Advent adventure #4
Your mission: Join another family and sing Christmas carols on a street corner in your neighborhood, or attend a Christmas Eve worship service.
For this final Advent adventure, you may prefer to have your Bible reading and discussion time before heading out on your carol-singing mission.
Bible reading: Read Luke 2:1-20.
Discussion guide:
Would you like to quit school and wander the countryside every day, helping a herd of sheep find fresh green grass?
Would you be scared to sit in the dark all night long, watching over your sheep?
Would you be brave enough to scare away hungry wolves and stray dogs who wanted to attack the sheep?
At first, just one angel appeared to the shepherds. The Bible says that when the angel appeared, "glory" shone all around the shepherds. Where did the glory come from? Was it from the angel?
What did the angel tell the shepherds?
Did the angel specifically tell the shepherds to go looking for the baby Jesus? Why do you think they went to find Jesus?
In Bible times, wealthy owners of flocks of sheep often hired other people to care for their sheep. Sometimes, the sheep owner would send his own children out to the fields to look after the family’s sheep. It’s possible some of the shepherds who saw the angels were children as young as ten years old.
The shepherds believed the angel’s message. Then they decided to do something about it: they went to see the baby Jesus for themselves. Everything they had been afraid of – that their sheep would get lost, or that wolves might steal some sheep by night – no longer worried the shepherds. They left their sheep because seeing Jesus was much more important, and no one wanted to miss out.
Mary and Joseph must have been amazed and encouraged to hear the shepherd’s story. The Bible says that Mary never forgot what the shepherds told her. The people in the town must have been amazed to hear the shepherds’ story too. They would have remembered the stories from long ago, telling how God’s glory had often been seen at the temple in Jerusalem. But at the time of Jesus’ birth, hardly anyone had seen God’s glory in over 400 years. Secondly, no one expected God’s promised Saviour to come, at that time, born as a baby. To the people in the town, all this meant one amazing thing: God is with us!
As we said earlier, some of the shepherds may have been only about ten years old. But their young age didn’t prevent them from being used by God. They simply believed God’s message, and told others what they knew about God. You can do that too. When someone you love is having a tough time, simply reminding them that God is with them can make a big difference. And when you worship Jesus in public places, or share about Him with others who don’t know Him, you start people thinking, Could it be true? Is Jesus really God’s Son? Maybe I should start looking into this.
[Close with a time of prayer before heading out to praise Jesus together.]