Have you ever been scared to pray because you don’t want to say the wrong thing or because you are afraid that you can’t trust God to do what is right or that He will be angry if you are honest? Today, we’re going to talk about why we can always be ourselves when we are talking to God. And not only that, but about how having to be perfect in our prayers comes from pagan religions and not from the Bible.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked a bit to be more understandable to kids.

Did you know that a lot of grownups are too scared to pray? Sometimes, people get the idea that God is so untrustworthy and mean that He is listening to every single word and every single thought just so He can have an excuse to do something awful to us or other people—like somehow He is waiting for permission from us to do something just terrible. Where did that kind of thinking come from and does it make any sense? Sometimes we get way too many ideas about God from how other people worshiped their gods and still do. So, we are going to talk about prayer in other ancient religions and how people have confused what those gods were like and what our God is really like. We can’t trust our God if we are thinking about Him like the people who worship a lot of gods do. Their gods were always just like people—only like people with superpowers who could be way more dangerous and mean than any human ever could!

Do you know any bullies? Bullies are kids and adults who are just mean and nasty and they are looking for an excuse to do something rotten to anyone they don’t like. What about people who are nitpickers and critical? Nitpicker is a name we call people who have to just mess with us on every little thing they think we are doing wrong no matter how unimportant it is. People who are critical are always just making us feel bad for whatever they don’t like. People like this are no fun to be around and most families have at least one person who is like this. Hopefully, we aren’t that person! I used to be very nitpicky and critical, just getting on people for whatever it was that they weren’t doing perfectly or whatever irritated me or whatever I thought they were wrong about. I thought I was helping—maybe not helping them but helping myself to make everything more like the way I wanted it to be. Being around me was not pleasant at all when I was being like that. I made people feel like I didn’t love them at all and like I didn’t see anything good about them. I am really sad about that now.

And when I became a Christian and was still doing that (and sometimes I still do it), it made God look like He must be that way too—just waiting for you to make a mistake so that He can pounce on you and make you feel bad about yourself. And I personally know that’s the opposite of what He is like. But the gods of all the nations around the children of Israel actually were like that. You never for sure knew exactly what would make them angry or even if you could do anything that was good enough to make them happy. There is a prayer that archaeologists discovered. It was written by a man going through a bunch of terrible things and he went from temple to temple, making sacrifices and trying to make all the gods happy because he didn’t know which one was angry or why they were angry and punishing him:

I wish I knew that what I am doing actually makes the gods happy! What seems like to me just makes the gods angry; The things I think are horrible are somehow okay with my gods. Who knows what the gods in heaven even want? Who understands the plans of the underworld gods? Where is anyone who has learned the ways of the gods? (rephrase mine from Walton’s Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament pg 145)

Isn’t that just awful?—Knowing that your god approves of really horrible things and doesn’t care enough to let you know what it is that they want? And because there are so many gods and goddesses, not even knowing which one is angry at you? And because there are so many gods and because they all have different personalities and likes and dislikes, what makes one of them happy might make another one angry. If two gods are fighting, and you worship one, will the other take their anger out on you? And to believe that when you die, you don’t just stop existing but you end up in the underworld and who the heck even knows what those gods will do to you—or your dead loved ones if you make them angry. It was a total nightmare. But that’s what life was like in polytheistic nations—which is a fancy way of saying “groups of people who believe in a whole lot of different gods”. We’ve talked about this many times, how really pathetic these gods were. They had to be fed every single day by priests, or they would get weak and they wouldn’t be able to do their jobs. The sun wouldn’t come up or the rains wouldn’t fall or too much rain would come down and there would be a flood, or all the animals and people would stop having babies, or whatever. Keeping the gods happy meant that they did their jobs and ignored the people. No one wanted the attention of the gods because that just got you in trouble one way or another. Bored gods were nothing but trouble. They wanted them well-fed, happy, and too busy to mess with humans! But they were also a mystery, which is what makes them a lot different from our God—who is really the only God there actually is.

God explained, through Moses and the Prophets and then perfectly in Jesus, exactly what He wants. No one had to guess. In fact, all of those laws (and some of them only made sense to the people they were originally given to because we don’t even know what they mean anymore and even the great Jewish scholars of the past couldn’t figure it out for sure)—anyway, all of those laws told the Israelites one thing. They said, “You have to be better than the world all around you. You have to love no other god except Me, and you have to love your neighbors.” And that’s hard. It’s still hard and especially since Jesus told us that our neighbors are actually everyone and not just the guy next door or the people who look like us or have the same religion or whatever. God used the commandments to tell us in every single generation forever that, “however good and kind and generous the world around you is, you have to do better to show them what I am like.” And so, we learn, little by little, to not be like the example set by the gods of the other nations who were hateful, cruel, and selfish. They loved stirring up trouble, hurting the weak, and starting wars. But if Jesus is right (and we know He is), then we have to be different than that. We can’t be thinking of ourselves and what would be good for us if it hurts someone else. Jesus never did that. In fact, He was willing to be hurt for the good of absolutely anyone who would ever believe Him. And what turns out to be good for us should be good for everyone we come in contact with.

