E-KIDS 1st Grade Lessons: July 23, 2017

Tony & Michelle Pawlak

MEMORY VERSE

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord

Romans 6:23

As Christians, we use words like SALVATION, REDEEMED, FORGIVEN, and other words that can be hard to understand. Have you ever found yourself wondering what these words meant? Me too. So, today we’re going to talk about them.

Heaven us a perfect place and to stay perfect, only perfect things can be there, right? Good thing God made us perfect. Here’s the problem; since Adam and Eve let sin into the world, we all have the ability to sin. The Bible says that everyone has sinned and is no longer good enough to get into Heaven. This is so sad because the wages (wages are what you earn for doing something) is DEATH!

However, God had a plan for this. The Bible tells us that God loved us so much that He gave His only Son Jesus to pay for our sins so we can be perfect again. All we have to do is believe that Jesus is the Son of God (and also God Himself), and that God raised Him from the dead. Even though the wages of sin is death, the free gift of God is eternal (lasts forever) life through Jesus. Jesus died on the cross to pay for our sins.(ref. John 3:16 & Romans 10:9)

But how does that work? How does Jesus dying on the cross help us? The Bible tells us that when we first sinned we became slaves to sin(ref. Romans 6:20 & John 8:34). That means that sin OWNED US! The only way to pay for our sins was with our eternal lives. That means we’d be paying for our sins in a place called Hell forever. When Jesus died on the cross, He used His death to pay for our sins because He had no sins of His own (ref. 2nd Corinthians 5:21). He would have been dead forever but God raised Him from the dead on the third day and conquered death. Now we don’t have to die.

By doing this, Jesus REDEEMED us (ref. I Peter 1:18-19). What does redeemed mean? It means to buy something back. Jesus’s death bought us back from sin and now we belong to God. That means we get to live our eternal lives with God forever! HOW AWESOME!

Jesus didn’t wait until He thought we were good enough.

We could never be good enough to earn what Jesus gave us freely. The Bible says that Jesus died for us while we were still sinners! (ref. Romans 5:8) That is an incredible kind of love, don’t you think? Now we have a choice to accept Jesus’s free gift of being saved from paying for our own sins in Hell or rejecting it and paying for them ourselves.

Why can’t we just erase our own sin with good works? Think of yourself as a perfect piece of dough. When you sin it’s like you get some dirt in the dough and it becomes part of the dough. The dough is no longer perfect and you cannot separate the dough from the dirt. What do you do? You decide to try to make up for the dirt buy adding in chocolate chips and sprinkles (good works) to the dough. This looks better but it doesn’t get rid of the dirt. It is always there. Too bad we can’t go back in time and stop ourselves from getting dirty.

So what do we do? The Bible says that when we accept Jesus’s gift of SALVATION (Being saved from paying for our

sins) we put on Jesus like clothes. Our good deeds are like dirty rags compared to Jesus so He lets us wear His RIGHTEOUSNESS (all the good things that we do and say and are)(ref. Galatians 3:27). Now when we leave this world and stand in front of God, He doesn’t see our sins. He only sees the righteousness of Jesus. All of our sins are paid for and forgotten forever!

So now is the time for your choice. If you choose to accept

Jesus’s free gift, then remember what the Bible says: because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Romans 10:9

If you ask Jesus to save you He will not say no. In fact, the Bible says: For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Romans 10:13

Let’s all choose Jesus so we can belong to Him. Then we