Your Child Develop a Growing Relationship with God

These six ideas to help your children on their spiritual journeys.

 In the sixth-grade Sunday school class that we taught, we would choose a class verse and ask everyone to memorize it. I would pay one dollar to anyone called on during the class who could recite it perfectly, word for word. The best verse we found to drive home to sixth graders the importance of making Jesus supreme in life is Colossians 1:18: “He is also head of the body, the church; and he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead; so that He Himself might come to have first place in everything."

Does your child have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ? If not, pray that God will grant you or others the opportunity to share the gospel. Without Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives, no one will turn away from worshipping false gods.

But even with Christ in our lives, we all are tempted in the flesh to serve these bogus gods. That’s why your child at some point in his teen years needs to develop the following convictions:

1.       Jesus Christ must be my Savior and Lord.

2.       Regular prayer must be a crucial part of my daily life.

3.       I must be the same person in private that I am in public.

4.       The Scriptures are God’s Word and serve as my daily guide.

5.       Nothing is more thrilling than fulfilling God’s mission for my life.

6.    I will pass on a godly legacy to the next generation.

To build these convictions into the lives of our children, we emphasized a number of key spiritual disciplines:

Bible study

Our children grew up hearing Bible stories from the time they were very small. When we had preschoolers, we helped them learn verses from a Bible memory program. We did some more formal Bible study with our teens in junior high and early in high school, but it was sporadic because of schedules.

Young teens often don’t feel the need to study the Bible by themselves in their own quiet time. We didn't see our teens take much initiative until they reached high-school age. The desire for personal Bible study seemed to come when they were on their own more and they saw their need to develop their relationship with God, to learn what He was telling them.

Prayer

Our approach to prayer at home was to make it a part of daily life and events. Of course we prayed at meals and bedtimes and with individual children when needs arose. We prayed before tests and tryouts and trips. We prayed for overseas missions we supported, for requests that came through our prayer chain, and for everyone in the public schools our children attended. We prayed as we drove the children to school, and when they began to drive, we reminded them to pray.  We also prayed during our family devotions in the morning before school

Church

Participation in the life of a church is a must. Your children may not always agree. Our boys went through a time when they didn’t want to go. Because they were also involved in other Christian youth activities, we told them they didn’t have to participate in our church’s youth group but that missing Sunday morning worship was not an option.

We also had to set standards for what they would wear to church. For a while the boys wanted to go to church in the sloppiest T-shirts and jeans. The girls balked as well at dressing nicely on Sunday. We compromised slightly because our church is fairly casual.

Sunday needs to be a special day for many reasons, the most important being the opportunity to participate in a formal time to worship the true God.