Train Them Up

One of our biggest concerns when we decided to send our kids to public school was making sure that we continued to provide them Biblical teaching.  We believe that is our greatest responsibility as parents to lead them towards a relationship with Jesus.  It is an overwhelming thought at times.  It is not for us to allow others to do.  It is our job!!  So we sat down and determined how we were going to be very intentional in our teaching them.  We came up with a plan of our we were going to do it to include 4 parts.

1.  Family Worship Time!!  We do this once a week.  It doesn't last too long (short attention spans) but it is a time where we as a family sing, study and pray together.  We are going through a resource put together by the Church at Brook Hills.  It has been an excellent way for us to lead them and it is divided by age which is great.  Matt plays the guitar and we sing praise songs.  We then study the Bible together.  One of my favorite parts is at the end when we all take turns praying.  I love hearing the kids pray and ask God to help them with what we just talked about.  We all look forward to this each week. We have found it works well to just do it on a night that works with the schedule for that week.

 2.  We wanted to start off each day with a way for us to focus on being more like Jesus each day.  I looked through a bunch of different books to find the perfect devotion book.  I found an awesome one called Growing with Jesus.  It takes about 3-4 minutes each morning but has a thought provoking question and then something for us all to do or think about during the day.  It has been excellent and brought up some really neat discussions.  We do it every morning at breakfast and then pray for our day.  We desire for them to be a light in whatever situation they are place and to do that they have to be focused on Jesus each and every morning.

 3.  Every night we wanted to spend some time in the Bible learning the stories and how they point us to the redemption of Jesus.  That of course means the Jesus Storybook Bible.  I know I have talked about it a million times on the blog but we just love it.  We are going through a story each night and it is such an encouragement.

 4.  We also wanted to make sure we focus on scripture memory with the kids.  I found a great resource on an awesome blog - I Can Teach My Child.  She has made scripture cards for each letter of the alphabet.  We have started going through the alphabet learning each verse.  They are some great verses that I pray will be a blessing to the kids in the future.

So that is what we are doing.  Are we doing a perfect job - NO!  But we have prayed over these decisions and know that God is going to bless even our failures as we teach and train Ben and Kate to be followers of Christ.  I think the key to it is to make sure to be intentional in everything we do and lots of prayer!!