The Lord's Prayer How Jesus Taught His Disciples to Pray

By Vicki Wiley

What you will need:

Sandy Candy 10 Bottle Party Pack - One Tube for each child
Colors: Gold, purple, green, red, orange, blue, black
(Substitute beads and cord to make bracelet or necklace instead of Sandy Candy)

The Lessons

Does anyone know what prayer is? Do you pray? When you pray, what do you say? Jesus' disciples wanted to pray, but they didn't know how to pray. So they asked Jesus what they should say when they pray. Jesus taught them how to pray and at the same time, he was teaching us how to pray!

Today, we are going to learn how to Jesus wants us to pray. We will use the "Sandy Candy" to help us learn. Here is a tube for you. As we learn, I will pass around different colors of Sandy Candy to remind you of the different parts of the prayer. You will fill up your tube with the different colors and that will help you remember! This is what he taught them:

"Our Father who is in Heaven"
(Pass around gold or yellow "Sandy Candy".)
The first thing Jesus said was, "Our Father in heaven". Some Bible Translations say "Our Father, who ART in heaven." That means our Father who is in heaven. Let's put some gold into our tube to remind us of heaven. The Bible tells us that the streets of heaven are made of gold, so the gold will remind us of heaven and how we should start our prayer.

"May your kingdom come"
(Pass around the purple "Sandy Candy")
Jesus is the King and we use purple to stand for royalty. The kingdom that Jesus is talking about is now in heaven, but at the end of the world it will also be on earth. When you see the purple, you can remember the kingdom of God.

"And what you want be done, here on earth as it is in heaven."
(Pass around green "Sandy Candy")
When we pray we ask God to give us what we really need, not just what we think we want. That's called "God's will". When we ask God to do what he wants, we are asking for "God's will". Green reminds us of plants, trees and the earth. We will use green to remind us that we want God to do what he wants in our lives while we are on the earth.

"Give us the food we need for each day."
(Pass around orange "Sandy Candy")
How do you get the food you eat? We are so lucky! We usually have all the food we need. We ask God to give us our food and we thank him because even though our parents buy our food we still thank God for giving it to us. God makes sure that we always have enough to eat.

"Forgive us for our sins,"
(Pass out black.)
We will use black to represent our sins. Jesus will always forgive the sins or bad things that we do, we just need to ask. When we ask, we just say "Please forgive me from my sins" and God will!

"Just as we have forgiven those who sinned against us."
(Pass out white "Sandy Candy")
Has one of your friends ever done anything mean to you? Sometimes it's hard to forgive them, isn't it? God always forgives us for our sins and we also have to forgive other people for wrong things that they do to us. We will use white to show forgiveness, because white is the opposite of black which we used for sin. Remember that whenever we sin, God always forgives us when we ask.

"And do not cause us to be tempted, but save us from the Evil One."
(Pass out red "Sandy Candy")
Does anyone know what "tempted" means? Tempted means that you want to do something that you shouldn't do. What are some of the things that you want to do that you know you shouldn't do? We are using red to symbolize temptation because you can remember that the first temptation was when Satan tempted Eve in the garden of Eden. Does anyone remember what happened?

The Bible says that Satan told Eve that she could eat a fruit that God had told her not to eat. Sometimes we think that this fruit was an apple, so we will use red like an apple so that we can remember temptation.

"For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen."
(Pass out blue "Sandy Candy")
We will use blue to stand for Kingdom, Power, and Glory. Have you ever just looked up at a beautiful blue sky and wondered about God? I do. Sometimes on a beautiful day, I can just look up into the beautiful blue sky and I think about how wonderful that God is.

God is wonderful. God will give you what you need. God will take care of you and forgive you for the wrong things that you do. You just need to pray like the disciples did and you can have all these things!

Let's look at our tubes and remember what each color means:
The gold stands for heaven
The purple stands for God's kingdom
The green stands for the earth
The black stands for our sins
The white stands for God's forgiveness
The red stands for temptation and
The blue stands for the kingdom, glory and power of God