Advent Devotional (with our first free printable!)

Advent is nearly upon us!

How are you going to tell your children the Christmas story this year?

We’ve created an “Advent Devotional” to help you explain the nativity to your children using craft, role play and Bible study. Why not take a look and see if some of it might be useful for you to use?

Advent means “coming”, and the Advent season is one where we expectantly prepare for the celebration of the coming of Jesus. It’s a season filled with anticipation, wonder and joy.

Advent begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas. The four Advent Sundays of 2016 are:

27^th November, 4^th  December, 11^th December, 18^th December

On each Advent Sunday (or whichever day of the week best suits your family) why don’t you do a special family devotion? We’ve created a free printable for you to use with your family.

Here’s the idea:

1. Each Sunday there is a Bible passage which you read as a family.

• The angel announces to Mary that she will have a son (Luke 1:28-35)
• The angel tells Joseph that Mary is pregnant! (Matthew 1:18-25)
• Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem and have baby Jesus – the shepherds celebrate! (Luke 2:1-20)
• The wise men travel to meet Jesus (Matthew 2:1-12)

2. A craft: you make the characters from the Bible passage.

3. Act out the Bible story using the character puppets (depending on the age of the child, they may act it out, or they may just watch you do it.)

4. Answer some questions together as a family.

5. Pray

6. Enjoy the exciting twist…

An exciting twist to this comes in the week leading up to Christmas day.

As you go through the devotionals, set up different parts of your living room or house as the settings for the different scenes – Mary’s bedroom, Joseph’s bedroom, the stable and “the east”. Your children can even make little scenes for your puppets if they are super keen!

In the last week before Christmas day, it might be fun if each night (after the kids have gone to bed), you move the wise men and shepherd puppets gradually closer to the nativity scene, with the stable eventually being a “full house” on Christmas morning.

The idea behind this is to help our children to be excited about the Christmas story as they look forward to how the puppets have moved each day. (Each day you can ask your children “Shall we go downstairs to see if the shepherds are closer to the stable?” etc.) It will be lovely for them to come downstairs and see all their puppets together in the stable on Christmas morning. We want to help our children to see the celebration of the birth of Jesus as the most exciting thing about Christmas, and we hope that this mounting sense of anticipation will add to that.

To get a free printable download of our Advent Devotions, simply subscribe to our newsletter below. When you subscribe, you’ll receive an email which will explain how to get your download.