Week 100
Paul—Provoked by the Evil He Saw Around Him
Point to Emphasize: Does your heart react against the evil, or do you accept it?
Reference Reading: Acts 17:14-33, footnote 241
Memory Verse: That you may be blameless and guileless, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverted generation… (Philippians 2:15a)
Sample Story
[NOTE to storyteller: In this story, we bring up the matter of gender identification and the perverseness in our society today. We only touch these matters carefully and in prayer so that we remain clean and do not touch the filthiness in this matter. Please pray over this story so that in telling it, you also remain clean and pure.]
There is one last story, a very important story about Paul that we need to share with you. You remember that Paul was raised a Jew, and he was a very faithful Jew. He even studied the Jewish religion. Of course, he was turned as a young man to know and to serve the Lord Jesus. At the time of this story, he was in Athens, Greece, waiting for some brothers who were to meet him there. As he walked along the main street of that city, he had some strong reactions as he saw that the place was full of idols and heard all the new philosophies being spoken there. Why would Paul have strong reactions against idols? What verses show the reason he reacted? [Lead the children to discuss that God is the only One we should love and worship. That’s why God hates idolatry. You might want to read Exodus 20:2-5a with the children.]
Exodus 20:2-5a—I am Jehovah your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the slave house; 3You shall have no other gods before Me. 4You shall not make for yourself an idol, nor the form of anything that is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water beneath the earth. 5You shall not bow down to them, and you shall not serve them…
So, Paul reacted to all the idols because he knew the truth in God’s Word. He made sure that his thoughts toward idols and philosophies were the same as God’s thoughts. Now, you may have never considered that God has thoughts about things, but Paul knew for a fact that God had thoughts about everything in human life.
We mentioned the philosophies, or new ways of thinking, that Paul heard while in Athens. The Greeks loved new ways of thinking, and they liked to talk about them, to have discussions concerning them. Again, Paul must have heard these ways of thinking and reacted to them. They certainly were not according to God’s thought.
In the 1970s, there was a girl growing up facing a philosophy that was very accepted at that time. This was that God didn’t create man, but that we evolved from monkeys! How outrageous! A lot of people no longer believed in the Bible but held to this philosophy. While in high school, in an advanced biology class, she just could not go along with this absurd thought! So, right there in class, she told her teacher and classmates why their thought of evolving from monkeys just could not be true. She based her response about this philosophy upon God’s Word. Both this young person and Paul based their reactions on the truth in God’s Word. [Storyteller, tell a personal story you had that matches reacting to a philosophy based on God’s Word.]
Now, the new ways of thinking that you hear in songs, read in books or magazines, see on TV, or see displayed as you walk into a mall are very different from what Paul heard and saw. Nevertheless, these new ways of thinking are all based on not wanting to believe what God says in His Word. Especially in today’s society, people throw God away and think whatever pleases them. Mostly, these ways of thinking are evil and perverse. Perverse means to distort, a turning aside from the truth. This perverseness is trying to influence you so that you no longer react to it as evil. That is why we need to tell you this story now and not wait until you are older. You need to have reactions like Paul’s, which were according to the truth and against the perverse ways of thinking.
Now, what does God tell us about marriage? [See if they remember that marriage is to be pure, one husband and one wife.] Yes, this is God’s thought. Marriage is between a man and a woman. Anything else is evil and perverse. And we must keep our reactions according to the truth and against anything else people think is okay today.
Just as God’s thought is reasonable and simple concerning marriage, it is also reasonable and simple concerning children. If a baby is born a boy, surely he will grow up to be a man. In the same way, a baby girl grows up to be a woman. If you are a she when you are born, then you will be a she when you grow up. But the evil and perverse ways of thinking in our society are so strong. In some places, children your age have to pick what pronoun they want to be called at school. This means that as a girl, you may choose the pronoun “he” and that if you were born a boy, you can choose the pronoun “she” or “they”, meaning you are neutral, neither “he” nor “she”. What an evil confusion this is! [Storyteller, please avoid speaking further.] God calls this evil and perverse.
If this is the first time you have heard about this or if you have heard about this before in books, songs, videos, or social media, your reaction should be that this way of thinking is against God’s thought. But right now you are saying to yourself, “I like that song,” even when you know it is against God’s thought. Or you might say, “It doesn’t matter if I look at these things on social media.” If there is no reaction within you against this kind of thinking, you are accepting what God calls evil and perverse. Take a moment and consider that. You have accepted something that is actually against God. This is very serious. We must always react according to God’s Word. Talk to your parents or older ones around you about all these influences so that you can be like Paul and have reactions according to the truth in God’s Word.