A kids talk for Palm Sunday – The Real Deal!

Today is a special day in the Christian calendar…yes it’s Sunday, but does anyone know what special name we give to the Sunday before Easter? Yes, Palm Sunday – the day in Jesus’ life when he came into Jerusalem on a donkey and the people recognised him as the Son of David.

Do you remember what they did? Yes, cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. And they sang Hosanna to the Son of David! Well, as I was thinking about Palm Sunday I remembered something that happened recently that was also about recognising the real deal.

Do any of you know what has changed about our money? Yes, there is a new £1 coin. Have any of you seen it? Well, here it is…come and look.

Do you know why they changed it? It’s because there are some people who don’t want to work for their money, they just want to figure out how to make fake money.

Apparently if we had 30 £1 coins here, one of them would be fake. Can you believe it! People try and copy the real thing so they can buy things they want. So the people who make the real coins have decided to make them even harder to copy, by making the coins different to the old one but also giving it special characteristics, so that people can more easily recognise the real from the fake.

One thing they have done is make it combining two different properties – see here:

• It is shaped by a rough side and a smooth side – it is made from a sliver bit and a gold bit
• Here there is a number 1 and a pound sign in the same place, depending on what angle you look at it.
• The small Lettering has One Pound on one side, and year of production in the other

So by combining two different elements in different ways they have made this coin very, very hard to copy. It struck me that it is the same with Jesus Christ the Son of God. In order to more easily recognise the real thing God made him to uniquely combine different properties…

• He was man, and God in the same place
• He was perfect in everything he did, said or thought
• He was the most loving person ever, for both people and the truth
• He perfectly combined grace and truth in one person
• He did miracles that no other person could do
• He taught as no other person ever did
• He sacrificed himself for others despite being deserted by everyone
• He chose to become poor, so that we might become rich

And when people saw him some of them said to themselves…this man is the real deal. And on that day when he rode on a donkey into Jerusalem, the people held up this man to the test of the Old Testament predictions and said, yes, he fits the description, he is the one we have been waiting for…he is the chosen one, the messiah.

The harder something is to copy, the more sure we can be that we have the real thing…what is true for one pound coins is also true for our Saviour. Think about this over Easter, when you are tucking in to your Easter eggs…Let’s pray.