Prayer: God's Story

Last week we read about how Jesus was God's plan to bless the entire world. We read that God was going to use Jesus to show every single person on earth how big and how good God is. And, God did use Jesus. Jesus came as the Christ that all of those people had been waiting for. He died on the cross and He rose again and then He left His followers on earth to finish what He had started.

But, before He left, before He rose again, before He even died, Jesus did something else. Jesus lived.

Jesus ran around here, on our messy earth, with a group of guys who were probably only teenagers. Those guys are called the twelve disciples. Disciple is a big word that just means “follower.” These were the guys who followed Jesus around and tried to live like He lived. Now, being a teenager might sound pretty old to you right now, but teenagers, just like all grown ups, are still learning an awful lot about life. These teenagers had a lot of questions for Jesus, and Jesus spent a lot of time answering their questions and letting them listen in while he talked with other people. If you were a teenager and you could ask Jesus any question in the world, what do you think you would ask Him?

Those are some good questions. We don't know all of the questions that the disciples asked Jesus, but we do have stories in the Bible that tell us some of the answers He gave them.

One of the things that He talked about a lot was called the 'kingdom of heaven.' Jesus told them that the kingdom of heaven was like a little tiny seed that had been buried in the ground. Even though you can't see the seed yet, it is still there, and, someday, it will fold up out of the ground and grow into a giant tree.

Jesus knew that there were bad things in the world. In fact, He told His disciples (and lots of other people!) this story in Matthew chapter 13: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared. “The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’ ‘An enemy did this,’ he replied.

God was the one who made the earth good. Satan came and tried to trick God. He convinced Adam and Eve to break God's image, even through they still had God's breath in them, and, now, the good is all mixed up with the bad. Good things, like food, are all mixed up with bad things, like weeds...

Download a PDF of the entire story here and click on the coloring pages below to download.