Good Creativity

First Sunday after Christmas

Scripture Reference: Gen. 1:1-5, 26-31

From “Saving the Ants”   

Terese Larsson’s Creativity

Preparation: Bring sheets of paper and pencils to hand out.

It’s the first Sunday after Christmas, and we’re starting a new church year. We’re at the beginning again. If we look at the beginning of the Bible in the book of Genesis, what are the first words we read? Does anyone remember how the Bible begins? (Let children respond.) It reads, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1 NLT). God saw that it was good. God created good things, and God is a wonderfully creative God.

In the beginning, God created something in his own image. Do you know what that was? (Children may offer answers.) It was humans. People are a special creation made by God. So if our God is creative and he made us to be like him, do you think people were made to be creative? Yes! We can create pictures and music. We can invent dances and stories.

We’re all creative in different ways. Some people are really good artists. They can draw pictures that look like the real thing and that are beautiful. I’m not very good at drawing, but I tried to draw a picture of a person. I’ll show it to you. (You may or may not have a talent for drawing, but make a picture anyway and show your sketch to children.) I’ve seen lots of pictures drawn by different artists of many different things, and I’ve realized that we can be creative for good and, sadly enough, we can be creative for bad.

(Here you may offer your own story of creativity being used in a bad way. An example follows.) When I was little, I remember my brothers and sisters and I would sometimes tease each other and try to make each other mad by drawing pictures. We would scribble a really ugly picture on a piece of paper, something like this (show second picture), and we would say to each other, “This is what you look like!” And they would draw an even uglier picture and say, “Well, this is what you look like!” That was being creative in a bad way, trying to hurt each other’s feelings with the things we created.

I drew another picture here, and this picture tries to show how my family makes me feel and how I feel about them. (Show picture and talk about it.) I can use these pens and paper to make bad things or good things. In the same way, each one of us can use our lives to make good or bad things.

Before you go back to your seats, I’d like for everyone to take a piece of blank paper to draw or write some of the good things you plan to do in the coming new year. May God bless your good creations.

Prayer:  Thank you, Creator God, for blessing us with creative talents. Help us to make good things with our creativity.