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Warm bread from the oven! How good it smells and tastes! But without leaven, or yeast as we call it today, bread would be like a cracker, flat and hard.
Jesus told a story about a woman who wanted to make a really big batch of bread. Maybe a dozen loaves or so! The woman got out a huge bowl, a large bag of flour, and a big stone jar of water. After she mixed the flour and water, she added some yeast. Ask your mother about this! Most mothers know how to make bread, and they know just when to add the yeast, and just how much to add. It?s not very much. In fact, the amount of yeast the woman added was only a pinch or so, maybe a small spoonful. Compared to all that dough, it was almost like nothing at all!
The woman in the story waited. In a little while, the yeast worked its magic inside the bread and it started to rise, and rise, and rise. Soon, it looked twice as big as it did before she added the yeast! Maybe even bigger! In fact, the bread dough got so large that it filled the whole bowl and ran over onto the table! It seemed like it might fill the whole kitchen, it got so big!
The bread dough got big and seemed like it might take over the whole house because of that little bit of yeast that the woman added. If she hadn?t added the yeast, the bread dough would have just stayed where it was in the bowl, and would not have made very many loaves at all.
The yeast in this story is like the good teachings in the Bible. The bread is like God's Kingdom. When you learn the good things that Jesus taught, it starts to work inside you and make you a better person. Someday, everybody will have the good things Jesus taught inside them, and even though you can't see Jesus' words inside you, and words seem very small, the change that those teachings make in everybody will make God's Kingdom get so big that it will take over the whole world!