Friday, December 6, 2019

Teach Them To Your Children

“You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.” – Deuteronomy 11:18-19

I need regular reminders that one of the main goals of parenting is to teach our children the word of God. Sending them to church does not suffice: consider that my kids spend over thirty hours a week at school, learning all kinds of other subjects, not to mention hours on sports or music. How many hours a week are they learning the Bible? The fact is, my kids aren’t spontaneously picking up the Bible. It’s up to me to teach them.

We can process this in two practical ways. The first is through daily family devotions. God’s word is to be on our hands and between our eyes: it has to be there every day; it has to be something we can’t avoid seeing. Family devotions provide that kind of daily discipline and reminder. The format, timing and content changes with each stage, but the point is to have one, to not give up experimenting until you find something that works. Even something short, done daily, is better than attempting something elaborate that is hard to keep up. Generally, we try to at least have some element of prayer and direct encounter with God’s word. We’ve found the easiest way to read the Bible is through books like The Ology or to pick a short Bible passage that we write up on the wall and talk slowly through. The kids are surprisingly willing to memorize things, so we’ve memorized the books of the Bible, the Ten Commandments, and are starting on the beatitudes. We end with sharing time, for prayer requests, to bring up unresolved emotional issues from the day, or to report on how we’re feeling (for some reason, Elijah always says with a dramatic sigh, “I’m tired”). We encourage them to pick people to pray for, or one of the adults just prays if attention spans are waning. 

In the past, we’ve done other things like sing through a hymnal (the Trinity hymnal is my favorite) or read about famous Christians. During December we go through a simple advent calendar. We encourage the kids to ask questions, no matter how basic. And finally, there’s the biggest secret to success: ice cream. At one point my parents advised making Bible time synonymous with ice-cream time, and well, now they won’t let us miss a night.

A second way is to ask God to help us both work the gospel into, and bring the gospel out of, any given moment of the day. We are to talk of the Bible when we walk, sit, lie down, and rise. This is not a program or an event; this is a lifestyle. Certain habits outside of family devotions can help, like listening to Adventures in Odyssey or GT Halo in the car, praying the Bible during bedtime routines, stocking up on Bible-based books we can’t find in libraries. But mostly, this involves doing everything Moses talks about in the earlier sections of these verses: after all, it is to us parents that Moses speaks. Our children can only receive what we have to give, and if the word is impressed on our hearts and souls, we won’t be able to help living this way. More than anything, our children will see what the word means to us: how precious it is, how holy and esteemed. And that’s my hope. I hope they love it, because I do. I hope they treasure it, because I do.

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