There are lots of ways to help your kids grow in their relationship with Christ, but I am going to cover five things that have been the most impactful on my family. These will come in 5 easy to digest blogs over the next few weeks. The subjects we will cover:
1. Make Prayer Part Of The Culture Of Your Home
2. Bring Your Kids Into Your Personal Time With God
3. The Deuteronomy 6 Way- Modeling
4. Get Them Into God’s Word
5. Spend Time With Other Families And Young People On Fire For God
I told my son Matthew last week that if the devil wanted to make us powerless, he would get us to be a prayerless. Prayer connects us to our All Powerful God and the Bible is filled with scripture on how God hears and answers the prayers of His people. If we pray, we find out how awesome prayer is and how wonderful it is to connect with our God. Can you believe that God wants to connect with your family through prayer? WOW!
I love praying before bed and around the dinner table. If you are doing this, I encourage you to continue. But when I am talking about making prayer 'part of the culture of your home', I am talking about adding some very cool components that will even make it even a bigger part of your family’s daily life. Here are some of things that we do to make prayer part of the culture of your our home.
1. When one of my kids comes to me with an issue or is not feeling well I will first listen to them and talk through it. Then I say, ‘Lets take this to the Lord together’ and pray with them. I love what happens when we release something to the Lord together.
2. When we hear about a person or family struggling I have tried to make it a practice to say, ‘Let’s pray for them right now, Matthew (or any one of my kids) will you lead us?’ This helps all of us to put our hope and trust in God for this individual or family. (This gets easier as your kids get older, when they are young you may want to do the praying and model the practice.)
3. Ask your kids to pray for you. If I am struggling or feeling sick, I try to make it a practice to ask for prayer. I love it when one of my kids prays for me. Those parents with toddlers to teenagers will be blessed when your kids pray for you. Trust me.
4. This next one is the one I have grown the most in over the last 12 months. I am still growing and it takes boldness… but I am making progress. If I am out with one of my kids at the store, gym, hiking a trail (or wherever) and we run into someone we know that shares a need of some sort, I say… "Can we pray for you right now?". We lay hands on the person and pray for them. This has been so awesome to do. The person we pray for is normally so encouraged by us stepping out in faith. I have found this is honestly less awkward than it sounds.
As I share these examples with you, I want to tell you that I do none of them in perfection and some seasons are better than others. Some of you may want to add all these ideas and others may want to use one or two. Find the right things that will help prayer become a greater part of your family’s culture and I promise, the whole family will be blessed by it.
