FEBRUARY: rEAD A STORY jESUS HEARD
"Jesus is the center of our faith,
Christ-centered community is the center of our life,
and reconciliation is the center of our work."
Palmer Becker, August 5, 2005
Christ-centered community is the center of our life,
and reconciliation is the center of our work."
Palmer Becker, August 5, 2005

Concept:
Jesus is the center of our faith! Jesus read and knew the stories of the Hebrew Bible, or what we know as the Old Testament. We can read those stories with Jesus, imagining him by our side.
This month we read the story of Baby Moses with Jesus. (Photo by Omar Lopez on Unsplash)
Pray It
Jesus, it’s hard to imagine you as a child, learning these stories just like I do. Help me to be curious and wise like you. Amen.
Jesus, it’s hard to imagine you as a child, learning these stories just like I do. Help me to be curious and wise like you. Amen.
Do It:
- Read the story of Baby Moses with Jesus
- Set the stage: Jesus, like other Jewish children, would have first heard stories like his one in his home, because home was the center of learning and growing in God. So it’s very likely that Jesus first heard this story while he was going through daily life with a parent. Choose a setting from your own family’s daily life - maybe cooking supper together, or walking somewhere, or cleaning together.
- Imagine Jesus here, a member of your family. What does he look like? Is he helping, too, or playing beside you on the floor?
- Parent or caregiver: tell the story. Maybe you want to read it from a story Bible or your regular Bible, or maybe you’ll give it a quick read ahead of time so you can freestyle it.
- Child: be curious! We know that children were instructed to always be curious about the scriptures. So interrupt any time you want to! Ask questions. What questions or thoughts do you think Jesus would interrupt with?
- Parent: Do your own interrupting. This is where you can bring in some additional wonderings. Like Moses, Jesus’s life was threatened in a similar way when he was a child (see Matthew 2) - what thoughts might he have as he listened to this story? Jesus knew Moses as the great leader of the Jewish people. If Jesus had some awareness that he was the Messiah, what might he hear in this story?
- As you finish the story, ask, “What do you think Jesus might say is the most important thing in this story?”
- Memorize Scripture with Jesus
- Once children in Jesus’s time were 5, they went to synagogue school (all genders, not just the boys!). Scholars tell us that every day, they would memorize a verse of the Torah (what we know as the first 5 books of the bible). Most children had the whole Torah memorized by the time they were 10!
- Choose one verse from this story to memorize. There’s not one key passage here, so it can be a part of the story your child is drawn to.
- For an extra challenge, memorize one verse of this story every day for 10 days!
- Hint: Memorizing as a household and rehearsing the scripture together is much more effective than simply telling the child to memorize it.
Explore it: A Note from Tami
I learned so much about the education of Jewish Galilean children in the time of Jesus through this article that Talashia shared with me. I encourage you to take time to read it. Scriptures include numerous times that Jesus quoted memorized scripture passages from the Old Testament. His training to become a rabbi would have included intense study and memorization of scriptures. How do we approach memorizing scriptures today? For ourselves as adults? For our children?
These sources may give you some good ideas:
I learned so much about the education of Jewish Galilean children in the time of Jesus through this article that Talashia shared with me. I encourage you to take time to read it. Scriptures include numerous times that Jesus quoted memorized scripture passages from the Old Testament. His training to become a rabbi would have included intense study and memorization of scriptures. How do we approach memorizing scriptures today? For ourselves as adults? For our children?
These sources may give you some good ideas: