I don?t remember how the conversation started, but I remember very clearly how it ended. We were exhibiting at a curriculum fair 15 years ago. A homeschooling dad had wandered into our booth. He was killing time and it was obvious that he had long since passed ready-to-go. I said something about parents teaching the Bible to their children. He dismissed me with, ?Oh, I let the Sunday School take care of that.?
1.Read systematically and chronologically. Chronology is a natural organizing system. Children will remember stories in the order in which they hear them. First we did this and then we did this. First Adam and Eve sinned, then they were sent out of the garden, then?.
2.Read from a standard translation (rather than paraphrase) of the Bible. Use a translation that grownups would use in front of their other grown up friends. I would encourage you to read from one of the word for word translations, and beware the translations which have capitulated to our culture?s demands for gender inclusive language.
3. When you read a story, read the whole story. God is a magnificent story teller. There is a richness and a power in the text. Children?s Bibles condense, simplify, and summarize. They edit out the very stylistic devices that aid memory. The edited versions grossly underestimate a child?s ability to follow a story line. The Bible tells the stories of real people in specific times and real places who faced real enemies and who were met by a REAL God. You can?t get more interesting than that. Reading the actual text of the real Bible out loud will train your children?s ear for powerful language, quality literature, and timeless ideas. The speech rhythms and the imagery feed the child?s mind, spirit, and imagination. The Bible is not too hard for them to understand. They don?t need us to dress it up with cute pictures, computer generated effects, or background? music. Bible twaddle is still twaddle. Twaddle is always a waste of time.
4. Don?t fear their questions. More than one parent has paled at the thought of reading the Old Testament to their young children because they fear the questions it might spark. When a child asks, ?What?s adultery?? your answer can be as simple as, ?Adultery is when man or a woman treats someone other than their wife or husband the way they should only treat their own wife or husband.? They know that Mom holds Dad?s hand ? she doesn?t walk around holding other men?s hands. It doesn?t need to be a discussion about sex. At its core, adultery is a betrayal of trust.
However, don?t tie yourself in knots trying to avoid the difficult passages. As our culture ramps up its celebration of all that?s wrong, our kids need to be armed with a Biblical perspective on healthy and godly sexual behaviors so they can recognize the counterfeit as counterfeit. Remember, that these discussions can be age appropriate.
You never know how the Holy Spirit will use any particular lesson. We once got a letter from a family who wanted us to know that their young son had become a Christian through the discussion of the Genesis passage concerning Abraham and circumcision. Not your usual evangelistic chalk talk, but God used it in ways no one anticipated.
5. Read aloud the way you?d read a beloved children?s book. Vary the voices, the pitch, the speed of you reading. Use your voice to draw the children into the story. When it gets tense and exciting, speak quickly. When David is tiptoeing around the sleeping Saul in the cave, whisper with intensity that fits the action. When he calls to Saul from the brush, read loudly. When possible, end the day?s reading at a climactic point. Leave them hanging.
6. Remember that all children are different. Some children are auditory learners ? others are not. Some hear a story once, and it?s embedded in their psyche forever. Other children won?t remember a syllable of it once you stop reading. You can?t take the credit for the first or the blame for the second. You just have to vary your approach. Sometimes you?ll want to have the children act a story out. Let Rahab cover the spies with a blanket to represent the drying flax. You might ?knock? on her door and ?demand? to be taken to the Israelites who have come to her house! You may need to read little bits of the story at a time, and break their narration into a series of smaller chunks. Gradually, they?ll be able to retain larger and larger passages. As their narration skills improve, you can make a game out of it, stopping one narrator and randomly picking another to pick up the story.
If your children love to draw have them draw a picture of the passage?s main event or key peson. Have them write, or dictate to you, a short summary of the action they?ve depicted, then save these pictures in a folder. One day both of you will treasure these. If your child would rather be pecked to death by ducks than draw or color anything, make memories another way!
7. Be flexible about the length of the lesson. Some days will go great! The kids will be engaged,? the angels will be singing, all will be right with the world. You may find yourself thinking, ?This would be the perfect time for Jesus to come back.?
