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A Simple Retelling
A man is walking the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Robbers jump him, take everything, and leave him half dead on the side of the road. A priest walks by. Crosses to the other side. A temple worker walks by. Same thing: crosses over, keeps walking. Then a Samaritan comes along. Samaritans and Jews didn’t get along, hadn’t for generations. This man had every excuse ready-made to keep walking too.
He doesn’t. He stops. Bandages the wounds, pours oil and wine on them, puts the man on his own donkey, pays an innkeeper to keep caring for him. Jesus told this story after a lawyer asked, “Who is my neighbor?” — trying to find the edge of his obligation, the line where kindness could stop. Jesus answered with a story that erased the line entirely.
What Does the Good Samaritan Teach About Kindness?
Here’s the part most retellings skip: the priest and the temple worker weren’t bad men. They had reasons. Touching a bloody body would have made them ritually unclean, unable to do their temple work. Their excuses were reasonable. That’s the point. Kindness usually loses to a reasonable excuse, not an evil one.
For a kid, that’s the whole lesson. Nobody decides to be unkind. They decide they’re in a hurry, or it’s not their problem. Teaching kids kindness through bible stories works because a story lets a seven-year-old see the excuse from the outside, before he’s made it himself.
How to Teach the Good Samaritan Lesson at Home
A good Samaritan lesson plan for children doesn’t need a whiteboard. It needs a real moment.
- Next time your kid walks past a sibling who dropped something, don’t say “help your brother.” Ask, “Are you going to be the priest or the Samaritan right now?” Then wait. Let it land.
- For younger kids, four and under, skip the theology entirely. Act out the story with stuffed animals. Let the kid decide, each time, whether the animal stops or keeps walking.
- Keep a bandage — an actual adhesive bandage — in a kitchen drawer as a physical object tied to the story. When a kid asks for a bandage for a scrape, ask who bandaged the man on the road.
Everyday Ways Kids Can Be Good Samaritans
Good samaritan activities for preschoolers work best when they’re small and repeatable, not a one-time service project. Saving a seat at lunch for the kid nobody sits with. Picking up a dropped crayon before an adult asks. Sharing headphones without being told.
None of this feels dramatic. That’s fine — the road to Jericho didn’t feel dramatic to the Samaritan either, until it did. A four-year-old who learns to notice a hurt friend on the playground is practicing the same muscle the man on the donkey used.
For a Sunday school class, good Samaritan craft ideas don’t need to be complicated: a paper road with three figures kids move along it, deciding at each spot whether to stop. Cheap. Concrete. Kids remember what their hands did more than what they heard.
Helping Your Child Build a Lifestyle of Compassion
Bible object lessons on kindness stick longer than verses recited from memory, because a kid can touch an object weeks later and remember the story attached to it. That bandage in the drawer still gets pulled out in my house, months after we first read this story.
Christian parenting tips for raising kind children usually miss this part: you can’t manufacture compassion by demanding it while a kid is annoyed with his sister. You build it earlier, in a story at bedtime, in a small object kept where he can find it, in a question asked instead of a command given. Some weeks it works. Some weeks my son still steps over the kid on the scooter, and I don’t have a tidy ending for that.
AbbaKid’s book “The Good Samaritan: A Lesson of Love” retells this story for bedtime, with pages built around the same three choices — stop, cross over, keep walking — that show up on every playground. If your family is looking for a low-pressure way into this story, it’s worth pulling off the shelf some night this week.
