Purpose: Use this children’s sermon on Joseph and his brothers to teach kids how God always works things out for good.
Scripture: Genesis 37-50
Needed: a picture of people helping each during a natural disaster and a picture of people helping each other after a natural disaster
Children’s Sermon
Recall any recent or historically significant natural disaster. Talk about how it destroyed homes and caused damage around the community. Talk about how awful it was.
Then, ask, Why do you think God lets things that happen? Does anything good come out of bad situations like that?
(Show your pictures and talk about how people get the opportunity to help others during and after a disaster.) Say, God is very happy when people help each other, and that’s one good thing that comes out of bad situations.
Joseph was a man who found himself in a bad situation once. His own brothers got jealous of him when his father, Jacob, gave him a new cloak. In fact, his brothers were so jealous of him that they were going to kill him, but, instead, they sold him as a slave into Egypt.
More bad things happened to Joseph while he was in Egypt, and, even though he didn’t do anything wrong, he was thrown into prison.
How would you like for all of those bad things to happen to you?
But years, later, God used Joseph to warn the people of Egypt about a time when there wouldn’t be enough food. He made a plan to keep all the people of Egypt from starving and Pharaoh made him the second-in-charge of the whole country.
That’s a big change, isn’t it? He went from being a slave to being a prisoner to being the second-of-charge of the country of Egypt. But he wouldn’t have been in Egypt to save the people and become the second-in-charge if all of those bad things didn’t happen to him in the first place.
So, God used Joseph’s bad situation for something really good. Joseph himself said the same thing to his brothers many years later.
(Read Genesis 50:20 , quoted here in the NIV.) “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”
So, when bad things happen to us, we should have faith that God is going to bring something good out of that bad situation.
Closing Prayer
Lord, you are the all-powerful God who is always working for our good. You can even bring good things out of bad situations. We pray that You’ll help us to trust You when bad things happen because we know that You’re still working and that You have a plan. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
You can also find this children’s sermon for Kindle or in print in my book, The People Build a Tower, but God Builds a Family