Jesus Heals a Paralytic

"Jesus Heals a Paralytic "

One day while Jesus was teaching inside a friend's house, many, many people came to listen. They crowded around the tiny house. They tried to hear at least a few words of what Jesus was saying.

Four men carrying a stretcher pushed their way through the people. On the stretcher lay a very sick man. He could not move at all. His four friends had brought him to see Jesus. They knew Jesus could make him better.

"Let us by! Let us through to Jesus!" they called out. When they saw they would never make it through the door, two of the men climbed on top of the roof of the house. The other two threw them ropes so they could haul the stretcher onto the roof.

The four men began pulling tiles off the roof. They were making a hole! Inside the house, the people listening to Jesus heard a ripping sound above them. They looked up. Then suddenly, dirt and tiles fell on them. The next thing they knew, a stretcher was being lowered through the hole with a sick man strapped onto it!

Jesus saw how hard the man's friends had worked. He told the sick man all the bad things he might have done no longer mattered. He could start over. Jesus said, "Now get up and walk home."

The man did as he was told, just as if he had never been sick. "Glory to- God! This really is His Son!" He and his four friends shouted and sang the whole way home.

Vocabulary: paralytic, stretcher, haul, tiles, ripping, strapped, Glory to God

For grammar practice, you can have students put these words in the past tense: crowd, bring, see, make, throw, fall, know, tell, do, shout

Students can create sentences with the words for extra practice.

Ask students comprehension and follow-up questions to the story: describe what the friends did for their sick friend, how did Jesus respond?, etc.

Additional activity: have students make a list of character qualities that are important in a friend. Have them discuss why those qualities are the most important. They can also tell you about their friends and the qualities that they most love about their friends.