Deborah. October 25-26, Judges 4-5, Isaiah 40:31 Adventure Bible (pp , 793) God never leaves his family.

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1 rd 3 5 October 25-26, 2014 Judges 4-5, Isaiah 40:31 Adventure Bible (pp , 793) Connect Time (15 minutes): Five minutes after the service begins, split kids into groups and begin their activity. Large Group (30 minutes): Begin 20 minutes after the service starts. Model what it looks like to be engaged in large group. th Deborah God never leaves his family. Think of a time when you were unsure or worried about how something would turn out, and you had to trust God to take care of it for you. Share this with the kids to help them recognize how important it is to know that God never leaves us. Small Group (15 minutes): Keep kids in small groups until parents arrive. If you all have extra time at the end, you can review the video and songs together. Ask kids to show you the details of their swords, and how they re going to trust God to help them. Decide as a team ahead of time who will be leading the Connect Time activity since it s a large group activity and requires AV needs.

2 Goal: Connect Time is all about engaging kids in an activity that allows them to connect with each other right away while simultaneously piquing their curiosity for Large Group and preparing their minds for what they re going to hear. MEMORY I SPY *Stay in a large group for this activity. A leader will need to be in charge of changing slides and leading the activity, while another leader will need to pass out paper and pens. You can also stay in small groups, and use the printouts instead of the slide. Gather everyone into a large group, and announce that you re going to play a memory game. Have kids break up into groups of 3, and hand each group a piece of paper and a pen. Tell kids that you re going to show a picture on the screen, and the kids have to memorize as many objects in the picture as possible for 1 minute. After the minute is up, each group will work together to write down as many objects as they can remember. Click to show the first slide (it will play with music for 1 minute). o If you decide to stay in small groups, hand out ispy printouts (1 per each group of 3 kids). Click to show the Kids Club logo (it will play with music for 3 minutes) and let groups write down what they remember during that time. After the music stops, invite one person from each group to stand up and read what they wrote down. Whoever remembers the most correct objects wins! After you re done, tell groups to talk about 2 things: 1) What things do you often forget? and 2) What things do you always remember? Before you head into Large Group, remind them about your expectations for their behavior: (1) be kind, (2) listen when somebody speaks, and (3) follow the leader s instructions.

3 Goal: Kids will (1) retell the story of Deborah, (2) know that God never leaves his family, and (3) understand how they can trust God to rescue them in their own lives. Why: God is not only always with us, but he has gone ahead and prepared a way for us. We can trust him to always be here. Tip: The story today has a lot of characters and scenes. Be sure to repeat over and over how God was with his people the whole time, just like he s always with us. REVIEW AND DIG DEEPER: *Pass around a bean bag to the person who s speaking. Each group member should be prepared to hold the bean bag and answer questions. 1. What did the Israelites do over and over again? 2. How did Barak respond when Deborah told him to take the troops to battle? 3. Why did God say that a woman would get the honor and not Barak? 4. How did God help the Israelites defeat their enemy? 5. Do you think God can help you win your own battles? How? 6. What could we do when we don t feel God close to us? GOD FIGHTS FOR US Give each kid a piece of paper, markers, and jewel stickers. Say that we are going to draw a sword. This sword represents how God defeated the enemy for his people in today s story, and how he ll win the battles that we have to fight in our own lives! Before they decorate the sword, tell kids to write one thing on it that they need God s help with. It could be the thing they prayed about in large group, or something different that they re worried or scared about. After they ve written that, they can design the sword with a special handle, patterns, pictures, jewel stickers, etc. Encourage them to go all out and make it a sword they would want to fight in an epic battle with! (Continued on next page)

4 Prayer Ask God to help us never forget that he is always with us, and that we can trust him to help fight our battles. Extra time? Memorize Isaiah 40:31 as a group by writing in on a piece of paper and having the group repeat it out loud. Cross out one word, then repeat it as a group again. Keep crossing out words until kids can say the verse on their own!