And then there are the other days. The kids will be squirrely, the toddler will eat the only crayon that every other child cannot possibly do without. The dogs will act like they?re hearing voices, and every door to door missionary, magazine subscription salesman, and homeowner?s association busybody will start banging on your door.
If an ice cream truck runs through your neighborhood ? this is the day someone will pick to crank up the music and circle your house. Believe me, I know how satisfying it would be to throw the front door open and give the missionaries, salesmen, busybodies, and ice cream truck guy a piece of your mind. And maybe the children have made Jesus cry by their godless distractibility and stiff-necked inattention ? but it would probably be better if you didn?t open that door.
So, ESPECIALLY on those days, be flexible about the length of the lesson. Let their waning attention guide you. If the children?s eyes have glazed over, draw things to a graceful conclusion and pick up where you left off tomorrow. 8. Train them to observe the text: ?Who is this story about?? ?What were they so afraid of?? ?Where did it happen?? ?When did it happen?? ?Why didn?t they want to go into the land?? ?How did Moses hold his hands up that long??
8. You are laying a foundation, you are training a palate, and you are preparing them with the skills they will need for mature understanding. This job is way too important to be left to Sunday School. God hasn?t given us permission to delegate this assignment. In 2 Timothy 3:14, Paul tellsTimothy: ?. . . continue in the things you have learned and are convinced are true knowing who you have learned them from ? that from a child (brephos) you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise unto Salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.?
There are 3 things to learn from this passage:
1. Timothy?s education began early. The word brephos describes the youngest of children: infant, newborn, or unborn child.
2. Timothy made the things he was taught his own. He became convinced, himself, that the things he had been taught were, in fact, true.
3. His mother and grandmother modeled faith for him. The sincerity of their faith gave credibility to the words they said. Their faith served as a model worthy of emulation. As Timothy was profoundly influenced by the quality of his mother?s and his grandmother?s faith, our children will also be influenced by the way in which we live. Our attitudes toward the scriptures will also influence their own view of scripture. If we think the Bible is boring, too difficult, confusing, not all the significant to our spiritual growth ? our kids will pick that up. Our passion for the Word will be contagious, our indifference potentially deadly.
Above all, our children need to know how to dig into the Word of God for themselves, over time becoming less dependent on us and more and more dependent on the Holy Spirit.
Our children are called to evangelize their own generation. If they?re going to be faithful in that, they have to know the Word of God. If they don?t know the Word well, they won?t be able to help anyone. They must know how to handle it accurately. In a world that increasingly downplays the significance of words and the consequences ideas have, our children must be able to accurately observe, interpret and apply the Word of God.
There will be no shortage of bad teachers, fad teachers, and false teachers, and our children?s only defense against error will be their knowledge of and confidence in the Word of God. They will be called to speak to the things that they have heard with their ears, seen with their eyes, and know to be true from their own study of the Word. So that when they are talking to their friends and co-workers, they are talking about things that they know first-hand about the Lord and His Word. It?s our responsibility to do all we can to prepare them.
You do not have to wait until they are teens to begin teaching them how to study on their own. Every time you read together you have an opportunity to show them how to find out what the Bible says, what it means by what it says, and how it applies to their specific situations. When should you start teaching the Bible to your kids?
It?s never too early, and never too late. Obviously, you have to vary your methods depending upon the age of your students. Here are some things to consider: of the Word. As you read, begin to teach them how to study the Bible inductively for themselves. Train them to listen for those repeated words and phrases: ?And the people of Israel again did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord? ?And he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and followed the sins of Jeroboam. . .? ?And he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord. . .? Teach them the value of making lists. Chart the kings of Israel and Judah, using one color for the good kings and another for the wicked. It won?t be long before the patterns emerge. As you talk together about what patterns you are observing, you will be teaching your kids how to evaluate a list.
9. Reinforce the reality of the story you are reading, every chance you get. These things happened to real people who lived in real places at a specific time in history. You will need to remind your children of that frequently. This is even more true for the most familiar stories. Familiarity frequently dulls sense of reality. Find a good, clearly laid out Bible Atlas and keep it nearby. Show your kids where things happened. And help them think about what it would have been like to experience the things you are reading about.
