Youth group Olympics
5 minutes
Remind people of the scores and leader board. Give everybody a small can of fizzy drink and get them to race each other, pushing it around a course with their forehead (beware of carpet burns!). The race isn’t over until they open and consume the contents (which can be messy, so do it on a plastic sheet!). Award medals and add points to the overall tally. If you have too many people to do this together, stage several heats, timing the winner of each and award points to the top three.
BOOM YOU’RE DEAD
10 minutes
Blindfold a member of the group. Arrange the rest of the group to form a maze, which this person must cross to reach the far wall. Put four or five paper plates on the floor at various points - these are radioactive devices which will explode if the blindfolded person touches them. As the blindfolded person makes the attempt, ask someone to play the Geiger counter effect, turning it up as a plate is approached, and down as the person moves towards safety. (Make sure there is always a safe way past each plate, or it isn’t fair!) Can your blindfolded member cross the maze in safety before the sound effect ends?
Remind your young people of what you’ve covered in this series so far. Say: what Jesus is teaching is a pretty big ask. He is aware that some of his listeners will be saying: “This is too much to ask. It doesn’t work in the real world. I’ve got other worries too, and I need to focus on them.” So now Jesus says: “You can’t do this by yourself - you have to trust God to get you through.”
Read Matthew 6: 25-34 and ask: can anybody suggest what the game has to do with this passage? Ask your blindfolded hero how it felt trying to negotiate the maze. Was the Geiger counter helpful? Did the Geiger operator prove trustworthy? Could they have managed alone? Say: in life we face all kinds of problems we can’t foresee. And we can survive only if someone is supplying what we can’t. Jesus says that God will - but we have to trust him to do it.
IN THE CIRCLE
10 minutes
Ask: What are your biggest worries? Write suggestions on the left of your flipchart. When you have a fair range (everything from ‘Brexit’ to ‘homework’ to ‘Arsenal losing again’ to ‘death’), point out the circles on the right. Say: efficiency expert Stephen Covey talks about two ‘circles’ in our lives. One is the ‘circle of concern,’ which contains everything you’re concerned about. The smaller circle is the ‘circle of influence’ which contains only those things you can actually affect. Which items on our list are in this second circle? (Find out more about Covey’s idea).
Covey says to focus on the small circle - you can’t do much about anything outside it, and worrying is just wasting energy. It just distracts you from what you can change. But Jesus adds something more: you don’t have to worry about the big circle, because God will take care of everything in it for you.
Read verse 33. Say: what Jesus wants us to do is to focus on the stuff we can change, and trust God for the stuff we can’t. We can work for his kingdom and we can change ourselves by “seeking righteousness,” and God will take care of the rest.
IT SEEMS SO RIGHT
5 minutes
Time a few volunteers trying the ‘Colour word jumble’ and say: it’s incredibly difficult to get it right! Your brain keeps giving you wrong information. When you have to decide instantly, you’ll get it wrong sometimes. Trusting our own judgment, we’ll crash and burn constantly. We need to trust God instead.
GOD IN A VOLKSWAGEN
15 minutes
Tell the story of Brother Andrew. Look at Matthew 6: 25-34 in small groups and discuss:
- In what ways did Andrew live out Jesus’ teaching in this passage?
- What would have happened if God had let him down?
- We aren’t Bible smugglers. How can we apply the same attitude?
SPOTLIGHT: SATNAV
5 minutes
Say: Every time you go on a journey with a sat nav, you’re taking a big step of faith. It’s miraculous stuff: three satellites, 12,600 miles away, calculate and recalculate your exact position in an instant, turn the information into a map, then hand you on to other satellites as you travel. But sometimes the results are less than brilliant. Play the clip and say: unlike God’s guidance, you can’t trust sat navs blindly.
Usually we don’t think about outer space and technological miracles - we just accept the results. Sat navs don’t give up on us - if we go the wrong way, or disobey their advice, they simply recalculate, without getting annoyed or reproachful.
Ask: How does God behave like a sat nav, according to this passage? How do we tend to take him for granted? How is he different from what happened in the clip? See here for more on how sat navs work or to use driverless cars as an alternative illustration.
IN THE CIRCLE
5 minutes
Finish by saying: this doesn’t always mean an easy life, but it guarantees peace and joy. Tell the story of the ‘Bali nine’ worshipping as they were executed.
Say: Over the previous ten years these nine had discovered something that they knew would outlast life here. They’d come from worshipping money to serving God, as their changed lives over the last decade had proved, and so could face execution without fear.
Ask: what do I most fear? Am I willing to take everything in my ‘circle of concern’ and let God deal with it?
Am I trying too hard to be my own sat nav? There’s no way to live this life of discipleship without trusting God to supply my needs. Pray together to close.
