Our Holy Week Family Devotional is brought to you by the Next Gen Ministry. We pray you and your family spend time reflecting on the life of Jesus this week.

Today’s Devotion

Maundy Thursday is the day we stop and remember the last supper that Jesus ate with His disciples. We call it Maundy Thursday because “maundy” comes from the word “mandatum,” or “a command.” On this day, we stop and think about the commands that Jesus gave His disciples the night before He died. He asked them to remember.

Hundreds of years before that last supper, God’s special people (called the Israelites) lived in Egypt as slaves. The Egyptians were mean to them and treated them unfairly, so God started making a plan to rescue them. He asked a man named Moses to help them escape from Egypt.

One night, God told Moses to have every Israelite family kill a lamb and paint some of its blood over the doorway of their homes. During the night, an Angel of Death came through the streets in Egypt and killed the oldest son in every house that didn’t have blood on the door. But no one died in the houses that had blood
on the door. The blood of the Passover lamb saved God’s people from death.

The Egyptians became afraid of the Israelites after this and begged them to leave Egypt. God had rescued His people! Every year after that, the people of Israel observed the Passover, remembering what God did for them.

The night that Jesus ate the last Passover meal with His disciples, He told them He was going to become the last Passover lamb. He would save them forever by dying on a cross for their sins. His body would be broken for them like bread, and His blood would be poured out for them like wine.

He commanded them to remember Him every time they ate bread or drank wine. We still continue to remember Him this way: on Maundy Thursday, with the last supper. Today, we call it The Lord’s Supper.

Talking Points

• How do the bread and the juice remind us of Jesus when we have the Lord’s Supper?
• Why is it important for us to remember that Jesus died for us?

Family Activity

Using the recipe below, make unleavened bread. After dinner, turn off all technology, as well as all the lights. Light a few candles and gather around a table together. Eat the bread and have grape juice to drink. Talk about the bread representing the body of Christ and juice representing the blood shed for us. Pray as a family and do an activity (play a game, read, or draw) together without any technology.

Recipe for Unleavened Bread

1/2 cup of white flour
3/4 cup of whole wheat flour
3/8 tsp. of salt
3/8 tsp. of baking powder
3 tbsp. of vegetable oil
3/8 cup of warm water
2-3 tbsp. of honey

1. Mix all your ingredients together in a bowl. Do not over stir.
2. Pat the dough into a circle on a greased cookie sheet, about 3/8 inch thick and about 5 inches round.
3. Score the top of the loaf. (Cut it lightly into eight sections, not all the way through.)
4. Bake about 15 minutes at 400 degrees.