5 1 Emphasize parts of today s story by moving around the stage, walking through the kids, and raising and lowering your voice at strategic times. The worship videos can be found here: I m Yours: Jesus Loves Me: *Click to play intro music Hey guys! Welcome to Kids Club, we re so glad you re here today. We had to use our brains to do a little memorizing for that game, didn t we? Well I m going to ask you to remember a little bit more. Can anyone remember what your group forgets a lot? (Call on 1 or 2 kids to respond.) Okay, can anyone remember what your group remembers a lot? (Call on 1 or 2 kids to respond.) All right, thanks everybody! THE ISRAELITES FORGET Today we re going to talk about God s family, the Israelites, who also had to remember a lot of things. Unfortunately, they forgot the most important thing ever. It was more important than remembering to do home work (click to show slide), more important than remembering your best friend s birthday (click to show slide), and more important than remembering to feed your pet (click to show slide)! Does anyone want to guess what the Israelites forgot? (Call on a kid to respond.) They forgot that God was with them! Even after God saved them so many times, they still forgot. In fact, they developed a bad habit of forgetting, and then remembering, and then forgetting again! Here s what happened: They would rebel against God, which means they forgot him and disobeyed him. Then they would repent, and turn away from the bad things they were doing after they realized what they had done. Then they would be restored when God delivered them out of trouble. Restored means made things right again. Rebel, repent, restore! They repeated this over and over and over again. Let s try a little game to remember this. Everybody stand up and do these motions with me: Rebel: Stomp your feet, shake your fist and yell out angrily! Repent: Kneel down on the ground and bow your head. Restore: Jump up and down and cheer!

6 Okay, I m going to say rebel, repent, and restore; whenever I say those words, you have to do the motion that goes along with them! Ready? Rebel, repent, restore, rebel, repent, restore (Say each of these words, starting slowly, then going faster and faster until it s too fast to do; you can also switch up the words to trick the kids!). Whew, good job guys! GOD SENDS JUDGES So how did God save his people from all the trouble they were getting into? He sent judges. What do you all think a judge is? (Let a kid respond). That s right! In modern day times, a judge is a person who sits in a courtroom and decides whether people are punished for their crimes. This is what you would probably think a judge looks like (click to show slide of a judge). But the judges that God sent were very different. We re going to watch a video about all the different judges God sent to his people, and I want you to try and spot the one judge that is different from all the rest. VIDEO: WHAT S IN THE BIBLE/JUDGES (5:44-8:15) Does anyone remember some of the names of the Judges that were in that song? (Let kids respond.) Yep, there were a lot of them. 12 total! The one that we re going to talk about today is named Deborah! Now what do you think is special about Deborah that s different from the rest of the judges? (Let kids try to guess that she s a woman.) That s right, she s a female judge, the only one! INTRO: DEBORAH Deborah was a very cool woman. As a judge, she led the Israelites and helped them get out of trouble. She was a prophetess, which means she heard words from God and told people about them. She also led the Israelite army! While Deborah was a judge, the Israelites were rebelling. They were disobeying God and worshipping false idols. They had completely forgotten that God was with them, so God had to let a nearby king rule over them. This king was cruel and did not treat them well, and he had a huge, powerful army. The Bible says he had 900 iron chariots! Does anybody know what a chariot is? (Let kids raise their hands.) Let s watch a video to see what that would be like! VIDEO: BEN-HUR CHARIOT RACE Wow! Those chariots are pretty intense! And the king had 900 of them in his army! Do you know how many the Israelites had? (Let kids guess.) They had zero! As you can imagine, it would be kind of scary to face such a big army. But God had a plan to rescue his family. Unfortunately, his family had forgotten that God was with them. BARAK DOUBTS GOD When the king s army was ready to attack the Israelites, Deborah asked a man named Barak to take 10,000 men out to fight them. She said that God himself was commanding Barak to fight the kings army, and that God would win the battle for them! How do you think Barak responded to that? Was he excited? (Let kids guess.) Well, unfortunately, he totally chickened out! He didn t believe that God would be with him when he went out. He doubted God.