And if God expects that from us, then we can expect even more from Him. If He wants us to be better than everyone around us, that means He is better than absolutely everyone—in fact, He is perfect. He gave us the Bible so that we could read the whole thing from front to back to learn who He is and how much He is willing to sacrifice so that we can be His people. In fact, when Moses wanted to see God, God told Moses His name, Yahweh, and said this—“Yahweh–Yahweh is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to get angry and full of faithful love and truth, always faithful and loving for a thousand generations (like 40,000 years—forever), forgiving people who decide to do wrong things, who do wrong things because they don’t care what is right, and people who just make mistakes. But that doesn’t mean there will be no consequences, because the wrong that people do can make things bad for a very long time for their own family.” (Ex 34:6-7)

God wants us to succeed, not to fail. There are plenty of humans beings who just want the worst for you and will trick you and take advantage of every mistake you make, but that isn’t what God is like at all. That’s why He is so forgiving, because He wants every single one of us to be more like Jesus and that can’t happen if He is just waiting around the corner for us to mess up so He can kill us or torture us. Believe me, if that was true, I wouldn’t have survived my twenties! Or even my forties! God knows how ridiculous we are and He also knows that, without Him, we are stuck in sin—not even knowing what is right or wrong. God wants His Kingdom on earth, the whole earth, to be a place where we all love Him and one another—that is His goal. That’s been His goal ever since the beginning. That’s why He created the Garden and put Adam and Eve in it, so that they would love Him and each other without any of the nonsense awful things we do to mess stuff up. Next week we will talk about what love means so I am gonna stop right there. I almost got off track. Again. It’s like I am a dog who sees a squirrel and forgets what they were doing!

God is going to treat you and everyone else however it takes to make His goals happen. That’s why He told Moses how patient and loving and trustworthy He is. It’s why He is so careful not to just kill us all when what we need is to be taught and loved and healed. He didn’t create us perfect. He created us with the ability to make good and bad choices and because we are His children, He cuts us a lot of slack and just rolls His eyes when we make mistakes. And when we are doing bad things, He works to change us so that we can do better. He isn’t a nitpicker, and He isn’t just critical and upset with us no matter how hard we are trying. In the Bible, there are a bunch of instructions, but you know what? They were nudges for them (and us) to learn to be better than the world around us and to save our communities when things are desperate. But behind them is always His goal to get us to love one another excellently. Unfortunately, until Jesus, people found ways to use those instructions to do what they wanted.

What does all this have to do with prayer? Everything! We have to know what God is like and what His goals are before we can settle down and be honest with Him, and before we can be honest with Him, we have to be able to trust that He is nothing like the false gods of the rest of the world—just waiting for an excuse to hurt us and the people we love. How can we be honest when we are afraid of every word we say? I know there are people like that but if God was like that then Jesus wouldn’t have died to save us—because God wouldn’t have wanted to save us.

The truth is that we can tell God anything because there is nothing we can say to Him that He doesn’t already know. But that doesn’t mean that He doesn’t want us to talk to Him about it. You can say all the wrong words about all the wrong things and all the wrong people while feeling terrible feelings and it is absolutely okay. He isn’t going to go off and do something messed up just because you are angry with someone. He will help you with your emotions because He gave you those emotions to tell you about what’s going on inside you and outside you. Emotions are our friends and also our enemies sometimes if we do the wrong things with them, but emotions aren’t ever wrong. Emotions just are whatever they are. God knows how wild and uncontrollable they can be. And sometimes, we need to be really mad when bad things are happening. And we need to cry when sad things happen. We also need to laugh during good times. So, we can come to God with all our emotions and He knows what to do with them and help us with them, so that we can control them better in the future or maybe even feel them more because He feels that way too. Do you believe that God is happy when there are wars and little children are killed because of terrible grownup decisions? No, He gets angry and He doesn’t care who those children are. So, we can tell Him in our prayers that we are angry or scared or tell Him about our good news too. It is all important to God.

Now, I didn’t used to know all this, and I would be so careful while praying. You see, I knew God was real and it was very important to me to please Him but I also didn’t trust Him at all. Someone did something terrible to me when I was about 34 years old—twenty years ago. And then he got other people against me too and it hurt worse than anything because it was in my church. My heart was broken and so I would talk to God about it and I kept asking God to fix it, but then I would get all freaked out and say, “But please don’t hurt his family God, please protect them. I don’t want them to suffer for what he is doing.” Isn’t that sad? I actually thought that God would hurt innocent people if I didn’t ask Him not to. I was a pretty new believer then and I still didn’t understand Him. It wouldn’t be until I was thirty-seven that I realized I could say absolutely anything I was thinking and feeling—even if I was angry at Him. And I have been very angry at Him many times. But prayer isn’t just magic, like they believed in the ancient world—our prayer is a talk with someone who loves us very deeply and forever. God is committed to you, forever, and He will always want you to be able to be honest with Him and trust Him because once you do, He can really start making you more like Jesus.

And I guess this is a good time to talk about the prayers of people to their false gods. I told you that it worked like a magic spell, right? First of all, they had to bring some kind of gift to that god—to bribe him or her. Their gods weren’t interested in them at all unless they brought some sort of expensive present. And then they had to say the god’s name exactly right because if they didn’t then that god wasn’t smart enough to hear them but if they did say their real name exactly right then the god had to do whatever they asked. Those gods could be bribed and controlled, and they weren’t all that smart. That’s why all the nations around Israel and also the children of Israel themselves had a hard time understanding God because He was just nothing like any of the other gods. He confused them. How could one and only one God create everything and do everything and know everything? It seemed crazy. They had to learn and it took a long time. That’s why they didn’t understand how prayer worked and why they kept worshiping God while also praying to other gods for help at the same time. They didn’t trust God to handle all their needs. They believed He was just like all the other gods who weren’t even really gods at all.

And we can still do that even when we know there is only one God. There are people who will tell you that God won’t hear you if you don’t use the right names or say the exact right things or that if you don’t understand the commandments perfectly that He won’t listen to you. And it is sad they believe that about God because with a god like that, no one can ever be good enough no matter how hard they try. That’s a god leaving you to feel hopeless and angry and that’s the sort of god that people give up on because what’s the use of believing in someone who can’t ever be pleased? Have you ever known someone like that? Someone who doesn’t like you no matter how good you behave or how much you do or anything? I do, and it is an awful way to live. What if you get straight A’s in school except for a C in PE and all they care about is that C in PE? Not everyone is good at sports—I wasn’t no matter how hard I tried. And what if you get all good grades except in math no matter how hard you try because your brain just has a tough time with numbers and equations? That’s so hard. It’s God who gives us the abilities to do certain things and not others. I have a beautiful singing voice but cannot read sheet music or play an instrument. I would get bad grades in those things. But when people blame that on you, they are really blaming God and the way He made your brain to work really well in some ways and to struggle in others. Not everyone is good at everything. Unlike people, God knows what you can and can’t accomplish. Your best really is good enough even if that best is only a C grade!

