Christ blessing little children by Henry Howe
Jesus loves us! That's the most important thing you can learn from the Bible. God came down to earth as a man named Jesus, and He did many important things on this earth to show us how much He cares for us. Now, here's the part that's sometimes kind of hard and scary. God loves us even when we do bad things, and He wants us to say we are sorry and try to do better.
Even the Disciples Made Mistakes
Jesus worked hard with His best friends, the Disciples, to spread this good news to everybody all over the world. However, even his best friends didn't always make good choices. Let me show you one friend that Jesus had to correct.
This is Simon Peter, one of Jesus' disciples. He loved Jesus very much and wanted to let everybody know that Jesus was the Messiah or God on earth. In this picture, Peter tells Jesus that he knows Jesus is really God in human form. Jesus gives him a big key and says "I will base my church on your faith." That's a really big deal!
But later on, Jesus told His Disciples that He had to go to Jerusalem, where bad men would tell lies about Him because they didn't think He's really God. They were going to kill him! Peter got very angry at Jesus and said, "No, Jesus, that can't happen to you!"
We might say the same thing, but Jesus knew something that Peter didn't understand. This was all part of God's plan. Jesus knew that He would take away everybody's sin by dying and being born again. This had to happen so we could all go to Heaven to be with Him. Jesus scolded Peter, and said, "You are in my way! You don't think about what God wants. You only think about what humans want!"
See? Peter was such a good friend to Jesus, that Jesus said He would base His church on Peter's work. Even so, Peter still made selfish decisions and got in Jesus' way sometimes.
A Song for When We Sin
There was a great King of Israel, named David, who wrote lots of songs for God. We call his songbook the Book of Psalms. In one of his psalms, David is very sad because he has done a very bad thing and God is very angry at him. We call this Psalm 51, and what David says is something like this:
God forgive my sin! Love me enough to wash it away.
I know what I did wrong, and I know you are mad at me.
I make mistakes a lot.
I know you always want me to do the right thing.
I know you can forgive me, God,
And you can clean me up so it's like I never did anything wrong.
Help me make better choices.
Don't leave me by myself!
Bring me back to your loving heart, and I will be happy again.
I will tell everybody I know that you forgive us if we are really sorry.
Thank you, God, for forgiving me.
Nobody is Perfect
Jesus is the only perfect person who ever lived. Everybody else makes mistakes. The most important thing we must remember is God will forgive us if we tell him in prayer that we know we did the wrong thing and we are sorry. That's why Jesus came to earth! He wanted us to know that He will take away our sins, if we admit what we've done wrong.
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