5 Ways To Encourage Your Child’s Love for the Bible
5 Ways To Encourage Your Child’s Love for the Bible
By Shela Ervin
As Christ followers, we know that God’s Word is our bread for spiritual life. We take our nourishment, loving correction, wisdom, and hope for heaven from its pages. It is one of our primary means of grace for life in Christ until he comes. So how might we impart the love of the Bible to our children?
Consider these five simple ways to encourage your child’s love for the Bible.
Make Scripture central in the life of your family.
Building in structured times for reading and discussing God’s Word communicates its importance in a way that no lecture can. Commit yourself to daily family worship with a short reading from Scripture, brief discussion about its meaning, singing (ideally!), and prayer. And I say make it daily because daily truly does communicate our souls’ need for the Word, as opposed to an option that we may take or leave.
Other strategies to be consistent include stacking your Scripture time with other daily activities, like eating, bedtime routines, and even tooth brushing! When you stack the habit of reading Scripture with another habit you’re already doing, it will help lock in that habit.
Use storybook Bibles to bring the biblical narrative to the forefront.
We’ve never had so many biblically sound and beautiful resources for children as we do today. The beauty of storybook Bibles is that they bring out the biblical narrative of God’s relationship with man from the Old to the New Testament. The good ones artfully highlight a biblical theology of Christ fulfilling all of God’s covenant promises.
Storybook Bibles are never as good and never a replacement for the actual Bible, but they can be a useful tool for bringing children to better acquainted with the story of God.
Some of our family’s favorites include:
- The Big Picture Story Bible by David Helm
- The Kingdom of God Bible Storybook by Lithos Kids
- The Biggest Story Bible Storybook by Kevin DeYoung
Give them their own personal Bible.
Having your own personal copy of the Bible can be a great motivator to own and understand it for yourself. Consider giving your child a good Bible and encourage them to use it during family worship, at church, and for personal reading.
Reference the stories and truths of Scripture in everyday conversation.
The amazing advantage that parents have in their children’s discipleship is the power of conversation (sometimes talking that goes on all day, every day!). Whether you know it or not, your child is making observations and connections about life in this world all the time, and God has given you a parental voice of authority and influence in their lives.
When you encounter situations in everyday life, casually bring up what truth or story you are reminded of from Scripture. When reading other books together with your children, ask them if the storyline or lesson from the book reminds them of any other person you’ve read about in God’s Word.
Let them see the centrality of the Bible from your own life of devotion to it.
We know that more often than not, values in a person’s life are caught, not taught. If you remind your children time and time again about how important it is to read Scripture, but they seldom see you poring over its pages yourself, your message will not land. In fact, the opposite effect may take place, where they actually internalize the lie that the Bible is not truly necessary for life.
This may take some reworking of habits on your part to make sure that you are personally devoting yourself to reading Scripture daily. It may even mean adjusting the time or place of your reading to allow for your children to see and even join you in Bible intake. But for the sake of stoking their affections for the living Word of God, the adjustments are worth it.
I pray that these simple encouragements stir you on to continued diligence in living life by the daily bread God gives. May God see fit to bear fruit of love for him in our children’s lives as well!
Shela is a happy helpmate to her husband in gospel ministry, mom to two young ones, and creates goods & resources with hopes to strengthen Kingdom families into Christ until he comes.
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