And you know what? Understanding God and our Bibles is even more complicated than anything you take in school. He isn’t nearly as hard to understand as we make Him out to be just because all these people have all of these ideas about Him being all sorts of ways because that’s how they were taught. If they had parents or a Pastor who was always yelling at them about how mean God is and how angry He is at them, that’s the god they are going to teach people about. I suppose that’s one main reason why God sent Jesus, so that we would see and hear and experience what God is and does in real life. The disciples are kind of hilarious in how much stuff they got wrong about God and how Jesus has to keep setting them straight. When two of them wanted to call down fire and brimstone on a city of Samaritans, Jesus said, “Dudes, no, that is not okay. Dang.” They kept wanting Him to be violent and He kept saying no. They wanted Him to take revenge on people who were mean to Him or wouldn’t listen to Him and He kept saying no. They wanted Him to send all the children away, and He really said no. In fact, He told His disciples that anyone messing with children was messing with Him and it would be better for them if they had a stone tied around their neck and get thrown into the sea. And then He told His disciples that not only did the angels who cared for children see God’s face up close and personal every single day, but that we should all be more like those children coming to see Him.

Jesus cared about the poor, and people in prison, and those who were hungry and thirsty and who didn’t have any warm clothes to wear, and who were sick and disabled. He cared for the people whom everyone else thought were suffering because they deserved it and didn’t deserve any special attention. He cared for all the people who were messed up in some way or another and let me tell you, the religious experts were really angry about it. And the religious experts today can be just the same. Jesus said that the most important commandments weren’t about giving enough money to God or keeping the Sabbath or any of that but were about doing what is right for other people. Giving money to God is good, but when we make things better for people who are hurting, it shows the world what God wants and how He wants to world to be a more peaceful and loving place where people don’t have to be scared anymore. They didn’t like that because some of them were rich from taking advantage of poor people. They didn’t want to hear that just keeping the commandments as written and ignoring the importance of love wasn’t good enough. There are always people who think they can please God by just doing the easy stuff, but loving people has to be learned and it is much harder. Some commandments are way more important than others and loving others and God are the two most important. If keeping one of the other commandments makes us do something to hurt someone else who is already hurting, then we aren’t making God happy at all.

That’s the God we are praying to. And so, we can say all the wrong things when we pray and it’s okay. We can be angry at Him or other people and it’s okay to trust Him with that. In fact, there is this prayer in the Bible that is really disturbing. A guy who has been through terrible things is so angry at his enemies that he wants their babies dead. What??? Who wants babies dead? Well, sometimes when we are really angry, we just forget what is right and good and we say whatever it is that comes to our mind. Because the babies of his own people were killed, he wanted his enemies to know what that feels like. He probably didn’t really want those innocent babies to die, he just wanted revenge. He wanted his enemies to feel how he was feeling. I think we can all look back to times when we felt the same way. And it is absolutely alright to be honest with God about that sort of thing. Believe me, He isn’t going to do it, but He can and will help you with how you are feeling. Not by smacking you down and saying, “Dude, that is so messed up,” but by comforting you and crying with you and not abandoning you even if it feels like everyone else has.

So, we can trust God with our messy emotions, and the messed-up things we are thinking, and our confusion, and frustration, and just everything. He isn’t looking for an excuse to smack us down for being honest, but when we are talking with Him, sometimes He talks to us about it. He doesn’t expect us to know things we don’t know or to be more mature and loving than we are right now. He’s here to help us become more like Jesus. God isn’t ever unfair even though people are. God isn’t waiting for us to mess up so that He can make fun of us like some people do. God doesn’t want to destroy us—He wants to give us life and wants to be with us forever when Jesus comes back as King of the world here on earth. The Bible says that He will wipe away all of our tears and people won’t be dying or getting sick or in wheelchairs or anything like that. My son’s body will work perfectly—that makes me happier than anything else! And no one will ever hurt you again.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you will take a chance on God today and talk with Him about anything and everything and be honest about how you feel. I promise you that He isn’t going to be mean or tricky or unfair to you. God is better than the best person you will ever know in real life.

Before we start talking about Abraham next week, it’s really important to talk about “the prayer before the Lord’s prayer” which we find in Deuteronomy and begins with the Hebrew word shema, which isn’t an easy word to translate into English but it is a very important word that we need to understand. If that wasn’t confusing enough for us, we also have to figure out what the heck it means that God is “one” because people have been asking questions about that for a very long time.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel. Parents, most scripture this week will be from the Miss Tyler Version (the MTV) which is the Christian Standard Bible reworded and expanded a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the meaning.

Today we are going to talk about a very important prayer in the Bible—and when a prayer is in the Bible, that’s a good sign that we need to pay close attention to it. You know, just like how we did with the Lord’s Prayer in Episode 59. But the Lord’s Prayer goes all the way back to a prayer called the Shema, back in Deuteronomy 6. Here’s the Shema:

“Shema, Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.^, Love the Lord your God with all your heart (mind), with all yourself, and with all your strength. These instructions that I am giving you today are to be in your heart (on your mind but they thought we did our thinking with our hearts). Repeat them to your children. Talk about all of these commandments when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up (like, all the time). Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them be a symbol on your forehead.Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your city gates.”

