AIM
To present again the ideal of unquestioning obedience; to give an impulse toward the attaining of this ideal by showing that the obedient are friends of God and a source of blessing to their fellows.
LESSON PREPARATION
Besides the study of the Bible passages, and what the commentators have to say concerning the incident of our lesson, there are many legends of Abram which are intensely interesting and relate to the protests which he made against the idolatry of his father and of the people among whom he lived. [See History for District and Graded Schools, Ellwood W. Kemp, chapter on “What the Hebrews Taught the World”; Leben Abraham’s, by Beer, quoted by Geikie in Old Testament Characters; The Talmud.] In studying this story with the children in mind we must remember that our own point of view concerning leaving one’s country and kindred to go out, not knowing whither, is a far different one from that which the children themselves will have. To them moving has in it the attractive element of novelty, and all the charm of the “unexpected” in every day’s experience for some time after the move has been made. They have not yet become so thoroughly attached to the place where they live as to be able to comprehend in the least the sacrifice that Abram made, and if we could examine the contents of their minds by some kind of X-ray process, we would doubtless discover that they were looking upon Abram’s experience in that respect as one to be coveted. This may explain why teachers of Junior children have often found this story tame and uninteresting from the children’s point of view.
LESSON PRESENTATION
Introduction
You may be quite sure that any child old enough to be in the Junior Department has had stories of the Pilgrims and Puritans several times in his day school course. One good way of introducing this lesson, therefore, would be to question concerning the Pilgrims, and why they came to this country, developing the fact that they cared more to worship God as they thought they should than for anything else that life could give. They were ready to give up their comfortable homes, their friends, their relatives, and go into a strange land where no homes awaited them, and suffer privations, cold, and dangers, because they knew that in that strange land they would be free to worship God in their own way. From this it would be easy to pass to the story of a man who took his family, his servants, and all that he owned and went into a strange land of which he knew nothing, because he had heard the voice of God telling him to go.
Another method of approach would be by calling attention to the names by which some men have been called, which they have won for themselves by the things that they did. George Washington was called the father of his country. Why? To-day we have a story of a man who earned a much more wonderful name even than that.