Fruit of the Spirit: Goodness
We continued our Fruit of the Spirit unit with another light week because we’d just come home from camping and I headed to a homeschool conference Thursday, but we did manage to spend enough time that it felt like we’d covered goodness.
What is goodness? I think of it as things being as God originally intended. I love what C.S. Lewis said about good and evil in Mere Christianity:
“ …badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness . . . Evil is a parasite, not an original thing.” C.S. Lewis – Mere Christianity, II, 2, para. 10.
“Goodness” and “badness” are not two equal and opposing forces. If there had never been good, there would have never been any possibility of evil. “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” Genesis 1:31. The only reason we’re not all oozing goodness is because sin entered the world when Adam and Even chose disobedience in Genesis 3. So when we do the opposite of what they did, when we turn from sin and live God’s way, we are manifesting “goodness.” What beautiful fruit!
As we talked about it for this lesson I didn’t want to focus on DOING so much as BEING. But how do you describe the essence of “goodness” to preschoolers? I liked some of the ideas in the song “Goodness” on the Music Machine: Fruit of the Spirit CD:
“Bees make honey and it sure tastes good. Did you ever smell a flower? Well it sure smells good…”
That seemed as good a place as any to start about having God’s goodness in us. The idea was reiterated when we watched the video on Goodness from the older version of Kid’s Character Builders on YouTube. (The newer version, with updated animation, is also available on DVD.) The video says your heart is like a honeycomb that God wants to fill with “goodness.” After watching it we enjoyed honey sticks and talking about how good they were. We also watched the episode on goodness from our Auto-B-Good DVD Fruits of the Spirit (still a favorite around here).
For our “listening lesson” this week I added a couple poems just for a little something different:
- “Overcome Evil with Good” from Hide ’em in Your Heart Vol. 1 by Steve Green
- “Fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22 & 25)” from Hide ’em in Your Heart Vol. 2 by Steve Green
- “A Good Boy” from A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson
- “Fruit of the Spirit” from Fruit of the Spirit: Banana na na (Vineyard Music Kids)
- “Goodness” from Music Machine: Fruit of the Spirit
- “The Fruit” from Seeds of Character by Seeds Family Worship
- “The Good Little Girl” from Now We Are Six by A.A. Milne (complete box set of Pooh Classics audio CDs.)
- Karen & Kids podcast episode “Fruit of the Spirit – Part 2”
- Adventures In Odyssey episode #263 “When Bad isn’t so Good”
And that was pretty much it! Most of our summer disruptions are over (at least the planned ones), so I’m hoping we’ll be able to dig in for the next three weeks and have a strong finish to our study of the Fruit of the Spirit!