Bible Sunday School Lesson – God Makes Good Things Out of Garbage

This is a Bible Sunday school lesson you can use to teach how God can make greatness out of a mess.  Don’t give up on Him, because He’s not giving up on you.

Sunday School Lesson: God Makes Good Things Out of Garbage

RELATED SCRIPTURES:
Hebrews 5:13

OBJECTS NEEDED:
Special Notes: This lesson works best in either a kitchen, but a crock pot and microwave will suffice.Heat the already-prepared soup as you’re giving the lesson.

Leftover chicken carcass from night before dinner; your favorite soup recipe, which ought to include something like 2 carrots, 2 onions, 1 cup pre-boiled soup noodles, 2 stalks celery, one container of soup starter, salt, pepper. Crock pot or stew pot, access to a microwave. One batch of chicken soup prepared earlier – enough for each child to have a cup. Cups, napkins and spoons, one for each child.

SUNDAY SCHOOL LESSON PREPARATION:
You’re going to make chicken soup with your class. Anything relative to your own recipe should be added to what’s above. As with most cooking shows, you’ll start the preparations and rather than wait for them to simmer, you’ll serve a pre-made batch.

SUNDAY SCHOOL LESSON:
Last night, my family had the most wonderful baked chicken for dinner! Yummy! Look what I’ve brought in today for you guys.

Open the bag where you’ve stored the carcass. Have everyone look at it. Now it just looks like a big old mess! It looks like something we’d want to throw out, doesn’t it? And if we don’t do something with it soon, it will spoil. Then, it will have to be thrown out!

Sometimes we make a mess of our day. We end up feeling a lot like this carcass: mushy and eaten alive and almost ready for the garbage. I’ve woken up some mornings with the best of intentions. I wanted to be a good Christian and be kind to others and make the best use of my day. But I’d find that a couple of my kids were sick and the washer was broken and foul moods prevailed around the house. Nothing got done, I felt worn out and exhausted”¦and like it would just be good to throw the whole day out and start
over. Ever have a day like that? Where everything went wrong and you ended up feeling like a carcass? Take examples from the students.

That’s where God comes in. God can take all the bad and make something good out of it.

Put the carcass in the crock pot.

Did you know that in the Bible, the cleansing of the Holy Spirit is often symbolized by water? What church ritual do we still practice today that has to do with water? Baptism.

We’re going to “˜baptize’ this carcass like God baptizes us. And that’s the start of making a new creation out of an almost rotten life!

Measure in your water and soup starter, according to the recipe. Follow soup starter instructions for correct heat.

Why do we put vegetables in soup? They’re good for you. Which tastes better in soup? The chicken chunks or the vegetables? Most should say the chunks of chicken.

Not everything God asks us to do “feels good.” Sometimes he asks us to be kind to others when it would be easier to snub them or be mean. But it’s good for us to do what he says. We’re adding vegetables now, because they’re good for us – like obedience is good for us.

Have some students cut up vegetables or simply add them if you have cut them earlier.

God wants us to be strong. He also wants us to be smart”¦or wise. Hebrews 5:13 says, “Anyone who lives on milk, being an infant still, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid meat is for the mature, who have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.” He’s making a metaphor. He’s saying that babies’ milk is like the easy things in life, and meat is like spiritual maturity.

We all want to grow up feeling spiritually strong, and our soup needs to give us physical strength.
That’s why we add these chicken chunks.

Have some students cut up chicken you pulled from the carcass or add the pre-cut chunks.

Even if we’re having fun in life, that joy doesn’t last unless we’re filled up with the Holy Spirit. God provides the Holy Spirit, and the word most used in the Bible to describe what happens to us is “filled.”To be “filled” with the Holy Spirit means to be filled with his love and guidance and wisdom. Without the Holy Spirit, we’d be really bland. Our soup needs filler too. That’s why we put in noodles. They’re the part that will fill us up.

Add pre-cooked noodles.

Finally, we need surprises to make our Christian lives complete.
Sometimes we think we have to get up and go to school and we find”¦it snowed outside! That’s one of God’s many ways of saying that we need good surprises – we need reasons to celebrate. They’re known as “the spices of life.” The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms states that the saying, ‘the salt of the earth’ is used today for ‘a person or persons of great kindness, reliability or honesty’. We want to be those people,
so we’re adding spices, and most especially, salt.

Add spices, salt, pepper.

Have you heard the expression, “You’re like a teabag”¦not worth much until you’ve been through some hot water”? That’s a famous saying, and it means that you need to go through some hard things in life to develop strength and depth of character. Lots of times, those character building experiences are referred to as “heat.” Let’s “put the heat” on our football team so they’ll win Saturday. The teacher was hard anyway, but he “turned up the heat,” giving us a quiz every Monday. We’re going to put heat on our soup to make it strong and hearty, just like we should be in life.

Add heat and let simmer.

This soup would take all day to cook properly. And that’s another ingredient of becoming like Jesus – patience. We change slowly. We grow slowly. Just because we’re not like Jesus today doesn’t mean we won’t be like him after years pass”¦if we have patience.

And we have plenty of patience. However, we’re out of time. Therefore I’m serving you a delicious batch of this soup that I made earlier”¦

Serve soup in cups with spoons and napkins.

Will you be trying this Sunday school lesson with your class?  Leave your comments below.  And don’t forget to Follow me on Twitter, where I will share more free Sunday school lesson ideas!