What? That doesn’t sound anything like a prayer, Miss Tyler. I know, right? It sounds like a corporate mission statement. One of those boring sayings that a company comes up with to tell people what they stand for and how they want to do business. Except, the Shema is serious and not at all boring. A lot of businesses just say those things so that people will trust them and think they are really honest and ethical. Honest, of course, means always telling the truth and ethical is a word that means doing the right thing. Both are important, and the reason that we pray the Shema is so that it will get stuck in our head and change the way we think about ourselves, our neighbors, our community, and most importantly, God. Prayers aren’t always about asking for stuff and they definitely shouldn’t always be asking for stuff. Prayer is always just talking to God and sometimes about God, like, to God so that we can remind ourselves how amazing and trustworthy and kind He is.

So, what does the word shema mean anyway? Sounds kinda weird to us, right? Shema is one of those Hebrew words that can’t be translated using any one English word. We have words in English for listening, hearing, paying attention, and all of that but we do not have a word that tells us to not only hear but also to do. So, we could translate it as hear and obey. I mean, when we are talking about hearing God then we really ought to be obeying Him too. Can you imagine God standing right in front of you and telling you to do something and you saying, “Yeah, no…I’ve got other things to do and to be honest, I just don’t want to do what you are asking me, like, ever.” That’s the challenge of believing in and listening to the voice of a God whom we can’t see and who is hard to hear. And He knows that, so He has given us the Holy Spirit to help us out. It’s not easy and we are gonna mess up, a lot, but we just never give up because it is totally worth it. Our God is wonderful, and we can trust Him that whatever He asks us to do is exactly what needs to happen so we can learn to hear and obey, and not just hear him and ignore what He said.

But, you know, we can’t just talk about what the verse says or what the words mean because we can get in trouble doing that. Do you remember what we need to check on? (1) We need to know who is talking, and when and where and why and (2) who are they talking to and why was it important for them to hear it? Whenever anyone tells me that everything in Scripture is for everyone, I remind them that in 2 Tim, Paul told Timothy to go to Troas and get his cloak and his parchments for writing on. That is definitely not a command to us. If we go to Troas, I can guarantee you we will not find any of that stuff there. And if we did, it would almost certainly be in a museum. And I am pretty sure that breaking into a museum and stealing a cloak would be against at least a few commandments!

The Shema prayer is in Deuteronomy 6 and it is important to know and remember that almost all of Deuteronomy is just one huge speech by Moses and we are supposed to listen to it all the way through. So, Moses is talking to the children of Israel forty years after they escaped from Egypt and they are about to finally cross over the Jordan River into the Promised Land! All of the people who had been grownups, except for Joshua and Caleb, had behaved so badly in the wilderness, instead of hearing and obeying God like they should have—well, they all died of old age and other stuff. And Moses is actually about to die too. Deuteronomy is the speech of Moses, reminding them of how they got into trouble, and why, and exactly what they need to do in order to stay forever in God’s Land. So that’s the who and to and why. Who said it? Who did they say it to? Why did they say it? We know all of that now. Let’s look at what Moses says right before this to make sure I am right:

 “This what God expects you to do, your job—the instructions and how you need to be fair with one another—the Lord your God has commanded me to teach them to you, so that you can follow them in the land you are about to enter, to go into, and possess, to get for your own. Do these things so that you will show the Lord your God all the respect He deserves, all the days of your life by carefully following all His instructions that I am giving you, your children, and your grandchildren too, so that you may all have long lives. Shema (listen and obey) Israel, and be careful to do what He tells you, so that you will please God and there will always be a lot of you and more and more every year, because the Lord, the God of your ancestors, has promised you a land flowing with milk and honey.”

Does it sound like we got it right? Moses is talking to the children of Israel about how important it is to listen to God and to obey Him and how much better their lives will be if they do. God is giving them every advantage in the world. They were enslaved and abused but now they are free and rich and about to have land of their own to farm and raise animals on. Lemme tell you, in those days money was nothing. It meant almost nothing—if you had money, you used it to buy land and critters like cows and sheep and goats and donkeys and if you were really rich you got a camel. And, when they left Egypt, everyone was so scared of them on account of the plagues that they gave them a ton of jewelry and stuff. You see, when God frees people who are enslaved, He makes sure they get paid—a lot. It’s only right because they worked all their lives for free, right? Humans think they should just be set loose with nothing but that is pretty messed up. And so, God is gave them restitution—they had nothing and Pharaoh had everything. Now Pharaoh has nothing, and they are getting everything. So totally cool.

Moses is telling them that obeying God leads to life and disobeying God leads to misery (like Pharaoh). But how do we follow God and know what He wants? That’s tough because there is a lot of stuff in the Bible that I would never want to have happen to me! Or to you or to anyone! Let’s look at the Shema again before we start talking about how to know what He wants and doesn’t want from us:

“Listen carefully and obey, Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.^, Love the Lord your God with all your mind to think, with all yourself to give, and with all your strength so you never give up. These instructions that I am giving you today are to be in your heart (on your mind). Tell them to your children over and over again. Talk to one another about all of these commandments when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up (so, like, all the time). Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them be a symbol on your forehead.Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your city gates.”

