“Ignoring what they said, Jesus told the synagogue ruler, “Don’t be afraid; just believe.” - Mark 5:36

For the last few weeks, we’ve been having between 20 and 25 youth coming to our Tuesday Night Bible Study. We are continuing our study of the Gospel of Mark that we began in the summer. It has been great for me just to take my time and study through what Mark has to say. It’s fascinating to me how many people react to Jesus with fear or terror and also how many times He tells people not to be afraid.

If you’ve come on a summer team, you probably have eaten with us at the longhouse on Tuesday night. It is how we always start. In the Yakama culture giving someone food is just another way of saying “I love you.” We sing four worship songs and then break up into the children’s study, the adult study and the youth study.

The youth study usually starts with a recap of last week’s story. Then we pass out 3-hole punched sheets with this week’s scripture printed on one side and the same passage on the other side with fill in the blanks. All of the kids have their own binder for the lessons and pictures. We ask the kids for volunteers to read and always have more volunteers than we have paragraphs to read. When we get to the fill in the blank - every correct answer gets a Jolly Rancher piece of candy. We learned quickly to institute a hands up policy so we can determine who gets the candy.

After the blanks are all filled, we will usually go through the story one more time and break out some talking points that the story illustrates. We are going through Mark to learn who Jesus is. We tend to focus on the following characteristics of Jesus:

• He is 100% God and 100% man.

• He has authority

• He saves people. Feeds them, heals them, frees them from demonic spirits.

• He loves us and is preparing (through the gospel) to die for us.

• He is with us.

After we finish the story portion, we break into 3 small groups (two groups of girls and one group of guys) and ask deeper questions about the story and we ask for prayer requests and close in prayer in the small groups.

The kids always surprise. When you think they have the answer they make a bad joke and when you think they are going to misbehave, they have a great question. Please join us in praying that God’s word will take root in their heart and they will know who Jesus is - not just from His word, but also through a personal relationship Him as Lord and Saviour.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Youth, Reservation, Scripture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.