The best rules for life
10 mins
What rules do your young people have for living their life? Ask everyone to think of one rule they follow and to write it down on a piece of paper. (These can be serious, such as ‘tell the truth as much as you can’ or silly, such as ‘always know where the camera is’.) Ask each person to present their rule and why they follow it. Then, when everyone has heard all the rules, have a vote to decide which the most important one is. Perhaps you could put together some rules for life for your group by selecting the top three or four. Write these up and stick them somewhere in your meeting space.
What is love?
5 mins
Spend a few moments discussing these questions:
- How many different kinds of love can you think of?
- Who do you love?
- What does it feel like to be loved?
- What does a lack of love feel like?
Be sensitive when you chat about these ideas, it may be that the idea of love is difficult some young people.
Key point 1
The need to love and be loved is central to our existence and wellbeing. To live without love can cause unhappiness and feelings of isolation.
God is love
15 mins
Spread out the emojis you have printed out. Make sure you have plenty of each one so that multiple young people can choose the same one if they like. Ask the group to listen as you read something from the Bible about God’s love. Explain that you’re going to stop at different points in the Bible passage and invite the group to choose and collect up the emojis that best represent their feelings about what they have heard.
Read 1 John 4:7-21, stopping after verses 11, 16 and 21. At each stoppage, after they have selected their emojis, encourage the group to compare their choices in pairs or threes. Are there any differences? What about similarities? At the end of the passage, ask the group to discuss:
- Why did you choose the emojis that you did?
- What were the similarities and differences with your partner?
- If you had to choose one emoji which represented how you feel about the idea of God being love, what would it be? Why?
Reflect for a moment on verses 19 to 21. Ask: what does it mean that we love because God first loved us? How does God show he loves us? Again, be sensitive when discussing love, and don’t be surprised if someone chooses an unexpected emoji.
How do we love God?
10 mins
Brainstorm some ideas of what it means to love God in our day-to-day lives and write your ideas down on a large sheet of paper. Searching online for ‘how do I love God?’ will bring up many different ideas if the young people are struggling. You could read some suggestions out and ask the group to debate whether they think these are good ideas.
Loving God and loving others
10 mins
Look at your brainstorm sheet and ask the group what these things mean for their lives. Do they feel loved by God? If so, what is their response to that? How are they going to love God and love others this week? Come up with some practical, achievable suggestions. This might be spending time with the person at school who annoys you. It might be doing a chore without grumbling. It might be thinking of a way to do something nice for someone or helping someone when things have gone a bit wrong.
Resolve to come back to the next session and tell others in the group how your week loving God and others has gone.
Key point 2
The practical outworking of loving God is not about good behaviour: we’re not being guilt-tripped into loving those around us. Rather it is an outworking of God’s love - almost like God’s love overflows from us to other people.