Even though we know the who, the to, and the why—some of this is still very confusing. We know what it means that the Lord is our God, right? But what does it mean that He is one? And what did Jesus have to say about it when a scribe asked Him which commandment was the most important? “Jesus answered, “The most important is Listen, Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.^,, The second is, Love your neighbor as yourself.^, There is no other command greater than these.” Obviously, Jesus agreed! But He didn’t exactly explain what it means either. All He did was to combine the Shema prayer with the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves because we can’t love God unless we also love the people He created, right? So, He taught that if something is cruel or mean or spiteful, don’t do it. If it isn’t appropriate, then don’t do it. If it isn’t treating someone like the image of God, or like a sister or brother, then don’t do it. If you would hate it if you were them then don’t do it. But more than that, if they hate it then don’t do it. You might love roller coasters, but they terrify me. If someone loved you then they might take you for a ride on a roller coaster, but only someone who truly hates me would do that to me. Loving people doesn’t always mean treating them like they are exactly like us,

What does it mean that God is one? That’s a toughie. You know, there are things in the Bible that are confusing, and that we struggle and wrestle with because they don’t make sense to us, and we talk about it and some people even argue. God being “one” and the Hebrew word is “echad” is sort of a mystery, if we are really being honest about it. And mysteries are great. Truth is that most everything about God is a mystery and if the Bible explained everything about God in a way that would make sense to us, it would be a hundred times bigger, and actually, it still wouldn’t make sense to us. What God gave us in the Bible are ways to help us kinda understand Him. That’s why the Bible is full of metaphors. Metaphors are very important because they help us to relate to God so that we can begin to trust and love Him and not just be scared of Him. I mean, just think about it. The Bible says that God doesn’t have a form, which means a body, and that He is Spirit. What does that mean? The Bible tells us that God is unseen, which means invisible. The Bible tells us that God is not a man, even though He is called Father. God is also not a woman, even though He is described as a mother quite often too. The Bible even calls God “He” but that might just be because ancient Hebrew only had he and she but no word to describe someone who wasn’t a she or a he.

Have you ever thought about how the words we have can make it hard to understand things that we don’t have any words for? That’s why we use words like “inexpressible” and “ineffable” when describing God. Those are big words that both mean the same thing—that God so is amazing and big and awesome and loving that our human languages don’t have any words that can describe Him without just being way to small. Even words like “good” aren’t good enough because we call food good when it is really only yummy. Or movies good when they are just fun to watch. Or sunshine good when rain is good too. That’s a big part of the reason why God sent His Son Jesus so we could at least see how God acts, and how God loves, and how God wants us to treat one another, and how God loves us so much that even when we killed Jesus because we are so violent and cruel, He forgave us. Could you forgive someone who did that to you? When the powerful people killed Jesus, any other god that the other nations of the world believed in would have just killed everyone and never would have forgiven them. Do we have a word for that kind of love? Not really. We say we love this, and we love that but really, we just like it and next week we might not even like it anymore. We don’t have the words that can tell us who God is or what God is, but we do have Jesus who showed all the ways that God wants us to be like Him.

The Bible tells us that Jesus is the exact expression of God’s nature—which is a fancy way of saying that Jesus doesn’t show us what God looks like but what God is like in His actions and feelings and love and exactly how much He is willing to do in order to rescue us from our sins. Jesus was born a human, even though He is the creative spoken Word of God who made the universe and everything in it, and so He had DNA even though God has no DNA because He doesn’t have a body—and so Jesus isn’t God’s identical twin or anything. We need DNA to have bodies. DNA is God’s blueprint stored in every cell of our bodies that decides if we are girls or boys, brunettes or blondes or redheads, what color our eyes will be and our skin (and because God loves variety, He loves how we all look—just think of how many different types of butterflies there are and flowers!). Because God has no DNA, He doesn’t get old, and His body doesn’t ever go haywire, and his joints don’t start making bad noises like Miss Tyler’s sometimes do and He doesn’t need glasses.

There are Bible verses that talk about God smelling the yummy barbecue smells from His altar, but He has no nose—that was just a way of saying that He was very happy in a way we would understand. There are other verses about what God sees and where God goes and what God says but does God need to open His eyes to see us? Does He need feet or wings or fins to get from here to there? Does He need a mouth to speak to us? Humans and animals need those things because we are very limited. Limited means that there are things we just can’t do. I can’t fly without an airplane or helicopter. I can’t go to the bottom of the ocean unless I bring oxygen with me to breathe. If I didn’t have a tongue, I couldn’t talk. God created everything in the Universe without having any of those things. But when He decided it was time to really let people know how wonderful He was, He sent His Logos, His spoken Word (remember how we talked about that back in Genesis 1?), born as a human being so that He could show us. And Jesus was so unlike every person who ever lived and who will ever live that many didn’t even realize how entirely like God He was because they had never imagined that God would be so loving, caring, forgiving, humble, meek and really not who they wanted Him to be. They wanted a God who would destroy the people who were hurting them—not a God who loved their enemies and wanted to save them too. Sometimes that’s hard, right? When someone is terrible to us and God loves them just like He loves us? But we’re not perfect either and because God loves them despite their sins, we can trust that He will still love us when we mess up too!

But we still haven’t come up with a good answer to how God is “one” right? Let’s look at that word in Hebrew, the language that the Shema was originally given to us in. That word is echad and if you say it right, you won’t spit all over the dog when you say it. That “ch” sound is in the back of your throat, not in your mouth. And we see it 946 times in the Bible! What? That’s a lot! And it can mean quite a few different things—but that doesn’t mean that we can just choose any meaning that we want! We have to study the whole Bible so that we will be responsible with what it most likely would have meant to them because it was spoken to them! They knew a lot of stuff that we don’t know just like we know a lot of stuff that they don’t know. And no one is exactly sure but we have some guesses based on what God has told us about Himself and what He wanted them (and us) to believe. And it might actually mean a whole bunch of things all rolled up into one. God is too amazing to just be described by one word that means just one thing. So, let’s think about it.

