With school Monday thru Friday and church on Sundays it can seem like there is no need to teach our kids, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. It is our duty and responsibility as parents to nurture, build up and instill kingdom values in our kids. It’s our responsibility to help them forge their identities, discover their gifts and help them define their purpose.
One day my kids started to talk about something they learned about God, and as they were talking it dawned on me that they didn’t learn it from me. They were learning things at school, at church, but what was I teaching them at home? At that time I was working on my Be Transformed curriculum. Here I was focusing on how to teach other people about identity, purpose and vision, but I was overlooking my own kids. To be clear this epiphany wasn’t about guilt and shame, it was more like, “oh holy crap, I need to be intentional about teaching my kids”. So we started family teaching time. Everybody gets out a piece of paper and a pencil and we draw what we are talking about. We keep it short and simple. As I start talking I begin to draw something. My kids look at what I’m drawing and draw the same thing. My youngest daughter asks me to draw what I’m drawing on her paper.
One time we talked about potential, how God put inside of us the ability to become everything we were created to be. We talked about the apple seed and how inside that apple seed was and apple tree and inside that apple tree was an orchard worth of trees. What something starts out as is not all that it is created to be.
By teaching our kids about who God really is and who we really are we are setting them up for success. They won’t have to unlearn a bunch of incorrect information because they started out with the truth.
What do you want your life to be about? What do you want your family to be about? What do you want your kids to know and experience? What greatness do you see inside of them that you can start to pull out?
Proverbs 22:6 says,
“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”