Purpose: Use this children’s sermon on the Fall to teach kids how to ask God for forgiveness.
Scripture: Genesis 3:12-13
Needed: any small object
Children’s Sermon
Show students your object and tell them that you want to play a game with them. You’re going to hand them the object and then you’re going to close your eyes for three seconds. Their goal is to pass the object around and hide it so that you won’t know who has the object when you open your eyes. Tell them that when you open your eyes, you’re going to try to guess who has it. Their goal again is to keep you from knowing who really has it.
Start the game and count to three out loud. On three, open your eyes and try to guess who has it. If you guess wrong, ask that student which of their peers has it. If they catch on, they’ll lie to you. If they tell you the truth, reiterate that their goal is to keep you from knowing who really has it and play again.
When they mislead you and you finally guess who has the object, point out that they did a good job of pointing the finger at others.
Say, The same thing happened in the Bible. After the snake tempted the first man and woman to eat from the tree that God told them not to eat from, they both blamed someone else.
(Read Genesis 3:12-13 , quoted here in the NIV.) “The man said, ‘The woman You put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.'”
“Then the Lord God said to the woman, ‘What is this you have done?'”
“The woman said, ‘The serpent deceived me, and I ate.'”
Did you hear that? The man blamed the woman and the woman blamed the snake, just like all of you blamed everyone else having my item.
But who do you think should get in trouble in the story, the man, the woman, or the snake?
The snake should get in trouble because he tempted the woman to do something that God told her not to. The woman should get in trouble because she did the thing that God told her not to. And the man should get in trouble because also did the thing that God told them not to.
All three of them did something wrong, and God punished all three of them, even though the man and woman both tried to blame on it someone else.
So, instead of blaming their wrong actions on someone else, what should the man and woman have done?
They should have told they were sorry for what they did. And that’s what we should do. Instead of blaming other people for the wrong things we do, we should simply tell God that we’re sorry, and He’ll forgive us.
Closing Prayer
Father God, we thank You for the story of Adam and Eve, the first man and woman. We pray that You’ll help us to learn from them not to blame other people or things when we do something wrong, but to simply admit what we did and ask You to forgive us. We thank You that You’ll always forgive us when we’re honest with You. Amen.
You can also find this children’s sermon for Kindle or in print in my book, Children’s Sermons about the Fall and the Flood