LESSON FOR THE JUNIOR CLASSES
STUDY SCRIPTURE: LUKE 2, ACTS 2, ACTS 21
Lesson 9 January 30, 2021
Key verse
“It shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams”.
Acts 2 17
INTRODUCTION AND STUDY
We are now studying about the gifts of our ever loving merciful, and gracious God the Father has given to His sons and daughters. His sons and daughters are people who have accepted the Lord Jesus Christ His Son as the Saviour of anyone in the world who believe on Him. These persons had expected it. God speaks to them and tells them what He would like the people who believe in Jesus Christ to do. They are thus specially chosen by God. We know this because God had given them this particular gift of prophesy. But remember that every believer has one or more gifts.
Some of them are young persons, some of them are unmarried, some of them are older persons, and some of them are widows, that is, some had been married but their husbands have died. But all of them are especially close to God.
So we say that since God will communicate information directly to them
– they are inspired by God to predict things before they happen, that is, they foretell future events
-they speak very important things that they can only know if God divinely revealed it to them, and
-they constantly will praise God for His divine counsel and information and teach, correct, and encourage, comfort and guide people so that they will follow the truths of God.
There have always been daughters of God. Some lived thousands of years ago but they had these gifts and abilities. Later some lived when Jesus was on earth and during the time when the early church was developing.
In Luke 2 we are told that when Jesus was 8 days old His parents Joseph and Mary took Him into the Temple in Jerusalem where there was a special ceremony of consecration that the Scriptures required for newly born children. A lady called Anna, a prophetess, who was about 84 years old and whose husband had died seven years after she got married, spent her days in the Temple encouraging people, teaching them and getting people to look forward to seeing Messiah the Saviour who would be coming soon. God had promised her that she would not die before she saw the Messiah Jesus Christ. So when Mary and Joseph brought the baby Jesus into the Temple you know that she was very thrilled and she thanked God for fulfilling His promise to her to see Jesus, giving her that great privilege. She made it clear to everybody in the Temple that the baby Jesus was the promised Saviour who had come to redeem everybody.
Anna must of been the happiest person in the world ever. She could now die in peace because God had given her the greatest blessing that she could ever had. She knew now that her nation would be saved. God had begun to fulfill His promise made many thousands of years ago to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
In the book of Acts chapter 2 we read about God making a dramatic action in blessing 120 of Jesus’ disciples that had come together to receive this particular blessing that Jesus had promised they would receive. This time was called the Day of Pentecost and the Holy Spirit came down looking like tongues of fire and filled everybody that was there. This was not really fire but it looked that way. When the blessing came on the people they had the ability to speak different languages and so they could tell the millions of people that have come to Jerusalem for the Feast of Pentecost about the great and mighty things that God was doing to fulfill His promises. This was such a unusual event that the people that heard the commotion and heard the disciples speaking loudly and with great energy and strength thought that they were drunk but then they realized that the disciples were actually speaking their own languages, speaking dozens of different languages even though they had not been taught to speak these languages.
So this gift of God had come on the men and women in the group, the sons and daughters, the old and the young, the poor and the rich, the educated and uneducated. They all prophesied, telling the people about God’s goodness and encouraging them to learn about the fact that God was ready to free their nation.
So here we have another case of the prophesying daughters of God. They played their role perfectly while the disciples led by Peter preached a beautiful sermon to all that was listening inviting them to repent of their sins and become believers in Jesus Christ.
But that was not all for the book of Acts tells us that there was a famous evangelist Philip who had four unmarried daughters and they too were prophetesses who taught people and told people about the goodness of God. You can be sure that they helped their father in spreading the word of God which was the gospel of Jesus Christ.
These were specially blessed girls. They did a great work for God even though they were unmarried women. They did not let the fact that they were not married stop them from working for God.
So in this Study we discuss both prophesying daughters of God. We note that some were young, some were old, some were unmarried, but all of them were true servants of God. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit. They were specially gifted and served God fearlessly. Remember that you are a daughter of God or a son of God and you too are filled with the Holy Spirit and can do great things for God and be a great blessing to all the people in the world that have all kinds of difficulties. God will give you the power to help them. When you’re helping them you would find that you are helping yourself and life and its problems will be easier to deal with and will be more manageable.