For the next three Sundays at Willows Presbyterian the “kids spot” is going to be filled with my favourite stories from the Bible.
I’m kicking it off with Ehud and the Moabites. Ehud is cool because he’s disabled (left handed) and a ninja. I’m going to use Brick Testament pictures.
In the Bible there’s a book called Judges.
It’s about some people God uses to save his people from their enemies.
They’re not special people – most of them are normal people, just like us.
In fact – some of them weren’t even normal – one of them was left handed – are any of you left handed?
His name was Ehud. Being left handed wasn’t much fun. He was different to the other soldiers in Israel’s army.
When Ehud was a young man Israel was being treated very, very badly by a very, very, very fat king called Eglon. Eglon demanded that the Israelites pay him lots of money so that he wouldn’t do nasty things to them.
Ehud and the Israelites didn’t want to serve this king – they wanted God as their king – so Ehud came up with a plan.
He made a short sword and put it on his right thigh under his cloak – because in those days guards didn’t expect to see many left handed people they only really looked on the right.
He marched in to see fat king Eglon with the payment from the Israelites…
…and he told him that he had a secret for his ears only.
The bad King Eglon sent his people out of the room.
And Ehud took out the sword – and buried it in his tummy.
King Eglon was so fat that the sword disappeared.
And Ehud snuck away. Like a ninja.
The guards thought the king was in the toilet – so they didn’t disturb him.
Ehud got back to the Israelites and they attacked the fat dead king Eglon’s army and killed them all. They were free from the bad king Eglon and free to serve God – their king.
Ehud had saved God’s people – even though he was left handed.
The Jesus bit
We are a bit like Israel – we need God’s “judge” to save us from a bad king that’s ruling our lives. We are being ruled by our sin. We want to push God to the side and treat sin as the fat ugly king of our lives.
We need to get rid of this fat ugly king just like Ehud did. And you know what – we have a ninja savior too. Jesus is a bit like a ninja. He dealt with sin in a sneaky way. People were expecting a strong and powerful saviour who would come and kill sin.
Do you know how Jesus got rid of our sin?
This was something a ninja would do. It was sneaky – because people weren’t expecting it. And it was effective.
We need to stab sin in the heart. In fact, the Bible says that if we want to follow God we should cut the sinful parts out. It doesn’t mean
with a sword.
We need our own saviour to cut that sin out – we need Jesus.