ISSUES OF LOVE
LESSON FOR JUNIORS
Study Scripture: Genesis 37
Lesson 1 September 5, 2020
Key Verse
“His brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the sayings in his mind.
Genesis 37: 11
INTRODUCTION
God the Father has told us that love for God and for all the people around us is the most important thing that we can have. He keeps telling us that He loves us and so He gives us all the things that we need to have a good and happy life. To cap it all He has sent His only Son Jesus Christ to show us what He is like and Jesus would die on the Cross to bear our sins so that we would be able after we die to live with Him.
God the Father tells us that love is very important and when we have love in our hearts we are going to be kind, humble, not envious of others, respectful, not try to hurt others, but to look after them. When we have love for others we are patient with them, are honest and truthful and do not try to deceive them. We are not afraid of them and will do what is good for them.
God had seen many things go wrong in the world and it got so bad that God decided that He would call a special man who trusted Him, had strong faith in Him, and he would do what God wanted him to do.
This man’s name was Abram and his faith in God was strong. God made him many great promises. One of the promises was that God would bless Abraham and make him a great nation. One of his children would become the Messiah and the Messiah would save everybody on earth who believed in Him. This was a tremendous promise and Abram was glad. God even changed Abram’s name to Abraham which meant “father of many nations”.
Abraham had his son called Isaac who was called the “son of promise”. Isaac had a son called Jacob who inherited the promise that God made to Abraham. Jacob had 12 sons and one of his sons was named Joseph. Jacob really loved Joseph because Joseph was well behaved, did what was right, and did not hurt others and make trouble like his other brothers.
Jacob showed his special love for Joseph because he worked hard and did what was right. He made
Joseph a very beautiful coat. The Bible called this “a coat of many colours”. We know that this coat was especially beautiful and special for there was only one other place in the Bible that talked about a coat that was beautiful. This was a special coat that King David had given to his daughter.
But because the other brothers knew that Jacob loved Joseph they hated Joseph. When their father Jacob gave the special coat they felt that their father was giving Joseph authority over them and he could supervise them though he was only 17 years old and younger than they were.
They were so jealous of Joseph that they wanted to harm him. One day Jacob sent Joseph to make sure that his brothers were looking after the sheep properly and when the brothers saw him coming dressed up in his beautiful coat they decided to grab him and throw him into a pit that was empty of water at the time, and then kill him after they had sat down and had their dinner. They felt that nobody would know what had happened and what they had done and they would tell Jacob their father a big lie that an animal had killed Joseph.
They had no love in them for Joseph their brother or for their father Jacob.
Our lesson today therefore tells us that we are not to do bad things to others. We are to love them. We are not to hate other people, and certainly not our family members.
When there is no love there is going to be jealousy, selfishness, envy of what others have, rudeness, bitterness, cruelty, and all kinds of other evils.
There are some who will be jealousy of others. All of those things make up what we call Fake Love not True Love.
Sadly you will find that many people fake their behaviour, pretending that they love others when in fact they hate them and are jealous of them.
When you are Jealous you want things that other people have. You think you’re being treated unfairly because that other person is getting more than you have received. You do not stop to think that maybe they deserve to have a little more than what you have because they are maybe hard-working, loving, kind, more helpful to others than you are.
The thing to be careful about is that when you are jealous you don’t feel good about yourself. You think that you are not good enough. You therefore feel angry. You think that just having the things or the position that others have will make you better. Maybe someone in class is appointed as Class Monitor or put in some other position in school and you are not asked to do that job and you feel jealous of them.
That is not a good way to live. It burns your inside when you just want to treat the person that seems to be better than you badly. That is not a good way to live for jealousy stays inside you and eats away at your mind and you have no fun.
So God wants you not to be jealous. He wants you to love. When you love you will look after other people and you will feel much better about yourself.
When you do that you would be behaving the way that God behaves toward every human being. He loves human beings and He takes care of them even when they are not behaving.
So we advise you not to do things which make you angry and which will sit on your mind so that you cannot have fun in life. God wants you to feel good about yourself and He warns you that if you don’t love nothing good will come of that.
So read the story of Joseph and make sure that you don’t follow the example of his brothers. It turns out that Joseph was the one that had to save the lives of these brothers that wanted to kill him and who eventually sold him into slavery, putting him in a very bad situation.
The brothers hated Joseph but God loved him and looked after him and made him someone that would turn around and be the saviour of his family.
Make sure that you do what God says. God will look after you and help you through all the difficulties of life.
You never know whether or not the person that you do not love and feel jealous about, and angry at, will turn out to be the one that saves your life. So promise God to do what is right and let God help you to overcome the bad feelings about others that