Simple Devotions with Children
I am sharing my journey through devotions with our children in the hope that it will encourage you. I did make some mistakes along the way. Does everyone struggle with doing regular devotions with their children? I know I did. I did what I would call bus-stop devotions. I read a devotion book with Bible verses and a lesson to our children while we waited for the bus. It was very hard for me to be consistent and I did not do devotions every day. Working against me was the fact that I am a perfectionist (God is working on curing me of this!). At one point, because I couldn’t do the devotions every day, I gave up and stopped doing them at all.
About two weeks later, I heard a little whisper from the Lord saying, “Who won that battle?” … the battle for devotions. Well, I stopped doing them, so I realized that satan totally won that battle! And I realized that even if I wasn’t perfect at doing devotions with our children, if I just did devotions a few days a week, that was better than none! So I went back to trying again.
I used to use devotion books with our children, but I learned a lesson here also. One time I picked up a cute little purple devotion book from the grocery store that was on a Christian book turnstile. It had pretty pink flip flops on it and since I was doing devotions with our girls (our son is the oldest and was in high school), I thought it would be just what we needed. We began to do the devotions but the book was talking about parents who got drunk, lied or left home. Finally, my little girls said, “Mama! This book may be for some little girls who have parents like this, but this book is not for us!” Out of the mouths of babes. Around this time, a woman came to our church and taught us on how to teach the Bible to our children. She said all we needed was the Bible! Imagine that! She taught us to go through the book of Proverbs or Psalms with our children, so that is what I began to do. I have to say that kids have the best insight into scripture, if you just give them a chance to think about it! Our girls thought of insights I had never thought of! And so went our devotions.
Here are some practicals for having devotions with your kids:
- You have a commission to teach your children the Word (I will post more on this commission soon!), so go ahead and teach them.
- Don’t nag your husband to do it, if he doesn’t feel led to. Do it yourself.
- Pick a regular time and try to stick to it.
- Start with going through Proverbs, just a verse at a time.
- Ask your kids what they think about the verse and listen to their answers. You will LOVE this part!
- Realize that your kids will fight you on devotions-they’ll say they don’t want to do it, that it is boring, they’ll get distracted, wiggle around… DO IT ANYWAY
- Let yourself not do it perfectly!
I do believe in SEED STUFFING. Get as much of the Word in your kids as you can when they are little. There will come a point where they will not listen as well anymore (this is a natural process of childhood as they turn into teenagers, don’t panic), so get the Word in them while they are listening still. The Bible promises that any Word you get in your kids hearts will not return void without doing what God intended it to do in them (Isaiah 55:11). What a promise! Doesn’t that just make you want to get even more of the Word in their hearts? It did me.
God may lead you a totally different way to do devotions with your children, and that is ok. This was just our little journey with devotions. You do what God leads you to do. But if you are struggling to find time to do this, then ask the Lord to help you. He will show you practical ways to work the Bible into your daily life with your kids (I’ll also give you more ways to do that in future posts!)
So when it comes to devotions, my best is advice is:
JUST DO IT! START DOING DEVOTIONS AND GOD WILL HELP YOU!
In His Love,
Suzanne
Mom Morsels 