Category: Family Devotionals

Fun Family Devotional on Needs versus Wants

A huge stumbling block to raising selfless children is the confusion that often arises between understanding what they truly need and what they merely want. Not accurately understanding the difference can eventually lead to all sorts of ungodly life choices. There’s a fun family devotional you can do to help your kids start realizing God’s view of the difference between needs and wants.

Grab your kids, a Bible and several magazines with ads and catalogs or plain paper and markers. Tell or read them the story about King Ahab and Naboth’s vineyard in 1 Kings 21. Explain that Naboth owned a vineyard. King Ahab wanted to plant a vegetable garden and decided that Naboth’s vineyard was the best place to plant his garden. Unfortunately, for Ahab, Naboth was unwilling to sell his land to the king. Instead of finding another place to plant his garden, Ahab forgot he had just wanted the land, but began to believe he needed it. His wife Jezebel stepped in and made matters worse, by telling Ahab that he basically deserved the land. She had Naboth framed for cursing God and king which meant he was stoned to death and Ahab seized the vineyard for his garden.

Explain to your kids that, while we may not go as far as Ahab and Jezebel, not recognizing the difference between our needs and our wants can lead us to making poor, ungodly and sinful choices. Challenge your kids to find or draw pictures of the things they want and the things they need. With older children, it is important to also discuss levels of need. For example, I need to have clothes to wear, but do I need a hundred pairs of shoes or a dress that costs $20,000?

Younger children may struggle with understanding they don’t need a toy, but merely want it. Older children and even you and your spouse may struggle to decide when a need has crossed the line to want. While the Bible doesn’t say we can never have anything we merely want, it is important to weigh the cost of that want and how purchasing it may prevent you from helping others who cannot meet their basic needs for food, clothing, shelter, etc.

Discussing needs versus wants needs to be ongoing in your home. Working with your kids to be careful to avoid selfishness and greed in pursuing their wants is key to them serving others and sharing their faith.

Fun Ways to Use Cooking to Teach Your Kids About God

Cooking is a life skill your kids will be glad they have as they enter their young adult years. What if you could teach them about God at the same time you are teaching them to cook? What if you could also serve others and share your faith at the same time?

You may not have really paid much attention before, but food is mentioned a lot in the Bible. Sometimes it is part of a story. At other times it is used to describe a promise of God or for other purposes. There are so many mentions of different types of food, you could easily teach your kids kitchen skills, how to make certain recipes and cover quite a bit of scripture at the same time. You can even share the finished products with someone to serve them and your kids can share their faith as they explain why they cooked those specific foods.

Here are some foods, at least one scripture where each is mentioned and the cooking lesson you could pair with it.

  • Almonds are mentioned in the story of Joseph in Genesis 43:11 and an interesting story about Aaron’s rod in Numbers 17:8. Assuming your kids aren’t allergic to nuts, you could teach them the different varieties of nuts and teach them how to shell each type. Or you could focus on the almonds and make a Jewish recipe for almond bread. Although the recipe probably doesn’t go back as far as the Bible, it is considered a historical Jewish recipe.
  • Figs are mentioned in the story of Abigail and David in 1 Samuel 25:18 and in the story of Jesus cursing the fig tree that wasn’t producing figs in Mark 11:13. This ancient recipe is considered a Roman recipe (amongst others), but since
    this recipe is popular in many countries in the area, it is probably similar to that for the fig cakes Abigail gave David and his men.
  • Salt, coriander, cumin, dill, garlic, etc. Spices are mentioned in the Bible, too. Matthew 5:13, Matthew 23:23, Numbers 11:5 and other verses mention various spices. Spices served to not only add flavor during Bible times, but in some cases helped preserve foods or slowed the growth of germs that cause food poisoning. Have your kids taste the various spices and try cooking this chicken recipe with coriander and cumin that is popular today during Passover.
  • Lamb is associated with Passover and the last supper as well as numerous other stories about sheep. Try a new lamb recipe.
  • Quail is from one of the more humorous stories in the Old Testament (To us, probably not so much to the Israelites!) in Exodus 16. You probably won’t see quail in the meat area of your grocery store, but the butchers in ours either keep some in the back or will order it for you.
  • Locust and honey made up the diet of John the Baptist. You can find edible locusts/crickets/grasshoppers (basically the same insect) at wilderness and hiking stores or online.
  • Fish were caught for a living by Peter, Andrew, James and John. Scholars think the fish was probably tilapia which, once again, your butcher can get if they don’t carry it.
  • Bread was a staple and was probably either unleavened, rustic whole grain or a bread similar to pita bread today. Bread is mentioned in numerous Bible stories and a quick Google search can help you find one new to your kids. You can find lots of possible recipes online depending upon which type of bread you want to make. Remember for any Passover story, the bread would have been unleavened. Otherwise it was probably the rustic bread or the pita type bread.