It could mean He was telling them to believe that He was the only one responsible for leading them out of Egypt and freeing them from slavery to the Pharaoh, their king who thought he was a god, and surrounded by gods who were responsible for the Nile River, the sun in the sky, the moon, the cows having a lot of babies, everyone having a lot of babies, actually. We will talk about this when we get to Exodus, but when Yahweh made everything in Egypt go wrong, He was showing everyone (the children of Israel and the Egyptians) that He alone was all powerful and that His people didn’t need hundreds of gods to run the universe because He created it so perfectly that it works all by itself. Just imagine a machine that never broke down or needed to be replaced! That would be a miracle. That’s what God did when He created everything that we can see and everything that we can’t see. Egypt’s gods and Babylon’s gods, and the Canaanite gods were really pretty pathetic—they even needed humans to feed them so they wouldn’t starve to death. Pretty lame gods. Our God alone didn’t need anyone to feed Him. Our God alone didn’t need help from all these puny fakers. He didn’t need to say, “Oh hey, Ba’al Hadad, would you please make it rain? I am just too busy trying to keep everything else working.” Um, so not happening.

Could He have been saying that He was the only god that they were allowed to worship? That could be, and He kept telling them that in a lot of different ways, including when He told them in the Ten Commandments that they were not allowed to have idols or to, like, get in His face by giving credit for the wonderful things He has done to anyone else.  Some people think that echad means unique, not like anyone or anything else, and that is certainly true and He proved it by totally making all the gods of Egypt look like a preschool football team playing against the Pittsburgh Steelers. Others believe that it means that God is unified. Unified is a word that means He is nothing like us—He isn’t doing one thing one day and deciding to do something entirely different the next. He doesn’t love us one day and then decide to hate us and give up on us. From the very beginning of the Bible, God has had one goal and only one goal—He wants to bring us back to like things were in the Garden before everything got messed up. He created the Garden and put people in it because that makes Him happy. I honestly have no idea why but it is true. Put me in a big old library and as long as I have food, a cot to sleep on, and a bathroom, I am happy. But God isn’t like that; He created us to be with Him.

There is one way to look at it that I really like—even though I believe that all of the explanations that I have given you so far are true. Maybe the Lord being echad simply means that He is perfect, complete, the only one we will ever need, totally trustworthy, and He and Jesus and His Holy Spirit never disagree about the plan to save us from our sins and from dying. God is so echad that He does whatever it takes. God is so echad with Jesus that whatever we see Jesus doing, is exactly what God does. The words that Jesus said are exactly what He heard God saying. Jesus said that He is echad with God in the Gospel of John:

“Don’t be so worried. Believe in God; believe in me too. In my Father’s house (God’s house) there are so many rooms. If there weren’t, would I have even bothered to tell you that I am going to make things ready for you? And if I am going away to make things ready for you, that means I will come again and take you to be with me, so that wherever I am, that’s where you will be too. You know the way to where I am going.” “Lord,” Thomas said, “we don’t even know where you’re going. How can we know the way there?” Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father (God) unless they go through me. And if you know me, you will also know my Father. From now on you do know him and have even seen him.” “Lord,” said Philip, “show us the Father, and that’s enough for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been here with you all this time and you do not know me, Philip? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words I am saying to you aren’t anything I just made up myself. The Father who lives in me does his works through what I do. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. If you still can’t believe that, then you can believe because of the things you have seen me do.“ (John 14:1-11)

I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to know that you can trust God because you can trust Jesus, and you can trust Jesus because you can trust God. He will never give up on you.

Prayer can be a very confusing thing—but it doesn’t have to be! As we go through the different sections in the Bible, I will be introducing the kids to how to interact with and trust God based on what we have learned. This first lesson will revolve around the Parable of the King Who Listened and it will teach kids about the access they have to God.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing and you missed the last seven episodes about the Creation story, you can find those archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has the old episodes downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.

People are always talking about prayer like everyone knows what it is and everyone does it and like it is so totally easy. But I am going to tell you a secret—most people really don’t know much about prayer beyond praying the Lord’s prayer. But prayer is this amazing thing that I want you to know about and have in your life, without all the mystery and confusion. As we will see as we keep going through the Bible, God made us to be able to communicate with Him and to do the work of His Kingdom. And prayer is a huge part of that but it is something that people rarely do. For some reason, most people who believe in God don’t really spend much time paying but I don’t want you to make that mistake. I am going to tell you a story:

Once upon a time, there were two children who lived in a huge Kingdom. It was an amazing place, filled with beautiful things but the very best thing about this kingdom was the king himself. He was kind, wise, good, generous, and always truthful. He was never unfair to people or cruel. And these children, we’ll call them Bo and Betty, knew the king personally. In fact, they even had a key to his castle and could walk right into the throne room any time they wanted and talk to him about stuff. And the king was always glad to see them and made time for them. He listened closely to everything they said whenever they came to see him. Sometimes he was able to do things for them right away and sometimes he waited until later. Sometimes he knew that doing what they wanted was not a good idea and so he said no. Sometimes they wanted things that he knew would be better for them to earn themselves rather than it just be given. He was very careful with their requests because he didn’t want them to become spoiled or prideful or wicked. Sometimes, when they got into trouble, he made sure not to save them from their consequences because he loved them and wanted them to learn from their mistakes. The king didn’t always give them what they wanted but he always listened and he always took them seriously and always thought carefully about what they were saying. I know you are thinking that they must be the luckiest kids in the whole world!

The problem was, they almost never came to see him unless they needed something. And sometimes they didn’t even visit him when they needed something. The king could look out his window to their home and their neighborhood and he watched as good things happened to them, and bad things. He watched when they won games and when their pet dog died. He watched as they struggled with long division and with spelling really long words. He saw when their best friend moved away and they cried and he saw when they were kind to the new boy down the street. And sometimes, very rarely, they would tell him about it if they needed help.

It made the king sad, because they only seemed to care about him when they wanted something or were in trouble. Otherwise, they ignored him. And he saw when they were sad and struggling and wished they would come tell him about it so that he could comfort them. He also noticed when they were celebrating something and wished they would talk to him about that too. He made sure they had food on the table and wished they would stop by to thank him for it. The king didn’t want to be just a vending machine whenever they wanted something and he didn’t want to be one of the tv channels they watched and then clicked away from when they got bored. He wanted to be a part of everything in their lives because he knew that if they shared it all with him that they would be happier and he could talk to them about everything and help them out with their lives every day and not just when they wanted something from him.

