Heavy Duty Love

Let sec 1s do survey first (Yipeng will upload this, so please be patient and wait)

Hook: Ranking different acts of love (print and cut out the flash cards provided)

Let them work together as a group to arrange the flash cards in terms of 1.

how ‘great’ the act of love is, and then ask them to 2. classify them into the 3 groups:

Agape, Phileo, and Eros.

If they cannot remember what the three types of love ... then you can do a quick

recap of the Hugs and Kisses lesson.

There is no fixed set of answers for the flashcard hook so it would be based on how you leaders perceive the types/ rankings of love to be. It's easier for you to explain to the kids why some acts of love you would rank before others.

The aim of the hook is to simply show them some examples that we think the kids

would be familiar and would be able to relate to of the 3 types of love.

Lesson:

If the kids do not have a definite answer to that question then continue to ask them why do we want to make that choice to love in the first place?

1 John 4:19

Because God first loved us and he is love. If we say we love him we must respond by loving the people around us.

So back to whether to or not we can and should love an enemy?

1 John 4:11-12

Love has to be demonstrated and that is why the response to God’s love comes in here by making a choice to love one another including your enemy. Verse 12 shows that also just by loving one another we are in fact winning people over for God because they would be able to see God in us.

Yes, it seems as though some acts of love would involve more emotions than others but that does not mean that since love should be a choice that emotional love is bad. God never makes mistakes and it was him who made us with emotions which set us apart from robots and computers. However this does not discount the fact that we have to still love those we do not like or are just difficult to love can be challenging. We need to enlist God’s help to do this and we do this through prayer.

3. Refer to Survey qn 1: showing their answers, ask them how important are emotions when loving (or trying to love) an enemy(or someone difficult to love)?

Matt 5:43-48

This should shed some insight to whether emotions are important when we are trying to love an enemy. From 46-47 its clear, Jesus said that anyone on earth can give emotional love because that is human nature that you love those who love you.

So we are challenged to do something that is really difficult for us to do: love when it is difficult to. We feel like it's not in our nature to do it. That is why only through God can we accomplish such acts, that is EXPECTED of us as Christians.

Agape being sacrificial and unconditional love. Agape love is love of God and from God, who is love to begin with (1 John 4:8). Give them concrete examples of conditional love to illustrate this point.

So basically this is the conclusion for today’s lesson that even though it might be so tough to love someone that we dislike God did not just command us to do so without showing us how The people in the verses did not deserve his love, we do not deserve his love because we are sinners but God LOVES us UNCONDITIONALLY. God showed Agape love in that he sent His son down to die for our sins even though we didn’t deserve it at all. Therefore in the same way we are to show that love to others around us that might not deserve that love because God loves us and to show that we love him, we have to love his people too.

Daena's note: You could also end by having the kids identify one person in their lives (a classmate, a sibling etc) whom they find difficult to love. Challenge them to think about how much God loves this person in spite of the fact that the kids find him/her unlovable, and challenge them to start loving that person the way God loves us.

LINKS:

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Optional (a story that you might like to share with your kids)

It is the true tale of what took place in the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp made

famous by the movie The Bridge On the River Kwai. The camp stood at the end of the Bataan death march that brought Allied soldiers deep into the jungles of Asia. Few would survive, and everyone knew it. In order to make the best of a terrible situation they teamed up in pairs, each watching out for a buddy.

One prisoner was a strapping six-foot-three fellow built like a tower of iron. If any could come out of this alive, all felt he would. That was before his buddy got malaria. The smaller fellow was much weaker, and very likely to die. Their captors did not want to deal with sickness, so anyone who was unable to work was confined in a “hot house” until he succumbed to heat exhaustion, dehydration, and the collapse of his bodily systems.

The sick man was locked into a hothouse and left to die. Surprisingly, he did not die, because every mealtime his strong buddy went out to him, under curses and threats from the guards, and shared his meager rations. Every night, his strong buddy sneaked from the prison barracks, braved the watchful eyes above that held guns of death, and brought his own slim blanket to cover the fevered convulsions of the sick man.

At the end of two weeks the sick man astounded the guards by recovering well enough to be able to return to work. He even survived the entire camp experience and lived to tell about it. His buddy, however — the strong man all thought invincible — died very shortly of malaria, exposure and dysentery. He had given his life to save his friend.

The story does not end there. When the Allied troops liberated that camp at the close of the war in the Pacific virtually every prisoner was a Christian. There was a symphony orchestra in camp, with instruments made of the crudest materials. There were worship services every Sunday, and the death toll was far lower than any expected. All this because of the silent testimony made by a strong man toward his buddy facing death.

It is not so much what we say but how we live that will make a profound

difference in our world.

John Chrysotom, preaching in the early centuries of the church knew this: “Let us astound [the world] by our way of life. This is the unanswerable argument. Though we give 10,000 precepts in words, if we do not exhibit a far better life, we gain nothing. It is not what is said that draws their attention, but what we do. Let us win them therefore by our life.”

So in relation to the lesson, refer back to 1 John 4:12

What's the first step in winning people over for Christ? Loving them as Christ loves us.

-Gail & Petrina. (: