Repent

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 third week of our series, we talked about repenting.  The kids learned that when we talk to God, we need to make sure that we deal with any sin in our hearts.  We explained that repenting means to ask for forgiveness for our sins, and then stop doing it.

We talked about the story of the Prodigal Son, and the kids learned that in order to truly repent, that must recognize that they are headed down the wrong road, and then turn around and go the other direction.

In our small groups, we discussed the following questions:

• Have you ever tried to stop doing something?  We talked about times that the kids tried to completely stop doing something that they knew was wrong.

• Why is it so important to repent when we pray?  We explained to the kids that in our relationship with God, sin always gets between us, so we need to repent so that we are talking to Him with a pure heart.  As a group, we came up with a list of sins that are the most difficult for us to stop doing.  We encouraged the kids not to give up, no matter how difficult it is.

• How do you break a sinful habit?  We explained to the kids that getting sin out of our lives takes more than just stopping what we're doing.  Repenting means that we turn and go the other way.  We discussed some steps that we should take when trying to eliminate sin from our lives (ex., pray about it, read Bible regularly, find a new activity to replace the old one, talk to parents, etc.).  We encouraged the kids to repent when they pray this week, and to know that God promises to always forgive us and give us the strength we need.

Our verse for this week is 1 John 1:9 - "But if we confess our sins to God, he can always be trusted to forgive us and take away our sins."