As the children grew up, they got angry about the things that the king refused to give them and fix for them and about the bad things that they thought he let happen. Because they didn’t share the good times with him and didn’t allow him to be a part of their sadness, they didn’t remember how wonderful he was. They forgot about him because they never really knew him. And the king was very sad because if they had just visited every day, they would have known him very well. Of course, the king was good and he never forgot them and every day he looked out the window of his castle in the hopes of seeing them come to visit.

Do you know what a parable is? A parable is a story with a deeper meaning. Jesus told ones that really had to be explained but I tell obvious parables. Obviously, I am telling you a story about how God is like a king and how praying to Him is like visiting Him. And how it is important that we visit with Him all the time about everything that is going on in our lives because He cares. Now, in the story I said that the children had a key that unlocks the king’s castle and in real life that key is Jesus. When we know Jesus and when we trust that He is who He says He is, God’s creative word and Messiah, and that He really did come to earth as a human being and work miracles and heal people and feed five thousand people with just five little loaves of bread and two small fishes, and when we believe that he was wrongly accused and that he was sentenced to death and that he was raised from the dead three days later, and that now He is King over all the earth and coming back someday—well, when we agree with that and when we tell everyone that he is our King and when we are loyal to Him and we do what He says—that is our key to the castle. Faith in Jesus makes it possible for us to always come and talk to God and for Him to always hear us.

Just think about it. The God who created everything hears you whenever you visit with Him in prayer. The God who split the Sea in half and allowed his people to walk across on dry ground—he hears you when you talk to Him. The mighty, all-powerful, loving, Creator God is paying attention to you and actually wanted to hear all about your day. Can you even imagine that? I think we would all be a lot more confident and a lot less scared, in general, if we really believed that God is always paying attention to us and listening when we talk to Him.

And that’s what prayer is—it’s talking to God. Sometimes people like to make it fancier than that, but really that’s what it is. When we pray we aren’t talking to ourselves or to thin air or to an imaginary friend but to God. And He hears us. He’s listening. Some people want to use flowery and fancy words that they don’t use when they normally talk, but you know what? God doesn’t need all that. Sometimes we are concentrating so much on how we sound and trying to sound fancy that we think more about the words we are using than about what we want to say to God. But God knows how we talk in real life and he isn’t fooled. Prayer isn’t a competition to see who sounds the coolest when they do it. Prayer is about having an honest relationship with God, a real relationship between the real you and the real Him. Imagine trying to fool God, right? But we do try to do that a lot. When we get to the story of Cain and Abel, you will see Cain trying to fool God and even though we read that and we facepalm, we do the same thing—just in other ways. One of those ways is by trying to be someone when we pray who we really aren’t in real life. But He watches us all day. He knows who we are. That’s who needs to come to Him in prayer, not the fake person.

Now, if you just don’t know how to talk with God, there are two prayers in Scripture that you can pray instead. And I pray these three times a day. I have a little alarm set on my watch and it goes off at 9am, 12am and 3pm. I pray at those times because that’s when they prayed at the Temple and today all around the world people pray at those hours, so when I pray then I am never praying alone. The first prayer is a prayer that Jesus taught His disciples when they wanted to know how to pray and the second prayer is found in Deuteronomy and is called the Shema. Jesus taught this prayer as well, and added another verse to it from Leviticus 19:18.

The first prayer is called the Lord’s Prayer because Jesus taught it in Matt 6:

⁹ Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. ¹⁰ Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. ¹¹ Give us this day our daily bread, ¹² and forgive us our sins, as we also have forgiven the people who have sinned against us. ¹³ And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

This is a wonderful prayer—of course, Jesus would teach us the most perfect prayer of all! This prayer tells God that we want His Name to be holy and set apart so that people will respect and love and honor Him. We also tell God that we want things here on earth to be done His way. We ask Him to feed us today. We ask Him to forgive us for the wrong things we do, and we promise to forgive others when they hurt us. But of course, that never means letting people who are older than you hurt you. And we ask Him not to let us be tempted to do wrong and for Him to give us a way out when we want to be bad, so that we will want to be good even more.

There is another prayer that I pray that is even older. It comes from Deuteronomy chapter 6 and Leviticus 19:18 and it goes like this: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your mind and with all your soul and with all your strength. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus said that these are the two most important commandments in all the Bible. I pray them after the Lord’s Prayer every time so that I remember to focus on what is important. And because I pray these, I want them to be true more and more and God changes me on the inside.

But I also talk to God all day about things, the way I would to a real person. When I am happy, I share it with Him, and when I am sad or scared, I tell him all about it. When I am confused or angry I go to Him and talk to Him. When I am really angry at someone, I usually have to talk to Him about it until I am ready to forgive them and not take revenge on them. Because, when we don’t forgive, that’s usually what we end up doing. We take matters into our own hands and usually make everything ten times worse. When I forget to talk to God or when I am so angry that I don’t want to, my chances of thinking, doing, and saying the wrong things really increases a lot! Even though I am fifty-one years old and old enough to be a grandma, doesn’t mean that I don’t have to talk to God all the time and listen for Him to talk to me. We never get old enough to stop needing to listen to God’s voice and to hear His advice.

I want you guys to think about how crazy it would be if you knew a king that you could take your problems to and you just refused. Nope. Not going to talk to the person who can solve my problems or help me solve them. Not going to talk to the one person who gives the absolute best advice and who is always right. I will just handle it myself instead. How crazy is that, guys??? If you knew someone who knew the President of your country and was friends with them and when they got into trouble didn’t ask the President for help you just wouldn’t hardly believe it. And yet, we have the Creator and King of the entire universe listening to us and waiting anxiously for a visit and we don’t want to talk to him? We should be talking to Him, and listening for His voice, all the time.

