Hosea

Hosea for 3-5s

Theme: God loves you even though you sin

Story:

Today we’re going to look at what a man called Hosea said. [get them to say Hosea]

Hosea lived a long time ago and spoke to God’s people. [could have Hosea puppet to say the next bit]

God loves you. God loves [name] and [name] etc.

And because God is the most important person in the world God is to be your best friend. You are to love Him more than anyone else in all the world.

But Hosea also says there is a problem.

Often other things are more important to us than God, and that makes God sad.

Often we forget about God, even though He is our best friend, and that makes God sad.

It also makes God angry and we need to say sorry for this.

But Hosea also says that even when we don’t treat God as our best friend He still loves us and He’s longing for us to make Him the most important person in our life. And that’s why God sent Jesus to save us.

We must love Him with all our hearts, souls, mind and strength.

What a great thing Hosea has told us this morning. Let’s say thank you to God for His great love, sorry for all the things we’ve done wrong, and ask Him to help us make God our best friend always.

Songs:

Jesus’ love is very wonderful

Jesus loves me, this I know

Activities:

Heart collage with ‘God’ in the middle and theme sentence at bottom

Colouring picture of Hosea saying theme sentence

 

Hosea for 5-11s

Theme: God loves you even though you sin

Intro:

• Friendship game
• Get the idols out of the area

Story:

• Historical background – Before Jesus, God’s kingdom split in two, Israel about to be wiped out by Assyria
• Introduce Hosea – God’s prophet or messenger sent to speak to God’s people [could dress one up]
• Hosea told to take a best friend, Gomer, whom he was to love and care for
• Gomer runs away and ignores him and makes lots of other best friends
• Hosea very sad
• This is like God; He had loved and chosen His people but they had run off and worshipped other Gods. God was very sad.
• Yet despite their sin God kept loving them very much
• We should see that when we make other things more important than God it is just as bad as this. (think of examples)
• Yet God still loves us and keeps calling us back to being committed to Him. And he’s shown us this particularly in Jesus dying and rising to save us.

Table time:

• 7-11s – Funsheet on Hosea 1:1-2
• All – big sheet: ‘God’ in the middle with lines of love towards each of them. Then get them to write/draw/stick things which may take God’s place around them.