5 Benefits of Reading the Bible Daily with Your Kids
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If you’re like me and have several children who aren’t old enough to read well yet, reading the Bible to your kids should be a part of your daily routine. They have no other way to benefit from God’s written revelation without you sharing it with them. Our responsibility as Christian parents is to immerse our kids in the Scriptures, catechizing them in the doctrines of the faith, and teaching them to love the Lord with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength. But, there are direct ways that we as parents can also benefit from reading the Bible to our children.
Step by step
Many evangelical churches today are experiencing a radical scarcity of expositional preaching, and it is to the detriment of the Church. Preaching expositionally is no more than proceeding systematically, verse by verse and chapter by chapter, through the Bible. This differs dramatically from an approach seen in many American churches today where the pastor preaches the Bible topically, picking and choosing those passages that support an idea or philosophy, and then ‘preaching’ on that subject.
The main benefit of reading through the Bible in order with your children is that it will force you to work by God’s outline, not your own. Rather than skipping over troubling verses or sections you haven’t quite understood before, you will be required to show up prepared, understanding what the meaning of the text is and knowing how it affects your overall understanding of the Scriptures and your own doctrines.
Instead of starting with a topic of contention or pet cause and finding verses to support it, expositing the Bible will allow you to start with God and what He has revealed, and then allow that revelation to determine your view of God, and ultimately everything else.
Answering the hard questions
Sticking to a plan and reading all the way through a passage will give you a chance to answer hard questions that your children, and you, might have. This isn’t an opportunity to show off how much you know; trust me, they won’t recognize it anyway.
The types of subjects that may prove difficult are going to vary greatly depending on the ages of your children. I have kids from five to thirteen years old, so we have had to cover a little bit of everything. Some topics that required a little more sensitivity and/or time to answer have included:
- What is circumcision?
- Anything about fornication or adultery
- Why would God punish Ahaziah for the sins of Ahab?
Answering our children honestly and openly when they ask us about the Bible is the best way to show them how much we rely on God.
Sometimes, you may just have to say, ‘I don’t know’ and come back to it later. That’s okay. It’s going to take more time than we have on this earth to ever fully understand the Word of God, and our children might as well find that out early. We should be able to show them that we rely on God and trust him even when we don’t understand how he’s working right now. After all, if we had a God we were capable of fully comprehending, he wouldn’t be much of a God at all, would he?
Stick to the point
It can be difficult to find time in the day to sit down and have focused Bible time with your children. For us, the best time is between dinner and bedtime. We usually have an hour or more where we can get in ten or fifteen minutes of talking about the Bible. While most of my own personal time with the Bible is reading, little kids aren’t going to sit well through much more than a paragraph or two before you start to lose them. It isn’t long before the little ones’ eyelids start drooping, and fidgeting hands begin searching out something to play with while you speak.
This time can prove invaluable for learning to keep your kids’ attention when it matters most. You may want their attention the most when you’re giving rules, or admonishing them during the day, but the most important time you can have their eyes and ears is when you’re reading the Bible.
Be ready to read only a short passage and show the kids how it reveals something to us about the character of God, the nature of man, or how it points to Christ as our only redeemer. Keeping kids on their toes by asking them questions will promote interaction and gain their attention. Eventually, they’ll be able to impress you with their knowledge of the Bible.
Don’t tell them, show them
We all know that it’s best to lead by example, and we are the example that our kids will mimic the most. We tell our children about being financially responsible and having good manners, but they’ll never develop those habits if we’re careless spenders and treat others poorly. We must live out those habits we want to see in our children.
By reading the Bible to our kids every day, we show them that we place great importance on the Scriptures. They’ll know that we read it every day because we bother to read it to them every day. Telling our kids about God isn’t enough, we must show them what we believe about God. When we go to church we show them that corporate worship is important. When we give offerings to church we show them that the body of Christ is responsible for supporting the work of the ministry. When we read the Bible to our kids we show them that we truly believe it is the Word of God, and profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness.
It’s a two-way street
Perhaps no other immediate benefit of reading the Bible daily with your kids is as rewarding as seeing how God works to bring the Scriptures to bear on the lives of you and your children. As we progress systematically through the Bible, it’s amazing how many times we will cover something one night, just to have it come up in practice the next day in a real-life application. I almost don’t have to look for ways to make applications for the kids, because God is showing me how to apply the Bible to their lives all the time. When you take your kids to the Bible every day, you’ll find yourself saying “remember we just talked about that?” more often than you think.
Conversely, God will help you to see where the day’s activities fit into that night’s Bible reading. I don’t often go out of my way to teach a particular lesson from the Bible, I almost exclusively teach it expositionally. However, it is still quite frequently that we can read a section at night and apply it to what just happened that day. The Bible really applies to every area of life, and if you stay in the word of God you’ll see reflections of your life in almost every verse, and reflections of the Bible in almost every daily activity.
Hopefully this encourages those of you who aren’t reading the Bible every night to your kids to start, and if you are already, keep it up! Just when you think they’re not hearing a word you say is when they’ll surprise you, so keep them in the Bible and have faith in God that his word will not return void.
Photo credit: Getty Images/B-C-Designs