7 Let s see what happened next. Can I have a volunteer to read this verse? (Call on a kid to read the verse.) SLIDE: Judges 4: 8-9: Barak said to her, If you go with me, I will go; but if you don t go with me, I won t go. Certainly I will go with you, said Deborah. But because of how you re going about this, the honor will not be yours, for the Lord will deliver the enemy into the hands of a woman. Wow, so God is going to deliver the enemy into the hands of a woman instead of Barak. You know, back then, that would be really embarrassing for him. It would show that he wasn t in command! Can someone tell me why the enemy would be defeated by a woman instead of Barak? (Let a kid respond.) You re right, it s because Barak doubted God! He didn t trust that God would do what he said we would do! He forgot that God is ALWAYS with us no matter what. GOD DELIVERS THE ENEMY Here comes the exciting part. The enemy s army went out to the battlefield with all their chariots and soldiers and swords, thinking they could easily defeat God s people. Deborah and Barak also led their army out to the battlefield. It seemed impossible that they could defeat such a huge army! But they trusted that God was with them. This is what Deborah said to Barak as they were about to attack: SLIDE: Judges 4:14: Then Deborah said to Barak, Go! This is the day the Lord has given the enemy into your hands. Has not the Lord gone ahead of you? (Click to play loop of a storm while you talk.) God had a plan to rescue his people. He sent a powerful storm, and the nearby river flooded so the enemy was trapped in a small space where the Israelites could defeat every last one of them! What an amazing battle! Can you believe that Barak ever doubted that God was with him? Well the story doesn t end here. The commander of the enemy s army was so scared that he ran away! He ended up hiding in the tent of a woman named Jael. This was the woman that God said would defeat the enemy, so Jael killed the commander while he was sleeping. God did exactly what he said he would. GOD NEVER LEAVES HIS FAMILY God never left the Israelites, not once. And he never leaves us either. No matter what hard things we go through, or what scares us, we can trust in him because he is with us. He has gone out ahead of us and prepared the way, so we don t need to be afraid! Everyone close your eyes and lay on your back. I want you to think of something that you re worried about, or that you re scared of doing. Once you ve got it, silently talk to God about it. Ask him to fight for you, and to help you trust him no matter what. (Give kids 1-2 minutes to pray. You could also do this exercise yourself along with them.)

8 Deborah celebrated God s victory by worshipping him with a song, it s called the Song of Deborah! We re going to do the same thing. Let s worship God with music because he has promised that he will always be with us. VIDEO: I m Yours VIDEO: Jesus Loves Me PRAYER God, thank you for assuring us that you will never leave us. We are so glad that we have a God who will fight for us when we are afraid or lonely. We love you. Amen!

9 Per groups of 3 kids: 1 piece of paper, 1 pen, 1 ispy handout (print keynote image in color on cardstock) Per kid: 1 piece of paper, 5 jewel stickers (IN-9/1205) Per group: Markers, 1 bean bag, 1 Adventure Bible (pp , 793) None 1. Song slide: for when kids enter the room (All that You Need instrumental; mp3 only; can be downloaded on website) 2. Slide: I Spy (put slide over attached music video for 1 minute) ( ) 3. Slide: Kids Club logo (put slide over attached music video for 3 minutes) ( 4. Slide: Homework 5. Slide: Birthday 6. Slide: Pet 7. Slide: Judge 8. Video: What s in the Bible (Judges): 5:44-8:15 9. Video: Chariot Race: Movie-Clip-Chariot-Race-Action.html 10. Slide: Judges 4: 8-9: Barak said to her, If you go with me, I will go; but if you don t go with me, I won t go. Certainly I will go with you, said Deborah. But because of how you re going about this, the honor will not be yours, for the Lord will deliver the enemy into the hands of a woman. 11. Slide: Judges 4:14: Then Deborah said to Barak, Go! This is the day the Lord has given the enemy into your hands. Has not the Lord gone ahead of you? 12. Video loop: Storm Video: I m Yours: Video: Jesus Loves Me: When is God with you? Tell me about Deborah. Daily talk starts - separate doc