Week 5: Isaiah Part 2

This week in our series "Drama & Dedication: The Life of the Prophets" we finished up Isaiah!  We focused on the misplaced trust Judah was dealing with by creating alliances with larger nations in order to gain protection.  Isaiah continued to warn Judah about their misplaced trust, but they refused to listen to God's message.  In order to gain a better understanding of what was going on, we did a little "visual history".  Different students took on the roles of people like Abraham, Moses, and the King of Judah.  We had various areas of the room labeled as countries such as Assyria, Canaan, Israel, Egypt and Judah.  In each of these areas were a stack of books.  These books represented the customs, material possessions, and general way of life of these various places.  As I read through the history, each character had to move to the respected area the history was talking about and pick up some of the books their, symbolizing that they are a part of that nation's culture.  Amanda, who played the King of Judah, ended up with a stack of books too high to carry, since Judah kept making alliances with other nations.

In exchange for protection, Judah was to adhere to the customs and culture of the nations they were in alliances with.  Judah, therefore, was leaving behind their own faith in God as a result of these alliances.  When we try to keep too many people happy, things get chaotic and confusing and we often forget who we really are and what we really believe.  At the end of our "visual history" we didn't remember which "books" belonged to which nation and were confused, stressed and tired from carrying them all around. 

We split up into middle and high school groups and talked more in depth about God's message to Judah through Isaiah.  We realized that relying and trusting in people is not necessarily a bad thing...it's only harmful when we put our full trust in those who ask us to compromise our faith and beliefs in return.  We discussed other things that might cause our faith to become weak like the Judeans, and how we can work on eliminating or staying strong in our faith despite those things.  When we gathered back as a large group, we read Isaiah 40:28-31 together.  This Scripture passage offers us good news and words of hope and strength when we may be feeling weak or watered down in our faith.  Before going home, we each received a piece of paper with this Scripture passage printed on it so that we could continue to reflect on Isaiah throughout the week.

Then we went down to the social hall and had some fun running around playing games.  Take a look:

  Don't forget THIS Sunday, February 6th, is our "Souper Bowl of Caring" mission collection for FACES during the 8:30 & 11am worship services, and our Super Bowl Party starting at 6pm Sunday night!  RSVP to me (Lyndsie) so I know how much pizza to get!