Calculate mileage between one place and another. When Judah was taken into captivity in Babylon, who far was it? How do you think they traveled all that way? What would it would be like if we had to walk that many miles. Who would carry your little brother? How do you think you would do on a trip like that? Myth and legend are not generally tied to specific imes and places in the way that historical accounts are. The writers of the Old Testament are painstakingly specific about time and location: In the thirty-seventh year of Joash king of Judah, Jehoash the son of Jehoahaz began to reign over Israel in Samaria, and he reigned sixteen years.?
Even the genealogies are worth mining together. Ever wonder why those long lists of begats are so specific about who lived how long before they fathered Whatzit (insert unpronounceable name here) and the lived so many years after that? Do the math together, and you can discover for yourselves who could have talked to Adam? Who could have talked to Noah or Seth? Pay attention to the time periods noted in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Numbers and you can map their journey. When you read the account of the census ordered by Moses, add up he numbers given for the population of each of the tribes. Realizing that Moses was leading over two million very grumpy men, women, and children through an actual desert will change the way your children visualize the story. And when hose two million men, women, and children start talking like they want to kill you, you begin to feel Moses? pain.
When your observations lead you to suspect that there may be more going on below the surface, show them how to go deeper. Model careful, text-based interpretation skills.
10. Talk about how to apply the scriptures to our lives. If we accurately observe and accurately interpret the scriptures, but never apply them to our lives, we?ve missed the point. Don?t force this. Allow the Holy Spirit to have the final say in how He wants to apply a text to our children?s lives.
The standard boxed Sunday School curriculum ?take-away? point (which, being interpreted, means application) is usually reduced to something like ?Obey the rules. Take turns. Tell the truth.? This is the Jesus Wants Me to Share school of Biblical application. It doesn?t matter what the story is ? the application is always going to involve sharing.
Whatever you do, please, please, please don?t reduce the Word of God to a fable, to a pretty moral lesson (re: Jesus wants us to share). The Holy Spirit is perfectly capable to bringing the point of the passage home to your child. Get out of the way and give Him room to do what He does best. Aesop?s fables are entertaining and somewhat instructive. The Bible is not a fable, and shouldn?t be treated as such. The Bible is not just another school subject. We must make it clear to our kids by word and by example that God isn?t all that impressed with how much Bible we know. He?s much more interested what we do with what we know. And this is one of those places where we have to lead by example.
This is the point of the commands given in that very familiar passage from Deuteronomy 6. First God commands us to hold His Word in our own hearts, then he commands us to teach it to our children. Sometimes we teach in more formal settings, but this passage places the emphasis on informal settings: ?as you sit in the house, as you walk along the road, as you get up in the morning, as you lie down at night.? When they see that the Bible is a natural, comfortable, normal part of everyday routines and decisions, they are more likely to see compartmentalized Sunday-only Christianity for the unnatural and empty perversion of truth that it is. For some bizarre reason, they expect to see consistency between our words and our actions.
Oh, and God love them, how our children watch how we live! It has been said that God sees everything we do. But, if God happens to miss something, our children will be more than happy to give him the run down. They hear us read the verses that tell us not to gossip, and they hear how we talk to our friends about that church lady who drives us all crazy. They see how we treat servers at the restaurant on Sundays when the service is slow or the order is wrong. They watch what we do at the grocery store when the clerk gives us too much change back.
If there is no evidence that the Word of God is living and active in our lives, reproving, rebuking, exhorting, our children are unlikely to expect it to influence their own. They see our good days, and we can bet they will remember the days we would most like to forget. That makes it even more important to remember the two parts to the Deuteronomy 6 command: diligently teach them God?s Word, and be equally diligent to show them daily models of sincere, gracious, kind, merciful, loving faith that is neither arrogant, self-advancing, hypocritical, gossip riddled, nor rude. And when we blow it, it is all the more ?mportant to model, not perfectionism, but repentance and humility and redemption.
Thank God that He is both the author and the finisher of faith. I am so very grateful for His faithfulness to do as he promised to do: that is, to bring that good thing that He has begun in each of us and in each of our children to completion of the day of Christ (Phil 1:10), that he will work all things together to make us like Jesus. He will finish what he has started in each of us.
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by Cyndy ShearerPin It
Source: http://www.homeschoolconvention.com/blog/why-you-should-teach-the-bible/
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