Did Jesus Really Live Again?

The song we chose for August is "Did Jesus Really Live Again?" (p. 64). It's short and simple and to the point, and very easy to teach.

To introduce the song, I talked about various miracles that Jesus did (the topic for August is miracles), and showed pictures from the Gospel Art Kit--Jesus healing the lepers, raising Lazarus and Jairus's daughter from the dead, etc. We talked about miracles He had done and I asked them what the greatest miracle was that He did on the earth. The answer: His suffering, death, and resurrection so that we can all live with Him again someday.

I picked several pictures from the Gospel Art Kit to represent lines from the song: Jesus appearing to Mary, the empty tomb, Jesus showing His hands and feet to the apostles, and the painting "The Second Coming." (If I had had enough ink in my printer I would have found clip-art online so that there was a specific picture for each line.) I invited kids to hold up the pictures as we sang the song. Often when I introduce a song, I talk about the words first. It was easy to concentrate on the lyrics for this song because of its simplicity. Some lines are even in a question-answer format: Did Jesus really live again? Yes! When? When the third day came. What did He do next? He wakened and He left the tomb; He called Mary's name. The second verse is similarly arranged.

Once we had talked about the lyrics, I said we would be dividing up into teachers vs. kids. The teachers sang the first line, the kids sang the second line, teachers sang the third, kids sang the fourth. This way, everyone only had to remember 2 lines at a time, but also got to hear the other lines each time we sang it.

Clearly nothing fancy, but it did the job and the kids learned all the words to the first and second verses in that 20 minutes.