We had lots of families for our family worship today and lots of stuffed animals brought up into the Ark.  Thank you to the props department of the Easton Panto for our Ark!

Thank you to David, Tim, Nikki, Vernon and Jess for leading us in worship.  We were learning some new songs today – new for the Band and new for the congregation.  We will repeat them again so that we learn them but just in case you want to practise the actions here they are:

and also ‘My lighthouse’ actions

Shine from the inside out

The reading was from the chapter called ‘Rain rain rain’ from the Lion First Bible.  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lion-First-Bible-Pat-Alexander/dp/0745961037 Thank you to the Hunt family for the reading and the Greigs for the prayers.

And Vanessa made some amazing Noah’s Ark biscuits

Alex gave a talk about Noah and the Flood as follows:

Does God the Creator of the Universe care about the bad things that happen in his world?

Yes 

But how do we know that he does? When he doesn’t stop bad things happening?

From the story of the Ark!

God created the world and it was good.  And he created the first humans, Adam and Eve in his image to take care of his world.

But Adam and Eve chose not to do what God had said.  They wanted to be gods themselves.  They disobeyed God and ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and bad things came into the world.

In fact the world got worse and worse so that all the humans were really bad and only thought bad things all the time.

God was sad that he had created the world and decided to destroy it.

But Noah was different.  Noah and his family were good and walked with God in their lives.

God told Noah that he was going to flood the whole world and told Noah to build a great big boat called an Ark.  It was a huge boat – 450 feet long, 75feet wide and 45feet high.

Then, because God cares about the animals he has created, he told Noah to look after the animals by taking two of every animal male and female aboard the ark.

Our job as humans is to care about the animals and not let them be destroyed. 

So let’s do that now – children bring their animals up to the Ark……

The rain fell for 40 days and 40 nights. Can you make sounds like the rain?  The rain came down and the floods came up and everything was destroyed except what was in the Ark.  The world was flooded for 150 days.

Then God sent a wind.  Can you make sounds like the wind.  The floods went away, the Ark came to rest on a mountain called Ararat.

Then Noah sent out a  raven to see if any land could be found.  Then he sent out a dove to find out if any dry land, and it came back with an olive branch in its beak.

God told him to come out of the Ark and bring out the animals and Noah and the animals came out of the ark.

Then the first thing that Noah did when he had come out of the Ark was to build an altar and prayed to God to thank God that he and his family and the animals were saved.

And because God loves us so much, he promised that HE would never destroy the earth again by a flood because of the bad things which we have done, even though there is so much evil in the world; even though he could stop it all by destroying us all.  He promised not to do so.

And to remind us of that promise he put the rainbow in the sky.  So although God really cared about the bad things that were done on the earth and still cares today and although he had been so disappointed in what humans have done that he sent the flood to destroy the world

and he is still disappointed, he loves us so much that he promised to Noah and to all the animals that he would never again flood the whole earth.

So today we know that he cares about the bad things in the world but we live in the promise that he will never again destroy all living creatures by a flood.  If the world is destroyed by a flood it will be our doing and not his…..

AMEN