Family Night - Guard your Heart

Our last family night was about contentment.  This night was called - "Lock the Gate".  It was about guarding your heart.  Again we are using the book - Family Night Tool Chests.  I highly recommend them because they make doing this - easy.  

Here is how our night went.

We open with prayer and then we ask questions about last week's family night.   For the first activity I gave everyone a piece of paper or a white board and they all drew a face and we had them point to where their mind was and then they wrote things they thought about on their mind.

They suggested cutting out pictures of a magazine and pasting them on the faces but that would have been too much for me for this night.  We talked about how God is very concerned about our thoughts and read Proverbs 4:23 and 2 Corinthians 11:3.   We asked why we should control our thoughts and how to do that and why God was concerned with this.  They have great Age Adjustment ideas for the older kids in your family, including teens.

We read Philippians 4:8 and told about the things we should be thinking about.

I loved this next activity.  We filled a wide mouth jar with water.  Then I had the kids gather match box cars (you were suppose to use rocks but I didn't have any together).  We read Phil. 4:8 again and we said the jar represented our mind and the water represented all the good thoughts in our mind.  Then we talked of the cars.  They represented the bad thoughts that satan wanted to put in our minds.  I had the kids drop the cars in the jar (we put the jar in a large bowl for spills).  With each car we thought of an example of a bad thought.  As the cars dropped into the jar - the "good" thoughts spilled out to make room for the bad thoughts.  We shared how  the bad thoughts crowd out the good thoughts.

We read Ps. 119:9 & 11 - and we told the kids when we live by the Bible and memorize it we know what we should fill our minds with and how we should live.  We asked each of the children one thing they learned from the lesson and then we closed in prayer.

And then they played with the cars in the water.