Lights, camera, action
15 minutes
Split your young people into small groups and invite them to take a look at today’s passage: Micah 6:3–8. The task for each group is to come up with a way of presenting this story to the rest of the group. They only have ten minutes to prepare and they could act it out, write a rap or perform a mime. The only rules are that everyone in the team must contribute and that they cannot deviate from the story in the text. Once their ten minutes preparation time is over, make room for a stage and celebrate all the performances.
Discussion
10 minutes
Based on their understanding of the text, invite the groups to discuss and find answers to the following questions:
• What do you think is the main thing that God is trying to say to his people?
• Does this story remind you of a story Jesus tells? (Check out Luke 18: 9–14.)
• What do you think this tells us about what God thinks is important?
• This theme is in the Old Testament and New Testament. Do you think it applies to us too?
KEY POINT 1
God is clearly more interested in the state of our hearts than any ‘show’ we might put on externally. Too often, we’re concerned with stuff and appearances, but God sees past all of that and is deeply interested in our love of him and love of others.
Get ready
5 minutes
Split your group into threes and give each person a piece of paper. Every group needs to choose someone’s foot to draw around onto one of the pieces of paper (yes, you will need air freshener for after this activity!), another person to draw around their hand and the third person to draw a heart on the third piece of paper. Title the sheet with the hand ‘Act justly’, the sheet with the heart ‘Love mercy’ and the sheet with the foot ‘Walk humbly’. Lead a short conversation with the whole group about what they think justice, mercy and humility are. The below descriptions may help:
• Justice is an active pursuit of a world justas- it-should-be. We know the world wasn’t designed to have people going hungry, thirsty or being vulnerable to poverty. Justice is activity that fights this.
• Mercy is a choice toward compassion and forgiveness in times of trial. We have received extraordinary mercy in Jesus’ death on the cross, so we learn to extend the same to our neighbours.
• Humility is a posture like the tax collector we read about earlier, who knew that God’s first interest is in the overflow of our hearts, not a show we might put on. Humility chooses Jesus and others first.
Video: What is poverty?
5 minutes
Ask the group to watch the poverty video found here that shows some ideas of what Micah 6:8 might look like in practice. Explain that after the video you will ask people to write ideas into their hands, feet and heart, so they will need to watch carefully.
Hands, feet and hearts
10 minutes
Get your groups of three to throw around some ideas for what it might look like in their lives to ‘act justly’ (hands), ‘love mercy’ (hearts) and ‘walk humbly’ (feet) with God. Write as many practical examples as possible in the outlines.
Invite the group to share ideas and feel free to throw a few of your own in to help them. Encourage your groups to remember that their influence to act, love and walk reaches into their schools, local communities and even as far as the global community. Inspire them to think big! You might want to put the descriptions of justice, mercy and humility on the screen to help them with their ideas.
KEY POINT 2
Living out Micah 6 is a very active decision to become more like Jesus and think of others more than we might ourselves. This doesn’t happen by accident. There is a good reason that all the words in Micah 6:8 are doing words – it takes action and lots of practice. What will we start practising?
Blackout news articles
5 minutes
Get the young people into small groups and give each group a newspaper. Invite them to check out some of the stories and pick a story of poverty or injustice. Each group must take their article and, where it is a story of despair or injustice, cross out words to turn it into a story of hope. Write over the article in a bold pen, a prayer or petition to God for the lives of the people involved in that particular situation. Once they have done one article, invite them to keep going and they should end up with newspapers full of prayers.
Prayer
5 minutes
Use the newspaper articles to inspire the group to pray. Ask each young person to choose one story and say a short prayer to God for that situation. If they are not confident praying out loud, they can read whatever they wrote on top of the article to help them.
KEY POINT 3
Turning stories of sadness into stories of hope is the invitation of Jesus for all of our lives, so every time we recycle, give our time generously or pray for our world, we are crossing out despair and choosing hope instead.