Listening for His voice? You betcha. And I find that kids can hear God a lot more easily than grownups can. The problem is that we usually don’t want to hear what God has to say and especially when we really want to be right about stuff. But we’ll talk about that some other time.

For now, I want you to think about what we just studied over the past six weeks—the Creation story. After we study about Adam and Eve, we will talk about repentance prayers—admitting to God when we have sinned and asking Him for forgiveness—which is exactly what they refused to do. But right now, I want to get you thinking about something important. I want you to think about who you are praying to when you pray. It’s easy to just pray and think about nothing and kinda consider it a chore or just something you have to do. But if you pick up a rock or a leaf or a ladybug lands on your hand, it’s pretty cool. But you can’t make a rock or a leaf or a ladybug and neither can your parents. Neither can I. No person can. We wouldn’t even know where to begin even if we had the power or were smart enough. Do you remember from episode 2 where we talked about God’s creative word, Jesus, and the Hebrew word bara? Bara is a verb, an action word, that only applies to God. Only God can bara—create something out of nothing. Humans can make things out of other things, to a point, but we can’t create anything out of nowhere—except trouble!

When you are talking to God and taking your troubles to Him, I want you to understand what He can do. Jesus showed us just some of what God is capable of. And it is important to study the life of Jesus to remind ourselves of what God would do for people if He was still here with us on earth walking around as a human being. But the whole Bible is filled with amazing things that God has done and when we pray, we need to be thinking of those. When you pray to God you are talking to the one who made the entire universe and all the animals and plants. And remember, He made them to be just what we needed, so we know He cares and is interested in what we need. When you pray to God, you are talking to the one who protected people from sinning against Him by making them all speak different languages from one another. So you can know that sometimes when we think something bad is happening to us, it is to keep us from the wrong path and that God will do whatever it takes to help us, even if we don’t like it. When you pray to God, you are talking to the one who parted the Red Sea so that His people could escape from Pharaoh and His armies, so you can know that He is there when we need saving. When you pray to God, you are talking to the one who talked to Cain when he was angry enough at his brother to kill him, so you know that He cares enough about you to try and step in before you do something really bad. And He also talked to Cain after he killed his brother, so you know you are talking to someone who won’t just ignore you and hate you forever when you sin—even such a terrible sin as murder. When you pray to God, you are talking to the one whom Abraham and Sarah and Noah and Hannah and David and everyone in the Bible talked to. Just think of that—He talked with all those great heroes and He talks to you too. It’s like if you had a friend who knows a movie star and he talks to that movie star on the phone and talks to you too. You would probably be excited about that and ask all sorts of questions about his friend the movie star. Well, you should be even more excited that you can talk, all the time, everyday, with the one who talked face to face with Moses!

I keep telling you how special you are to God and His plans for His Kingdom and I mean it. And it all starts with faith in Jesus and accepting Him as your King and Savior but it doesn’t end there. We have to make God an everyday part of our lives if we want to be like Jesus—if we want to be faithful images of God and not someone who looks like a cracked or funhouse mirror reflection of God that doesn’t look anything like Him at all. I had a dream once where Jesus told me something amazing about you kids. All the grownups were excited and going off in their cars to meet Jesus but He told me that He wouldn’t be there when they were expecting Him. He would be late. You want to know why He would be late? Because He was sticking around for you guys. You are going to be grownups and you are going to serve God in His Kingdom and you are going to be a greater generation than mine. I know it with all my heart. You are going to do important things for God. You are going to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth and do good works, and your kids after you. And you may wonder how in the world little old you can do that. Well, you can’t. Not right now. But someday you will and it can start today by talking to God about anything and everything and listening because, sooner or later and maybe already, He will start talking to you. But like any friendship, you won’t hear the voice of anyone that you aren’t spending time with. You can spend time with Him alone, or with others. You can pray alone, or with others, and really it is good to do both. Treat God like your best friend, the first one you tell everything to. Talk to him, not in fancy language that you would have to think too hard about making sound right, but like Moses did. You can read the book of Exodus and Numbers and see the kinds of things Moses talked to God about and how He said them. He used normal words and spoke his mind.

And if you are embarrassed, don’t be. God already knows what you are thinking and what you have done so you won’t surprise Him. You can even tell Him when you are angry at Him or disappointed. It’s okay. The prophets in the Bible did that a lot and He never shot a lightning bolt at their butts. You can trust God because He already knows everything about you and hasn’t killed you yet! In fact, as we go through the Bible you might be surprised at how merciful He is when people have done bad things. Even when they aren’t sorry. That’s why I am doing this radio show, so you can learn all about God and about His Son Jesus. Like I always say, the whole Bible tells us about them even when it seems to be talking about humans. It’s always about God, telling us what He wants from us and why we can trust Him—even when we’ve just totally messed up. God isn’t like anyone we have ever met because He is perfect. Moms and dads and teachers and friends aren’t perfect. We mess up. We say and do the wrong things, make bad choices sometimes, and sometimes we get cranky and mean. You can always depend on God to be perfect and do the right thing, which is why you can talk to Him about anything in your life. Since you can’t hide anything from Him, you might as well talk to Him about it, right?

That’s it for this week and next week we will start talking about Adam and Eve. We’re going to talk about God’s special Garden, and Adam being made from dust, and the two trees and the naming of the animals and Eve being made, and the serpent and all of that. It’s going to take about two months to talk about it all, probably, because each part of the story tells us something important about God and why He deserves all of our trust, loyalty, and worship.

I love you. I am praying for you. I pray you have a wonderful week studying the Bible with the people who love you.