There are quite a few other foods in the Bible that you can use to continue your cooking and Bible lessons, but these should give you a great start. Have fun with it. Your kids will remember the Bible stories you share while cooking even better than the ones you normally just tell them.

Fun Activities to Teach Your Kids About Communication

Communication is a wonderful thing…when it works well. Unfortunately, in families – particularly amongst siblings – there can be communication issues that can damage and eventually sever relationships. There are some fun activities connected to Bible stories that can help you start teaching your kids about communication.

For both activities, you will need materials your kids can use to build something. For older kids you want to make the “building supplies” as unique as possible. Think uncooked pasta, straws, marshmallows, etc. For younger children, blocks or Legos work well.

For the first activity, tell your kids the story of the Tower of Babel found in Genesis 11:1-9. Give your kids the building supplies. Tell them they must build the tallest tower possible without talking. The older your kids are, the more difficult you can make the task…like they need to use all of the supplies or it has to hold a certain amount of weight. Giving older kids a time limit can also up the pressure. Be extremely strict about the no talking rule. No noises, etc.

When time is up, ask your kids the problems they faced because they couldn’t talk. Would it have been easier if they could speak? What if they could speak, but spoke different languages? Why is it difficult to communicate without words? Why do our words sometimes make communicating more complicated?

For the second activity, tell your kids the story of Nehemiah found in the Bible book of the same name. This time, your kids need to build a wall using the materials you provided, but this time they can talk. As soon as they start, starting yelling at them and try to distract them like the people did in the book of Nehemiah. If needed, call their names, ask them questions…anything you can verbally do to distract them from their building before time expires.

Afterwards, discuss how distractions can make communication more complicated. How did it feel when one of their siblings was trying to tell them something, but you kept interrupting the conversation and/or distracting them? How much more difficult did it make their communication? What things distract them when others are trying to communicate with them? Why is it important to minimize possible distractions when having a conversation? With older kids, this is a great time to talk about how devices impact communication.

Have fun with it. Future activities can encourage them to communicate well and handle communicating in godly ways with someone when they are in conflict. For now, just get them thinking about the importance of clear, undistracted communication.

Teaching Your Kids Reflection

The Bible contains quite a few verses that discuss the idea of meditating on scripture. Psalm 1 lauds people who “delight in the Law of the Lord and meditate on it day and night”. The New Testament also discusses meditation, but often uses terms like “think about these things”, which are perhaps more familiar ideas for us.

Whether you call it meditation, reflection or “thinking about”, God wants His people to think deeply about the scriptures He has given us. He wants us to think about what they tell us about Him and what He wants for us and from us. He wants us to use those reflections to think about how to apply those scriptures in our daily lives. He wants the same things for your kids and He wants you to teach them how to reflect on scripture.

Even though I was raised in a Christian home and attended church regularly, I don’t remember being taught anything about how to reflect or meditate on scripture. I’m not sure when it ceased to be a spiritual discipline, but you may not have been taught about reflection either. If you were taught anything, it was to read the Bible, but the plans they used covered so much scripture in one day, you could barely read it all, much less reflect on any of it.

If you want to start your kids off with great spiritual habits, reflection on scripture is an important one. It’s really rather simple to teach – even if you were never taught how to do it. I’ve broken it down into steps, to make it more like a recipe or set of instructions. There are multiple ways you can teach reflection, but this is the most streamlined I could design.

