You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Wednesday, December 19th, 2018. This week on the Catholic Sprouts

podcast, we are once again talking about the Jesse Tree, which is a list of ancestors of Jesus

Christ. We're talking about all the great lessons that God worked to teach his people and is

continuing to try to teach us today so that we and they might be ready to receive the Savior

of the world, Jesus Christ. We started this week by talking about Ruth, who was a foreigner,

not a member of the nation of Israel, and yet became a part of God's beautiful plan as the grandmother of King David.

Yesterday we talked about King David, the man who defeated Goliath as a boy, and wrote the beautiful book of Psalms, which teach us how to pray and have a relationship with God even today.

Today we're going to talk about what happened after King David. So remember, the nation of Israel had begged God for a king.

He said no for a long time, but finally he gave in. First, Saul was king,

and then David. And David was a good king. He loved the Lord. He built a beautiful temple to the Lord

in Jerusalem, and he worked to really change the hearts of the nation of Israel so they might faithfully follow him.

Well, David died, and his son, King Solomon, took over, and so on and so on.

And many generations followed David.

But unfortunately, not all of David's descendants that became king were good kings. In fact, many of them

were terrible kings, and they led the nation of Israel away from God. Many of them instituted

idol worship. Idle worship means that you create a God, you dream up a God, you make a statue of him,

perhaps, you claim that he does all these amazing things, and then you have people worship him.

Very often you even sacrifice to this pretend God.

Well, many generations after David, the king was encouraging and even requiring the nation of Israel to turn from God and worship an idol.

Well, God sent his special messenger, Elijah, to go and correct the people of Israel.

Elijah was a prophet, which means that he was closely connected to God, that God spoke directly to him, and that God gave him a special message to take to the people. That is what a

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