A few weeks ago we took a brief dip in our homeschool Bible lessons into the book of 2 Thessalonians. I’ll freely admit this was in preparation for our Sunday School lesson, and let me work out the best way to teach my 2 Thessalonians lesson to the kids. It’s a tricky book, and not one we teach to young kids often. I’ll be honest, we don’t often teach 2 Thessalonians to adults.
What is 2 Thessalonians about?
It’s actually about a lot of different things, but it has one of the big passages people point to when they talk about end times. But to give you a quick overview of the book:
- Hi Thessalonians, I’m writing you a letter and I’m so thankful for you and your church.
- Calm down Jesus didn’t already come, and you didn’t miss Him.
- Please pray for me, and don’t be lazy, keep working.
That’s it, it’s a pretty short book, and that last tip about keep working actually goes back to chapter 2 where Paul talks about the End Times.
Why Teach End Times?
There are a lot of Christians who wonder why even teach this stuff? I mean, we can’t know when it’s going to happen, and for all, we know it’s not going to happen in our lifetime.
There are a couple of things to say in response to that:
- When Jesus came the first time He was sorely disappointed in all of the Jews who studied the Bible but hadn’t bothered to realize what the prophecies meant.
- We’re supposed to study the WHOLE Bible, which means even the parts that are hard to understand.
- Here’s what Paul said in 2 Thessalonians 2:2 “not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by the teaching allegedly from us—whether by a prophecy or by word of mouth or by letter—asserting that the day of the Lord has already come.”
So, we dug into this difficult topic. We talked through some of the bigger theories, and how we can’t know when this will happen, but we can know the types of things that are going to happen.
2 Thessalonians 2 activity
After all that time talking about people who will come and try to trick people by sounding like Jesus, but not actually following the Bible, we decided to give them a challenge.
Jeff wrote up four different mistranslations of the Lord’s Prayer. Each one was wrongly translated for a specific purpose. Then we gave the kids each one of the translations to see what they could find.
They studied them for a while, and noticed it sounded similar, but not quite the same.
One passage was pretty much a veiled prayer that was very self-centered. While it may have addressed God, it sure wasn’t about God.
Another passage seemed to think God was the permissive parent who gave you whatever you wanted just because you said please. I think we’ve all known that parent at some time in our lives.
On the other end of the spectrum was the all-powerful God who was angry. You know, the one people call the “Old Testament God” who smites everyone.
This one was a great discussion because in many ways it is the least changed, but the tone is very different.
While my kids at home were able to pick out the different things in the variations that were wrong, and what each person was going for with their mistranslation, but it was a real challenge for my Sunday School class. They might have done better if we had a higher teacher/student ratio, but it worked fairly decently.
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2 Thessalonians lesson printable
I really only created just the Lord’s prayer printable for our 2 Thessalonians lesson, that’s all so far.
An interesting follow through for this for older kids would be discussing actual people who tried (and trying now) to exalt themselves over everything. Very deep lesson!
I did actually have a few people in mind in the church as I was writing this lesson. It would be a great follow-on for teens.
Thank you for this, We are doing 2nd Thessalonians in our Sunday school this Sunday and I can’t think of a better activity for the older Sunday School kids.
God bless you