Kids are curious about heaven. They want to know to know if they'll see their pets, play video games, have bodies, and be able to fly. It captures their imaginations, and that's a great thing.
I don't know about you, but our Sunday School never got to this stuff. Each year started with Abraham (maybe Noah), finished Jesus in time for Easter, and saved something about Paul for VBS. Revelation was the stuff of mystery. Our youth group got to see "A Thief in the Night", but that was before I got there. So End Times remained cloudy, unknown and a little spooky.
But the truth is, End Times are not scary. They're not. And that's one of the themes of our series, which will carry us through the rest of the school year.
Here are the "Big Ideas" we want to communicate through the next 8 weeks:
- God has a BIG plan, and the life you live while on the earth is only the beginning.
- "God is with us" will take on a whole new meaning. Spiritually, God is with us now, yes, but when the Old Earth has passed away and God "makes all things new" (Revelation 21:5), God will actually live among his people. It's a tough thing for an 11-year-old to grasp why that's significant, and why life with God trumps life with video games, but that's what we're pressing in on.
- The End Times are exciting, not scary. The tribulation is scary. The deception of the nations is scary. But it all has a purpose - the execution of God's justice on the earth and the establishment of the new, eternal Heaven and Earth, where sin and evil are gone and there is no more "death or mourning or crying or pain". So...for that reason, we are teaching the End Times backwards, which is to say that we are starting at the end of the story and working our way back to now. The progression looks like this:
- The New Earth and Heaven will be absolutely perfect places
- In order to create the New Heaven and New Earth, the old earth must be rid of sin
- In order to rid the world of sin and evil, it must be judged
- In order to judge the world, the judge - who is Jesus - must return to the world
- The world will receive judgment and consequences for its rebellion - but - believers will be spared from this
4. Christians disagree about the timing and sequence of End Times events.
One more note: when you talk about End Times with your kid, it's ok to say "I don't know". I'll be doing that a lot. For one thing, the Bible isn't clear on when everything will happen or how or why. For another, many of their questions reveal an innocence about the nature of eternity or God's holiness or the sin and corruption of the world. Who can blame them? Kids just don't tend to think beyond the here and now. That's why these are, truly, uncharted waters. And if we can get them to think for a few minutes about what heaven is and why in the world anyone would want to go there and why it's a great thing to be with God and why we're limited in our ability to experience God while here on the earth...well, that's a really good thing.
