothers, indicating what Samuel saw in that brother and why he thought that brother should be king when he got to them.
Now here’s where the lesson went slightly wrong, because some of the boys didn’t listen to the instructions. They decided to write down things they KNEW about each other, like “He’s Brazilian.”
This led to more than a few laughs as I said, “Samuel looked at the third brother and said, ‘He would make a good king because he’s Brazilian,’ and God said, ‘No, I don’t want him.”
So, I went slowly through the brothers, and the kids had a laugh volunteering reasons why God might have looked at them as the king.
Slowly but surely, God rejected all of them.
It was very sad.
Only it wasn’t, because we all knew there was one more figure waiting in the wings.
Samuel asked about that one last son, and Jesse said, “Well, there is my other son who is watching the sheep.”
And this is where we get the famous verse from the chapter, roughly paraphrased, “God does not look at the outside, but at the heart.” 1 Samuel 16:14 or thereabouts.
And then we flipped over our cards and wrote what people do not see, but what God sees. We wrote what was inside of us. The talents God can use, how much we love God, and how we help others.
It was an interesting lesson with them.
