Teaching Faith

Teaching Faith

FAITH – Have popcorn popping as the girls come into the room, so it smells and sounds neat.  Invite two eight year olds that have been baptized within the year to bear their testimonies.  Compare them to a kernel of popcorn, how their faith is so strong and will continue to grow.  Show them the bottom of the bowl where they will see the “DUDS” tell them that it takes work for our faith to grow.  We must accept the gospel and then act for our faith to grow.
(Handout-small bag of popcorn kernels, slip of paper that says “Don’t be a “DUD” work on your personal progress this month)

FAITH

Topic:  Put Your Trust In The Lord (YW Value: Faith)

Preparation:  A small glass cup filled with pennies.

Handout:  Cut white tissue paper into 5 inch squares.  Place a penny in the center of each piece of tissue paper.  Pull the tissue paper up and around the penny and tie with a white ribbon.  Give a penny wrapped in tissue paper with a copy of the scripture card to each young woman.

scripture card reads – “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.”  Proverbs 3:5

Presentation:  Ask the young women what words are imprinted on the front of a penny.  (“in God We Trust.”)  Pass around the glass of pennies and invite each young woman to take a penny and place it in her shoe.  Each time she feels the penny in her shoe throughout the week, it will remind her to put her trust in the Lord.  Try this experiment yourself the week before presenting this object lesson.  Share how you felt as you put your trust in the Lord.  Our faith in the Lord increases as we put our trust in Him. The Savior should be a part of everything we do and every decision we make.

Recite Proverbs 3:5

Object Lesson
In a food processor, chop up Oreo cookies until they look like potting soil. Place the crumbs/soil into a flowerpot.  Then here is the lesson.  You speak about faith being like a grain of mustard or a seed that is planted in good soil. (the whole time you talk you are sifting the “soil” through your fingers like it is dirt)  You speak about this seed growing and what it needs to survive, such as, water food sun.  You compare this to faith and how you plant the seed and feed it with Church attendance, scripture study, FHE, temple attendance,etc.  You then ask someone of they have faith in you and know that you would never do anything that would hurt them.  Hopefully you do have someone.  You ask them to open their mouth and you feed them the “soil”.  This was done at girls camp and a leader opened her mouth and ate the “soil” from my spoon.  The girls talked about it for months.  A snack of chocolate pudding with the chopped cookies on top.  For an added bonus we pot gummy worms in the pudding.  It was really cute and the girls all remember the faith activity.

Here is an object lesson that I seen used before.  It was pretty good.  Don’t know if you have tinker toys, but Legos would probably work also.  Good luck  Christine Moreland

Working by faith (or listening to the still small voice)

Items needed: Tinker toys, you must have doubles of every piece.

Build a simple object from the tinker toys. (example a house) Place the exact same tinker toys in a bag. Have one class member be blindfolded.  The goal is for them to build the house.  They will do this by receiving instruction from another class member.  You may also assign a class ember to give false instructions, (those that oppose the correct ones given by the other student)

Lesson: Just as the student was building a house without seeing it or knowing what they were building so to are we building our mansion in heaven.  If we listen to the still small voice and trust it in faith we have a chance.  If we pay attention to the other voices it is more difficult

When I was in Young Women’s a leader did a really amazing object lesson on faith.  She displayed a small box (like a shoebox) and told us that inside the box was a real horse.  Of course we all objected and told her that it was a toy horse or she wasn’t telling the truth. She let us object but kept insisting that it was a real horse. Eventually she allowed someone she chose to come and look and they confirmed that it was a real horse. Even though we had this witness we still didn’t believe. Eventually she opened the box
and pulled out a jar which contained a horse in embryo form. This sounds a little disgusting but it was so effective.  All of us were dead silent and she told us went on to tell us that many times it is hard to believe things that we can’t see, and that even sometimes we have people who are witnesses who tell us to believe and have seen what we doubt and yet we still question this.  There is a lot more that she said and it was a great lead in for her talk on faith.

As far as getting an embryo she got it from a professor at a University, but I also have found other embryo’s with High School and Middle School teachers that they will sometimes loan you.  The idea is to just get anything that is unbelievable.  I once even did this with an aligator’s head that my parents got while in Louisiana.
Kirsten Woodward

Tickets (faith object lesson)
Source: Corrie ten Boom
A girl and her father were going to ride a train and the girl was concerned and asked her father many times on the way to the train station, where was her ticket? He kept reassuring her that just before she gets on the train he will give her the ticket and she need not worry. It is this way with our Heavenly Father. He will give us the strength and help and support to successfully learn, grow and be blessed by ANY situation that we encounter in our turn here on earth. But he may give us that help right when we need it and not any earlier, so we may feel unprepared for many things that could come our
way. But we need not worry because he will give us the ticket to ride, when we need it.

