4 Personal God Things to Share With Your Child
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Subject Line: 4 Personal God Things to Share With Your Child, Part One
Hello again!
This month’s video provides some great ideas for Personal God Things to Share With Your Child to encourage their spiritual growth.
Many parents communicate that they are at a loss when it comes to answering kids’ tough questions about God. For example, when someone close passes away—a friend or family member—parents scramble to teach their kids about life, death and heaven. More often than not, parents end up avoiding complicated matters altogether!
Instead of waiting until certain topics come up, make a list of subjects you want to talk about and begin addressing them one by one, casually, but through your eyes. How do you know God is real? Share that with your child! How have you experienced God’s love? Try to express this in a way they can understand; this means talking to your child about what you believe personally.
Annemarie Scobey produces a family spirituality newsletter where she describes how she and her husband share “the little miracles or Godincidences” as she calls them with their children. She has found her children are beginning to understand how God is involved in everything in life! She says doing this has taught her kids that a relationship with God is not about praying for miracles, but rather giving credit to God when you know He has been involved.
This week’s video offers four solid ideas for spiritual things you can talk about with your kids. When they hear about your experiences, they will be better prepared for understanding God’s involvement when they go through their own.
https://vimeo.com/parentministry/review/175380701/fdec832fcb
Honored to walk alongside you,
Children’s Pastor
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Subject Line: 4 Personal God Things to Share With Your Child, Part 2
Welcome back!
Do your kids know how you feel about God? Do you talk about God in everyday conversation, or do you keep your relationship with God private?
Sharing your walk with the Lord with your kids may be one of the most important things you do as a parent. Deuteronomy 6:4–7 says, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them [the commands of God] on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.”
This doesn’t mean a set time once a week where the family sits down at the table and discusses God things. Notice what God says through Moses—talk about them “when you sit” and “when you walk along the road” and “when you lie down and when you get up.”
Basically, talk about God-things all the time with your kids!
One great place to talk about God with your kids is in the car. They are captive audiences even if it’s a short three-minute drive to a sports practice. Don’t be hesitant to share how you saw God working in your life while they were at school—even if they have friends in the car!
Or, make use of drive time in the morning by asking your kids if they have a big test that day, or anything they are concerned about. Then pray out loud for them (eyes open, of course!) It may feel awkward at first, but your kids will store up those memories in their hearts, and it will likely be something they miss as teens.
Mark Holman writes “We were never called to be ‘one-hour-at-church-only Christians.’” He says if all we do is spend an hour with God at church each week, that doesn’t demonstrate a loving relationship but “it actually leads our children to think that Christianity is hypocritical because it’s something we only do at church and not at home.”
Raising kids who love God starts with you loving God. Children watch everything, and they absorb more than you might realize. When they see your relationship with God modeled in all aspects of your life and they know you love and follow Him, it impacts them.
Until we meet again in next month’s Online Parenting Class, don’t be afraid to talk about God in new places! I hope the video for this month has provided some ideas for sharing “God things” with your child. I’m committed to walking with you!
Children’s Pastor
Video Script
4 Personal “God Things” to Share with Your Child
You know, when you’re having spiritual conversations with your child, that can be a little bit awkward. It’s hard to get your child to talk about the things of God, so one of the ways to get the conversation rolling is for you to share some things about how you feel about God and more specifically, share some experiences that you’ve had as you’ve interacted with God. It might help and equip your child to begin to understand and think about their experiences with God. I’m going to give you four things that you can tell your child that is information that they really, really need as they grow spiritually.
Here’s the first thing. The first thing that you need to talk to your child about when it comes to things of God is I want you to tell them the first time that you really, really, really believed God was real. I know for me that was when I first pondered space and all of the vast space. We have telescopes. The smartest people in the universe have built the biggest telescopes they can and they still haven’t seen the limit to space. When I think about that vastness and how big that is for me, that helped me connect to the fact that there has to be a God who has created all this. What was it for you? When was that moment when you said, “You know what? God is real and I know it to be true.” That is a beautiful thing to share with your child because that’s right where they are. They’re trying to figure out for themselves is God real. For them to hear your story of that, it would be a huge help to them.
The second thing you could share with them is when did you decide to follow Jesus. That’s an important story. I remember, for my parents, I didn’t hear that story until later. My dad was a pastor, but I never thought to ask them, and I guess he never really thought to give me tons of details. It wasn’t until I was a little bit later in life that I actually heard the details of how he became a Christian. Sometimes we live so closely together we forget to tell the obvious things. You know what? It’s so crucial for you to tell your child how you started to follow Jesus. Tell the story of when did you make that decision. How did it happen? It will help your child so much to start to begin the process for themselves. Do I want to follow Jesus? If so, they’ll have an idea of how to do that by listening to your story.
The third thing that you can tell your child about God is how you made a mistake. Now you’re thinking, “Wait a second. I’ve been with you up to this point, but I don’t want to have to admit all my mistakes to your child.” By the way, you need to be careful. There are some mistakes you’ve made that are kind of rated R and not rated PG. You want to tell them about a mistake you’ve made because it’s really important for them to understand because they look up to you as a parent, obviously. They really need to understand that you’re not perfect. You know what that does for them? It takes away the pressure for them to be perfect. Give them a story of a PG mistake that you’ve made and how you had to learn and accept responsibility and then you had to get up and move on and just say, “You know what? I’m just going to move on from this and learn from my mistake.” Give them a story. Tell them something that you’ve done. That’s so important for them to understand.
Finally, tell them how you’ve made a difference. This isn’t a time for humility, okay? Take some time to say “Hey, you know what? I have made a difference. My life makes a difference. I have a voice, and I use my voice to fight for this cause or I care about people and I take my time to go help and serve these people.” At some level, hopefully you’re making a difference. Hopefully, Christ and your relationship with Christ has inspired you to make a difference. Share that with your child. Why? So they can begin to think about how they can make a difference. I promise you it will inspire them more than you might have imagined.
These four things are ways that you can share your story with your child. What it will begin to do is it will help them write their own story in their journey with God.
Texts/Tweets
TIP: Choose a hashtag for your tweets and use it consistently. That will tell Twitter to store a list of your tweets on one place for later reference.
Tweet One: Share how you have experienced God’s love with your kids. #expressyourfaith
Tweet Two: Give credit to God in front of your kids! #expressyourfaith
Tweet Three: Kids watch your relationship with God closely. #expressyourfaith
Tweet Four: Talk about God all the time so it becomes natural family conversation. #expressyourfaith
Tweet Five: Make drive time God-discussion time. #expressyourfaith
Tweet Six: Demonstrate a loving relationship with God to your kids. #expressyourfaith
Tweet Seven: Raising kids who love God starts with you loving God. #expressyourfaith
Tweet Eight: Talk about God when you sit, when you walk and when you lie down. #expressyourfaith
Tweet Nine: Tell your kids how you know God is real! #expressyourfaith
Tweet Ten: God is involved in everything . . . do your kids know this? #expressyourfaith