H is for Holy Spirit Bible Lesson and Activity

How do you teach children about a concept that most adults can’t really comprehend? This Holy Spirit Bible lesson and activity can help!

Teaching children about the Holy Spirit isn’t easy. I don’t think anyone will fully understand until we ask God in heaven, but I did the best I could.  I broke our lesson into three parts: Who, How, What.  This made it easy for them to learn and as they get older, I can fill in their basic knowledge with more details.

Who is the Holy Spirit?

Before our lesson, I froze some water with blue food coloring in a small plastic cup. Then I popped it out into a bigger dish and displayed it in the middle of the table. I had my daughter read Matthew 28:19 that says, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit…” 

After we read the passage I asked who the Holy Spirit was and my kids gave me great answers, “It’s God’s Spirit. He is God.”

Yes, He is God, but also different!

I explained that there is God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and just like this water can be three different things.  “It can be ice, liquid water, and what else can it be?”

My daughter Audrey immediately said clouds. “Right, it’s called water vapor,” I said. We can’t always see it, but we know it is there because it collects in the clouds and then it comes back down as rain.

We put the ice outside to observe the 3 forms.  After a while, the ice turned to water and we marked the water level. The girls kept going outside to check on the water and see if it had turned into water vapor and went up into the air. You could also speed this up and boil the water or microwave it.

So the Holy Spirit is God; He is the same as Jesus and the Father, but He is a different form.

How do you receive the Holy Spirit?

In Matthew 3:16 Jesus is baptized and the Holy Spirit comes down on Him from heaven. While my children are very young and don’t really understand what being baptized means, they do know what sin is and so I talked with them about what Acts 2:38 says, “Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” If your children are older, this would be a great launching point for a discussion on baptism.

For now, with my children I just talked about what kind of sin they struggle with and how they could repent, stop doing those things and commit their lives to God.                              

What does the Holy Spirit do?

We get the Holy Spirit from turning away from sin, being baptized and committing our lives to God, but what does He do?

He helps us remember what we’ve learned about God (John 14:26), do God’s will (John 16:13-14), helps us bear the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:16-26), and makes us children of God (Romans 8:1-17).  We can’t leave it up to Him to do all the work, we are responsible for reading our Bibles and Praying so the Holy Spirit can help us.

My children loved singing this silly song to remember the fruit of the spirit and what it looks like when the Holy Spirit is working in us.

In my homeschool I am all about review, so at meals I will ask questions about what we learned during our lessons.  Breakfast is when we talk about God and read the Bible so we can start our day off right, so the next day I asked these questions to help them remember all they learned about the Holy Spirit.

1. Who is the Holy Spirit? (God)

2. How do we receive Him? (Repenting and committing our lives to God through baptism)

3. What does he do? (Helps us live the way God wants us to)

4. How do we know the Spirit is working in us? (By the fruit)

5. What’s something that you need the Holy Spirit to help you with?

We had a blast and learned a lot about God and about each other. For more bible study ideas for kids, check out all of the posts for each letter below.

I’ve joined the ABC’s of Bible study for children!

For more bible study ideas for kids, check out all of the posts for each letter below.