A pearl is precious in that it comes from an oyster.  The pearl is then taken and polished for it’s beauty to shine forth.  Our faith starts out as an unpolished pearl and with every prayer, testimony, scripture, and miracle we read, or say, or hear about our faith becomes polished. Just as the pearl is precious, our faith is precious too because it is a gift from God.  As our faith becomes polished we become beautiful and strong and then our faith becomes very valuable to us.

As a handout I made them a scripture bookmark-I tied a pearl (fake of course) to one end of a piece of white ribbon and then another to the other end of he ribbon.  The girls were thrilled with it and I noticed some of them are still using them.

L McCartney  (Laura in MN)

I started out by asking the girls questions like:  What do you do if you are hungry?  What do you do in the morning before going to school?  ect.  And then asked them if it was enough just to know about these things, they needed to do something in order for each task to be met.  What if you saw someone drowning and there was a lifesaving ring next to you?  You would have to throw it in, in order to save the person.  Just like our faith we need to be doing something in order for our faith to grow.  I read a quote by John Taylor
that talked about faith being dead without works… And then in the end I asked them all to be their own lifesaver by doing things to make their faith grow.

As a handout I made a bookmark for each of them with the quote on it and then handed them each a white lifesaver candy.

Quote:  “Faith without works being dead, it is evident that living faith…..is that which not only believes in God, but acts upon that belief.  It is not only the cause of action, but includes both cause and action.  Or in other words, it is belief or faith made perfect by works.  John Taylor.

Laura in MN

I am going to cut some 2 by 2 blocks of wood and gift wrap them up in white paper and beautiful bows and ribbon.  And talk about faith being a gift from god and attach a card to it with a quote about faith being a gift from God.  

Laura in MN

I am printing out a quote in the form of a poem and gluing it onto cardstock and then punch holes all the way around the card stock and then weaving white ribbon through the holes and then tying a bow in the corner of the square.  I will talk to the girls about gifts and what they expect a person to do who receives a gift from them.. be grateful, thankful, show they appreciate it ect…then I will read them the quote which is:
 

Faith
Faith is a gift of God bestowed as a reward for personal righteousness. It is always given when righteousness is present, and the greater the measure of obedience to God’s laws the greater will be the endowment of faith.
Bruce R. McConkie

I also plan to ask them who they enjoy giving gifts to example:  people they love or really care about ect.  I will tell them that Heavenly Father loves each of us so much that he has given us a gift of faith if we will only be obedient to him.  I will attach a small packet of Hershey hugs and tell them every time their faith increases H.F. gives them a hug and increases their faith even more.  I hope this makes sense and that someone can use it.
> Laura In MN

I have done a presentation on faith several times that seems to make an  impact on the youth.  I start out with a girl sitting up front in a chair.  I  talk to her, telling her that I am Heavenly Father, and she is being sent  down to earth. I tell her she needs to learn to recognize my voice and follow what I say so I can guide her safely back, and talk about living by faith.  I tell her that there will be other voices trying to direct her, but she should
only listen to me. I then blindfold her.  I quickly move a few chairs making a bit of a maze.  I tell her take two steps forward, three steps to the left, etc, making her way around the room and back to me.  I have a couple of girls pre-assigned to say “come over this way” but she I remind her to follow only my voice.  When I have her back up front, I sit her down and talk some more about faith and how even when she thinks she knows better what is best for her, she should trust Heavenly Father and obey.  Then I have her stand on her chair, then have her stand on a table I have next to the chair.  I tell her to put
her back to the girls, then ask her if she trusts me. Will she obey no matter what I ask her to do, knowing that I would never tell her to do anything that would hurt her. She says yes.  Then I say, “Cross your arms over your chest and fall straight backwards”.  Unknown to her, during my presentation, I have several brethren quietly enter the room and are standing on either side of her to catch her.   Often, she will be afraid and refuse to fall.  Thats ok.  I talk about do we really have faith when it gets hard to trust and obey.  And if she does choose to fall, it is an amazing experience.
   Sally