Praise

This past Sunday in Kids Church (1st-6th grade), we continued our Build-a-Prayer series.  The focus of this series is to teach kids how to communicate and connect with God through prayer.

In this second week of our series, we talked about praising God.  The kids learned that when we praise God, we show him the respect he deserves.  We explained that God desires a relationship with us, and when we focus on praising him first, rather than just giving him a list of requests, we express that are love for him is more important than our needs.

We talked about the book of Psalms and focused on Psalm 100, which teaches us to enter God's presence with a joyful song.

In our small groups, we discussed the following questions:

• What's the best compliment you've ever received?  We talked about the nice things that people have said about us and the way we felt about it.

• Why do we praise when we pray?  We explained to the kids that when we praise God, we let him know that we love him and that praise is a sign that we have a real relationship.  We went around our group and had each kid come up with at least one praise for God, and explained that because God is so amazing, it isn't difficult to find ways to praise him.

• How do we give God the honor and respect he deserves?  We explained to the kids that God should be #1 in our lives.  As a group, we talked about things that keep us from making God our highest priority.  The kids learned that when we pray without praising, we are making our wants and needs #1, instead of God.

Our verse for this week is Psalm 100:2 - "Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs."