And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. Deuteronomy 6:6-7
The Word of God—the foundation upon which we want to build our family…
From early in our relationship, my husband and I have known that we wanted our family decisions to be based on biblical principles. It’s not something that comes easily, and we often fail. One thing is sure; the more time we spend in God’s Word, the more likely it is that this desire will be a reality.
The question has been, what is the best way to incorporate Bible study into our daily lives. We knew we would study the Bible in our homeschool, but how? I grew up in a Christian school and attended a Christian college, so Bible was always one of my “subjects.” We really wanted it to be more than just a subject, or something to check off our “to-do” list. Don’t get me wrong. We have Bible lessons each day, and the kids do have assignments to accompany them. I’ve intentionally chosen not to use a premade Bible curriculum because it just didn’t work for us. At times I’ve been tempted, but when I’ve tried to use the Bible lessons that accompanied a complete curriculum that I had purchased, my heart just wasn’t in it. I found that I actually needed to be praying about what we needed to be studying at the time. I needed to study and prepare it myself in order to be enthusiastic about sharing it with our children. If I’m excited, it’s much more likely that they’ll be excited!
One of my favorite things to do with our younger children is to keep a Bible notebook. This is idea that I borrowed from My Father’s World. Several days a week the children will do a project that can be glued on one page of their notebook. On the facing page they write or copy something about the Bible lesson. These notebooks are full. They are bulky. They have rough edges, and they are treasures! My little ones love to go back through them to look at what they’ve made, and the discussions this evokes are precious.
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My husband and I struggle in this. He doesn’t know what to read. He feels he’s inadequate to just read from the bible because he doesn’t know the history surrounding it. I try and stick a bible curriculum as we have the girls, 11, 7, and 1 and it’s just easier. But I feel like I’m missing the importance of just reading the bible with our girls. I really love the kids bible journals and know my girls would love to do that. Do you have any words of wisdom or encouragement about getting started on reading just from the Bible?
Hi Donna, Great question!
I’m just going to mention a few things that we do during our family time, and hopefully this will give you a few ideas to use a springboard. 1. Simply choose a short Psalm…especially one of praise, and meditate on it for a week or so…or however long you feel led. You could do this at a mealtime or at bedtime ore whatever works best for your family. Some of them mention the specific times in David’s life that he wrote them, and that could be an added discussion, but it certainly doesn’t have to be. Reading the Psalms is so pleasurable all on its own! 2.We read the chapter in Proverbs that corresponds with the date. Then we have each family member tell what his/her favorite verse is and why. This has led to some very interesting discussions. If questions are asked, and you don’t know the answer, it’s fine to say, “I don’t know, but let’s see if we can find out.” Of course, having a good dictionary and concordance is really helpful for this, as well as some of the books I mentioned such as Victor Journey through the Bible and Manners and Customs. We also have a KJV Life Application Bible that has a lot of great background info, definitions, life application and character sketches. Also, depending upon the relationship you have with your pastor or youth pastor, you might find a valuable help there. We are blessed with a youth pastor who encourages our teens to ask questions, and he lovingly and biblically answers them. We’ve all learned so much from him! 3. Another thing our children very much enjoy is when we choose a passage of Scripture that is a narrative, and they read it and act it out. They have a lot of fun with those, and these moments come up in discussions much later in time. 4. One other thing I would suggest is to use your curriculum whenever you do it throughout the day. Then whenever you have family Bible time, have your husband reread the passage that you did earlier and have a family discussion on it. 5. Sometimes we pick a topic and start searching for Scriptures about it. One that comes to mind is when we did a study on praise and thanksgiving. I think of it because when we started it, we also started the habit of having the kids name one specific thing for which they were thankful that day. Now our day isn’t complete without this time of thanksgiving.
I certainly don’t want to undermine the importance on seeking the Lord’s leading. Often He’ll show you in one way or another what he wants you to read. Sometimes it might just be revisiting something you heard during a church service or read somewhere on a card or poster. Sometimes it might just be opening to the Psalms. Don’t stress about it. Start small, and enjoy!
Praying God’s blessings for you,
Rachel
I love the idea to study youths from the bible! Besides the books mentioned, how did you organize who to study? Did you use other resources or your own remembrance for who to study? I’d love to do this, but I’m not sure I’d recall enough characters.
Hi Heather! A lot of the youths that I chose were the more “common” characters in the Bible. I don’t want to say it just happened b/c I believe God was orchestrating it, but we were concerned with some traits we were seeing in our own children and felt that we needed to really focus on biblical examples of young people. I tried to choose a variety from both the Old and New Testaments. While most of the characters I chose have positive reputations I did try to look at some negatives as well because we felt that it was important to see consequences for bad actions. This happened about mid-school year because we weren’t satisfied with the Bible study we had chosen, so I looked to see about how many weeks of school we had left and went from there. Some characters, of course, have taken more than one week. For instance, we started with Daniel in his youth, but we went into his adulthood because we felt it was important for our kids to see how the decisions he made in his youth affected his life as an adult. Each chapter took about a week, but you can certainly divide that how you see fit. We would also do Scripture copywork and memorization as well as map work and a timeline, but that’s personal preference. Most days we would read the passage and discuss a certain aspect of it, and on Fridays I have them write an general essay on the discussion from the week. It’s really interesting what stands out to each of them! I don’t have a specific book that I used to get ideas for characters…most of that was just memory. We spent a great deal of time on Daniel. I would love to revisit him and do an entire unit on Ancient Babylon along with it, but it didn’t fit this time around. We of course looked at his contemporaries and the results of their decisions as well (Shadrach, Meshech and Abed-nego; Nebuchadnezzer, Belshazzar, etc.) We also did Mary the mother of Christ as well as Joseph, though we don’t know his age. We are finishing up a short study on Jesus himself because, of course, He’s the perfect example. We will do the boy who offered his lunch to Jesus, Naaman’s servant girl, the young men who mocked Elisha’s bald head and Timothy (which is going to lead into a HUGE unit on the books of Timothy). I also would like to do the boy kings, Rehoboam and others, so we might just continue this through the summer. It’s taken more time than I anticipated, but it’s so worth it! One I didn’t mention was Joseph in Egypt. He’s a great study as well, but we’ve done in-depth studies there before, so we chose others this time around. I don’t know of specific books that would list all the youths, but I’m guessing they might exist. I’ll have to take a look to see what I can find! I have a feeling that as you get started, you’ll discover that you remember far more than you think. Blessings to you!