The Gift of the Holy Spirit

We jumped from Easter to Pentecost, to begin a series in Acts. Our story for Sunday the 19th:

40 days after Jesus rose from the dead, he went back to heaven. He told His disciples to wait for the Holy Spirit to come and give them power to witness for Him. Now it's been another 10 days	(all count to 40, then to 10)
It's a big Jewish holiday. Jews from many different countries have come to Jerusalem to celebrate	give flags from different countries to adults
But Jesus' disciples are afraid to join them for fear of being arrested. They are staying inside and praying, waiting for the Holy Spirit that Jesus had promised.	all kids kneel to pray
Suddenly there is the sound of a big wind	turn on ceiling fan to high
and they see what looks like fire come down and settle on everyone's heads!	sprinkle orange paper shreds on all heads
But not only on their heads—it's as if they have fire in their hearts, too! Suddenly they're not afraid any more, and they want to go out and tell everyone about Jesus.	They get up, show their muscles
But all these people out there are speaking all different languages. How will they communicate? Something really wild happened—they opened their mouths to preach, and it came out in the language of whatever person they were talking to at the time!	have slips of paper with "Jesus has risen, just as He said" printed in languages of adults' flags. Match flags on paper with adults' flags to give it to them while saying "Jesus is risen"
The people listening are amazed! They start discussing this with each other—and forget to listen to the message!	the adults all huddle together
Finally, Peter gets up and gets everyone's attention	one boy as Peter stands on stool
In a loud voice, he begins to preach: "Jesus has risen from the dead" "The blood of Christ can cleanse all of our sin" "God loves you and wants to have a close relationship with you" "Trust in Jesus and receive eternal life"	Have each sentence on a banner. Have one child put up each banner on the board as Peter reads or says that sentence.
All the people around are thrilled at the message. They want to know what they need to do next. Peter says: "If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved."	This verse also put up on board
Lots and lots of people believed that day. The disciples kept track of how many	Have one child bring clipboard around room for all to sign
When they added it all up, how many were there?	Underneath signature sheet on clipboard are sheets with numbers 500, 700, 600, 800, & 400. Have children copy these one by one on board, one child adds them up (=3000)
In one day 3000 people believed! You could say it was the birthday of the Christian church. So let's celebrate that!	sing happy birthday—have birthday cake!

Originally I hadn't written in to do the counting to 40 & 10 at the beginning of the story. But people were chatting & not paying attention, so Mr. Lei came up with the idea on the spot as an immediate attention-grabber. GREAT move! So I wrote it in as a keeper!

For a game, I had copies of the banners with the four sentences from Peter's "sermon", cut into pieces with 1-2 characters each (for 5-7 pieces per sentence). The pieces for one sentence at a time was distributed to the adults. The idea was supposed to be that one kid at a time would take the adults and arrange them to get the sentence in the right order. I think at least some of our kids could have done it by themselves, but the parents were maybe a little too quick to help. And we had more kids than sentences, and the room was crowded…we ended up giving up on the game after just two rounds. We were running behind time anyway.

By the way, a zillion thanks to my good friend Mrs. Tong who wrote out all the banners for me. It would have either taken me forever (I write Chinese like a kindergartner), or would have wasted tons of paper printer ink!

For a craft, (a zillion thanks for internet craft sites!), Bruce and I ate a lot of canned food the week before so I could freeze water in the empty cans. Sunday morning we wrapped them with paper on which "dot-to-dot"dove patterns were drawn. The kids' job was to pound nails lightly through the dots into the can. The idea being, once the ice melts you put little candles in them & you have "Holy Spirit" candle holders—fire and dove!

Bible study was from Ephesians 1:16-20, about other gifts (besides the "birthday gifts" of boldness and other tongues) the Spirit wants to give believers. I was afraid it was going to be too abstract, but it seemed to go fairly well. Two people participated who don't usually say anything, so that's exciting!