JOIN THE JOURNEY JR.
Families Abiding in Jesus together
With shorter reading assignments and kid-specific focus areas, Join The Journey Jr. is designed to help parents disciple their kids and engage with Scripture in the best ways for their age.
This month's memory verse
Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ.
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And God, who knows the heart, bore witness to them, by giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us, 9 and he made no distinction between us and them, having cleansed their hearts by faith.
12Everyone listened quietly as Barnabas and Paul told about the miraculous signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles.
13When they had finished, James stood and said, “Brothers, listen to me. 14Peter* has told you about the time God first visited the Gentiles to take from them a people for himself. 15And this conversion of Gentiles is exactly what the prophets predicted. As it is written:
16‘Afterward I will return
and restore the fallen house* of David.
I will rebuild its ruins
and restore it,
17so that the rest of humanity might seek the Lord,
including the Gentiles—
all those I have called to be mine.
The Lord has spoken—
18he who made these things known so long ago.’*
19“And so my judgment is that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. 20Instead, we should write and tell them to abstain from eating food offered to idols, from sexual immorality, from eating the meat of strangled animals, and from consuming blood. 21For these laws of Moses have been preached in Jewish synagogues in every city on every Sabbath for many generations.”
As we’ve read through Acts 15 this week, we’ve seen that there was an argument around how people were saved by God—was it by God’s grace through faith alone or by God’s grace through faith and what we do? The Judean believers were questioning whether the Gentiles were actually believers and part of God’s family. So, all the leaders of the church had a big meeting to talk about it.
Read Acts 15:8-9.
Peter gets up in front of everyone and tells them that God had given the same Holy Spirit to the Gentiles that he did to Jews. He said that both the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians had the same salvation through Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. Salvation is having freedom from the punishment, presence, and power of sin—because of Jesus! It doesn’t matter where people come from, what background they have, what nationality they are—if they have accepted Jesus as their savior, we are unified with them through the gospel.
Since we are all saved by the same God and filled with his same Spirit, let’s play a game that shows our unity! Break your family into two teams and play the Marshmallow Tower Challenge.
Object of the game: Build the tallest freestanding structure that can hold a specific object on top without collapsing.
What you need:
Teams: 2–5 players per team. You can also play as one large group!
Time limit: 10–15 minutes is standard. Shorter (8 min) raises the pressure.
Rules:
How to judge: Measure from the table surface to the top of the structure.
Close your time as a family in prayer. Thank God that you are unified in Christ with your family. Pray for the people in your community or church that you are also unified with. Ask the Holy Spirit to give you a greater love for the church and other believers in your life.