Splink | Guard Your Heart

Garbage In…Garbage Out

Invite the kids to make dinner with you. Instead of going to the pantry or refrigerator, ask one of them to grab the trash can and start looking through it to find some food for dinner. When they seemed outraged, keep looking through the trash and continuing to think of ways to use it to make dinner. Then ask: Why shouldn’t we put garbage in our bodies? Pull out some good food from the fridge and start to make dinner with their help.

Just as we don’t want to put yucky garbage in our bodies, we should not put yucky stuff in our heart/minds. What are some bad things we should not put in our minds? (It may be very enlightening to hear their ideas.) We must keep our minds pure and not allow wrong ideas and things that would cause us to think wrong things.

Read 1 Corinthians 6:19-20. Who lives inside us? The Holy Spirit lives inside us and we want to never make Him sad by putting wrong things into our mind. When we fail, we should ask Him to forgive us (1 John 1:9).

Splink 2:

Plant What You Want to See

Plant some seeds (that can later be transplanted into your garden or yard) to talk about how we need to put good things into our minds.

Some questions to ask:
Does it matter what kinds of seeds we planted?

What might happen if we planted weeds?

Jesus said the Word of God is like a seed. How is the Bible like a seed? (The Bible has everything in it to make you grow into a strong Christian. 1 Peter 2:2)

The Bible is God’s truth and contains all we need to grow to be more like Jesus. It can help us learn how to get to Heaven, to be a good friend, to forgive our enemies, and to grow in love and many other good qualities. If we want good things in our lives, we must put good things in our hearts and minds.

Splink 3:

Remove and Replace

Before everyone gathers for dinner, write negative statements on post-it notes (or pieces of paper) and stick them around the room (one statement on each paper). Then after dinner, read Philippians 4:8 together. What does the Bible say we should think about? (Things that are true, lovely, etc.) Sometimes when we try hard not to think about something, we think about it even more. A good way to change our thinking is to replace the wrong thought with a better one.

Invite each person to find a wrong thought, write a better one on another post-it note and leave it in its place. (Throw away the old ones.) Leave the good thought notes up and read them together occasionally.

Here’s a few wrong thoughts to get you started:

• I can’t do anything right.
• My sibling is driving me crazy.
• I hate doing the dishes.
• I wish I had a different family.
• My teacher makes us work too hard.
• God doesn’t love me.

Say a prayer asking for God’s help to guard our minds against wrong thoughts.