Two Tips #4
4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5 You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 6 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. –Deuteronomy 6:4-9
Leading our families in worship can be intimidating. But the reward is worth the effort. Deuteronomy 6:4-9 connects the way we teach our children to our own love for God. It also instructs us to weave our teaching into our lives, so that it infuses whatever we’re doing, whether we’re sitting, walking, or lying down. The instruction to write God’s instructions on doorposts and gates is an encouragement to be intentional about reminding ourselves and our families of God’s instructions. Each month, we provide you with two tips for developing your personal and family discipleship from dads who, like you, are taking on the challenge of investing spiritually in their families.
Tip #1 for Personal Devotion
Read Model Prayers
People generally struggle with two primary challenges with prayer:
Consistency: when to pray
Content: what to pray
If we’re not intentional, we’ll tend to pray only when some external problem presses upon us: a child’s illness, a difficult situation at work, or a conflict with our spouse. It’s good to bring these issues to God, but if that’s the extent of our prayer life, we will miss out on the real richness of prayer. Prayer is not requesting God’s help with things we’re worried about, it’s also developing a deeper love for and relationship with the Almighty. Just as with your family, that relationship will grow with scheduled, intentional time. Try adding a prayer time to something you already do every day: eating breakfast, commuting to work, or reading before bed. Or set a daily reminder on your phone to get you into the habit (you can snooze it, but don’t mark it complete until you’ve actually found some time to pray).
One of the challenges to consistency is content. We don’t find the time to pray because we don’t know what to do with that time. One of the best ways to learn how to pray is to read model prayers and let them lead us. You can repeat their words as your own, or stop every few lines and pray similar things in your own words. The best resource for this is the Bible's own prayer book: the Psalms. Read a Psalm a day and make its words your own. Another rich resource for model prayers is The Valley of Vision, a collection of Puritan prayers. As Mark Dever says, “When used slowly, for meditation and prayer, these pages have often been used by God's Spirit to kindle my dry heart.”
Tip #2 for Family Discipleship
Watch the Bible Project
Helping our kids understand Scripture is vital for developing their love for it. It’s hard to love something you find confusing. We don’t want our kids’ vision of the beauty of God’s Word to be obscured by a haze of misunderstanding. For years, the Bible Project has been producing videos that explain books of the Bible in engaging and accessible and yet thorough and deep ways. Recently, they’ve added videos on themes in biblical theology, such as holiness and sabbath. The videos will work best with children over ten, but their beautiful visuals will maintain younger kids’ attention, while older kids (and you!) learn new things about how the books of the Bible communicate their message, both individually and collectively. Check out their extensive video collection on their website or YouTube channel. You could try picking one of their collections and watching a video a week with your family. Not only will this redeem your kids’ screen time, it will give them a foundational understanding of Scripture on which to build their love for God’s Word.
