Are you ready to answer God’s call? an Isaiah lesson

I love to teach our Isaiah Sunday School lesson right before Christmas because so much of Isaiah is about Jesus, and many of the major christological (what do you mean that’s not a word spell check?) prophecies come from Isaiah’s book.  

Last week we learned about the minor prophets

Why teach an Isaiah lesson to kids?

I think there are two reasons to teach an Isaiah lesson to kids:

1. To show God keeps His promises, and how much the Jews had to look forward to as they waited for Jesus.
2. Isaiah makes a great call to serve God and tell others about God.

That’s an overly simplification of Isaiah, but those are the two big lessons I personally take from Isaiah.  So, let’s dig into the lesson.

As a warning, there are not as many hands-on elements to this lesson, but we had a few guest speakers in our Sunday School class this week.

Isaiah lesson 1: Go tell others

In Isaiah chapter 6, God calls Isaiah up to heaven and Isaiah sees God and all his wonder and says:

Then God speaks, “Whom shall I send?  Who will go for me?”

And Isaiah says, “Here I am!  Send ME!”

I wanted the kids to get, it’s not just the “Christian Superstars” who go and say yes to that call, but anyone can do it.  So, I asked some members of our church who’d gone on short-term mission trips to come in and talk about what it’s like.
And they got across just what I wanted them to learn.  You don’t have to be the superstar to go tell others.  God uses everyone, and it’s a great lesson for all of us to remember.  Think of it as a great adventure God calls us on.  One of our visitors wasn’t able to make it on Sunday, so we’ll have another guest in a week or so, which will be awesome to hear his take on missions.

Isaiah lesson 2: God keeps His promises

If you read through Isaiah there are a lot of warnings about what’s going to happen.  In the midst of all the dire warnings, God gives promises of hope.  God will send a savior, and it’s someone no one will expect.

God put it all together, every single detail for His final plan.  For years people placed Isaiah much later in history because of how uncannily it mirrors the life of Jesus, and then they found the Dead Sea Scrolls which so clearly showed Isaiah had been written before Jesus was born.

You can tell someone something, but it always becomes more clear when they actually see it for themselves, so I gave the kids passages from Isaiah and then passages from the New Testament.

They slowly went through the Isaiah passages and the New Testament passages and matched them together.  I actually limited the assignment to 7 passages from the over 15 passages I’d picked out (yes I am guilty of assigning too much work from time to time, I get excited about it).

And just because it amuses me, here’s one of the pictures the kids took of me teaching the Isaiah lesson at the house.  It’s amazing how many pictures they can take and not a one really turns out.  Thank goodness for digital pictures. Up above is their super high-quality video.

 Get your Isaiah lesson visuals, words, the entire shebang right here.

More Isaiah lesson resources

• Illustrating Isaiah
• Major prophets lessons
• Isaiah notebooking pages
• The Truth Chronicles (Adventures in Odyssey)(mentioned in the video by my sons)

Next up: What happened between the Old and New Testament