Tips for Focusing Your Family on Scripture

Keeping your family focused on scripture – on God’s Words in the Bible – should be one of the basics of Christian parenting. For a lot of reasons though, this one is an area in which parents often find themselves procrastinating. There are a lot of different reasons for avoiding focusing your family on scripture, but the result is the same. Kids who aren’t grounded in scripture will have a very difficult time obeying God.

Why? Because if they aren’t extremely familiar with scripture they don’t really know who God is. Which means when others try to demean God in some way, your kids don’t have any real reasons to disagree. Your kids will also have a very fuzzy idea of how God wants them to live their lives. Not just obeying His commands (although that’s important), but the positives of how to live a Christian life – serving, loving, faith sharing and more.

To be prepared to live a productive Christian life, your kids have to know the scriptures. There is no short cut. Ignorance is not an excuse – especially when our access to scripture is so ridiculously easy today. Don’t depend on your church or a Christian school to teach your kids everything in the Bible either. They don’t have enough time – even over eighteen years – to cover everything your child needs to learn.

Like it or not – you are responsible for homeschooling your child in the Bible. If you haven’t homeschooled before, the very idea may frighten you. It’s what God expects of parents though, so He’s given you what you need to be successful. Here are some ideas though to get you started.

  • Have family devotionals. They don’t have to be fancy or long. Consistency helps, but if you skip a day just pick up the next day. There are so many helps for family devotionals. This blog has lots of free family devotionals for which you can search. Our parent website – Teach One Reach One Ministries (www.teachonereachone.org) – has over 200 children’s Bible lessons and hundreds of free activity ideas you can do with your Bible lesson. Your favorite book vendor also sells dozens of family devotional books on a variety of topics.
  • Refer to scriptures in your conversations. You don’t necessarily have to quote a verse word for word with the accompanying reference, but you can slip in a scripture summary very easily. If you are talking about something that reminds you of something in the Bible, mention it.
  • Encourage personal, independent Bible reading. Get everyone their own NIrV Bible for easier reading. Set up comfortable spaces meant just for Bible reading. Encourage your kids to think of the Bible as a library and “check out” different books. Challenge each other to read a chapter of Proverbs or some other book each day and then talk about it at dinner every night. Don’t go too far and demand multiple chapters or hours spent in Bible study daily. You want to establish a great habit and make it interesting and engaging.
  • Teach your kids how to fact check with the Bible. Your children will encounter all sorts of people who will claim to explain what the Bible has to say on a variety of topics. They may be Christians or atheists. Their mistakes may be innocent or intentional. Regardless, it’s important to teach your kids how to fact check what they see or read by the Bible. Make it a game – although it’s important to remember the stakes are incredibly high.
  • Have scriptures around your family. Maybe you have some scripture art as a decoration. Or you handwrite note cards with scriptures your kids need and tape them to their bathroom mirror. Maybe you leave them little love notes and include a scripture. Be creative, but your kids need to be exposed to scripture as much as possible. Often they will absorb a scripture just by being exposed to it constantly.

Once again, the particular activities you use to expose your kids to scripture on a daily basis aren’t that important. What is key is making sure your kids know what God has to say so well, they don’t stumble around making decisions and wondering what God really wants them to do. Or they don’t have their faith destroyed by someone misinterpreting the Bible, because they actually know what is really in God’s Word. It takes time and effort on your part, but it is worth every minute you can find to spend on it.

Published by

Thereasa Winnett

Thereasa Winnett is the founder of Teach One Reach One and blogger at Parenting Like Hannah. She holds a BA in education from the College of William and Mary. She has served in all areas of ministry to children and teens for more than thirty years and regularly leads workshops for ministries and churches. She has conducted numerous workshops, including sessions at Points of Light’s National Conference on Volunteering and Service, the National Urban Ministry Conference, Pepperdine Bible Lectures, and Lipscomb’s Summer Celebration. Thereasa lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband Greg, where she enjoys reading, knitting, traveling and cooking.

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