  • Find a time and place. It works best if your child picks a time when something is already regularly scheduled and can just add on a little reflection time. So for example, if your child always eats breakfast or an afternoon snack, he or she may choose this as a great time to do some reflection. We tend to think of reflection as “quiet time”, where one sits silently or chants a syllable over and over. In reality, some of your kids may reflect better when taking a walk or listening to praise songs. Each of your kids may choose a different time and place. That’s fine, because it’s important to find what works best and will help them establish the habit.
  • Pick a source of scriptures. The version you use is important. Try one like the NIrV. It’s a translation, therefore, more accurate than a paraphrase, but is also on a third grade reading level to make it easier to understand. To make it easier to find meaningful verses upon which to reflect, consider using a “Bible verse of the day” setting in your Bible app or from another source. Or use a book like Proverbs, where each verse usually has a lot to think about within it. Without this help, your kids may end up trying to meditate on a list of names or a description of a bit of action in a Bible story.
  • Teach them to read the verse and then say what it means in their own words. This may mean they need to look up the definition of a word or two. If they can’t explain the verse in their own words, they probably don’t understand it well enough to meditate on it.
  • Teach older kids to look for context. Sometimes verses can be confusing if you don’t understand what happened in the verses surrounding them. Job’s friends, for example, say some things that were just totally wrong and made God angry. Taken out of context though, your kids may think what they said was true and important. Often just reading a couple of verses before or after will give them enough context. In complicated situations, they may wish to use a concordance to help them.
  • Teach them to look for a lesson. Ask your kids to think about why God wanted that verse to be in the Bible. What does He want them to learn from it? What does it tell them about God and what He wants for them and/or from them?
  • Teach them to ask themselves what they need to change or do now that they have reflected on the verse. Reflecting on scripture doesn’t do a lot of good unless it is also used. Have your kids think about their lives in light of the verse they reflected upon. Is there something they need to change or do in light of it? How can they make those changes in their lives?

At first, you will want to teach your kids how to reflect on scripture by doing it together as a family. After they are comfortable with the process, let them attempt reflection independently, then discuss their thoughts with you later. Hopefully, before long they will have developed a daily habit of reflecting on scripture.

Using Animals to Teach Your Kids About God

Family fun trips are great times to reinforce what your kids have been learning about God. Zoos, aquariums, nature preserves and even farms are usually full of animals and other creatures God created. (Our suburban yard has even been host to deer, foxes, possums, rabbits and more!) You can use the animals you see as ways to teach or remind your kids of some important biblical principles.

The great news is that you don’t have to preach a sermon to your kids. You don’t have to memorize a lesson plan or a bunch of scriptures. You can just make casual comments as you go. Often these comments are best made in response to something your child has said. Hopefully, some of them will come out of your mouth spontaneously. And of course, you can say other things while you are enjoying God’s creation, just sprinkle in the comments from time to time.

Use your own words, but try saying some of these things to your kids the next time you visit the zoo or aquarium.

  • “God must really love us to have created such an amazing variety for us to enjoy!”
  • ”God is so creative! Did you know God made you in His image, which means He made you to be creative, too?!”
  • ”God is amazing!”
  • ”How awesome is that! God created the (insert creature name) so that (insert interesting fact about animal you just learned). Did you know that the extreme intricacy in God’s creation is what is leading many scientists – even some atheists – to admit that the idea that all of this was created by chance is impossible?”
  • ”Oh! That’s a donkey like the one in the Bible that Jesus rode.”
  • ”I wonder if this animal would have been clean or unclean when Noah was loading the ark?”
  • ”How interesting that all of these different types of (insert name of animal grouping) are related. Noah didn’t have to take one of each variety of these on the ark, just one of each kind, or group of animals. He probably took baby animals so they would have longer to breed after the flood and would have taken up less space and eaten less food on the ark.”
  • ”I wonder what day of creation these were created on?”
  • ”God told Adam humans were supposed to take care of everything He created (have dominion over). How do you think He would want us to take care of all of these animals/fish? What is one thing we can do to help?”
  • ”God sure did bless us by giving us so many beautiful things to see while we are on Earth!”
  • ”Why do you think God created (insert name of creature) so that (insert characteristic)?”
  • ”How many animals did we see today that you think are mentioned by name in the Bible?” (Provides a great excuse for teaching your kids how to use Bible resources to find information.)
  • ”What are some things we saw today that we should thank God for the next time we pray?”
  • ”God is amazing!”

You won’t use all of these every time you go to a zoo or a nature preserve. Some you will word differently because of the personalities and interests of your kids. There are probably dozens of more things you could say, but these should get you started. Have fun with it. Use every chance you have for a teaching moment that points your kids to God.