Keep Your Heart

Material

• Blindfold
• Earplugs

Steps

1. Start the discussion with the children by asking: Do you have a heart? Of course! We wouldn’t be alive if we didn’t have a heart. Often, when we talk about our hearts, we are not just talking about the organ of our body that pumps blood. We talk about our emotions and the things that drive us. This is what we refer to when we tell someone that we love them with all our heart.
2. Put the blindfold over your eyes.
3. Continue. We can protect our hearts by controlling the things we see. Maybe you’ve watched a movie you shouldn’t have seen? You may have seen a photo that you should not have seen. Or maybe you’ve read something that God doesn’t like. We must protect our hearts by controlling the things we see. Sometimes when we watch TV or go on the web, there may be inappropriate things… then we have to blindfold ourselves! That is, we can change channels or sites.
4. Put the earplugs on.
5. Continue the lesson. Do you know what this is? (Wait for an answer.) I can’t hear you… you have to speak louder. (Make everyone scream.) Maybe I should take them off? (Then remove them.) I can hear you so much better now. We can also protect our hearts by controlling the things we hear. Maybe you hear someone telling a joke or a story that is in bad taste: you can just leave. Or maybe all your friends like to listen to a band with coarse lyrics and you know that they don’t really honor God. Well, you have to control these things and not listen to them!
6. Complete. Why is it so important to keep our hearts? The Bible says it controls everything we do. If we always look at and hear bad things, it fills our hearts with bad things. If our hearts are filled with these evil things, that is what will happen in our actions and in the way we speak, and it will not please God. Proverbs 4:23 tells us to keep our heart more than anything else. This is what King David did and God loved his heart very much. It doesn’t mean that we never get it wrong, but that we think and decide not to let certain things into our hearts.