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Today’s hero is The Crippled woman because she shows us the gift of the Sabbath
Essential Teachers notes:
The Sabbath in this story turns from a day of freedom into a day of limitation and back into a day of freedom as Jesus enters the picture. Sabbath in new testament terms can appear plainly ridiculous to youngsters today, but it’s importance is not to be ridiculed rather questioned. Discuss the difference between wrong intentionally and misguided with your youngsters, challenge older children to examine how they can keep their Sabbath a holy time. As always this story is provided as a guide, do use the idea and specifics woven into your own words.
Main Passage : Luke 13
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Long ago, when the world was young, God look at all he had created and smiled. It was the 7th day and after all his hard work he rested. All those idea’s he had had were now free and living. It was good to stop creating and enjoy the view.
Years and years later God’s people were wandering through the desert with their leader Moses. Moses climbed a big mountain to talk to God and to ask him what his people should do. God wrote out 10 special rules for the people. 1 of those rules was about the Sabbath. The Sabbath was the 7th day in the week, a day of rest, a holy day. Just like the day when God stopped and looked at all he had created. God wanted the people to stop work for one day so they would be free to spend time with him.
But work was difficult to describe. For someone delivering goods, travelling a long distance is work, but what about visiting relatives? For a chef, cooking is work, but is cooking for your family work? As the years passed God’s people started to make rules about what was work and what you could or couldn’t do on the Sabbath.
By the time Jesus came to be with God’s people they had masses of rules about the Sabbath. You couldn’t cook, or light a candle, or blow a candle out. You couldn’t spit on the ground as you may be making mud (mud was used for bricks), and you could only travel 2 thousand steps. Adults couldn’t even look in a mirror because it may tempt them to pull out a grey hair. Lots of the rules sound silly to us now, but the religious leaders took them very seriously.
But, Jesus knew what it had been like on that first Sabbath. When everything was good and people weren’t trapped by the problems of the world. So when Jesus was preaching in a synagogue one Sabbath morning and saw a woman walk into the synagogue all bent over with a bad back, he decided to help. The woman had been unable to stand up straight for 18 years, but she knew that God loved her and that he wanted her to spend time with him in the synagogue on a Sabbath day. Jesus healed her. She stood up straight for the first time in years and started praising God for setting her free.
Can you imagine how the religious leaders would have felt. You can’t heal on the Sabbath, that was one of the rules. Do you think that was one of God’s rules?
Jesus reminded them that each day they untied their animals to let them have water, even on the Sabbath. Jesus was setting this woman, a child of God, free from what had tied her up for years. The religious leaders couldn’t argue with that, but they didn’t like it.
Our hero kept praising God, it was the Sabbath, Gods day, and she had met God in person, she had met Jesus.
Today’s hero is The Crippled woman because she shows us the gift of the Sabbath
