One of the best things we can do as parents is to help our children meet God and teach them to hear from him regularly. Primarily, this means helping them learn how to spend time in God’s Word and how to pray. Yet, as parents this is one of the hardest things to do.
For many reasons, it is challenging to spend time with God regularly as families. Busyness, lack of interest (from kids and parents), feeling like it’s not beneficial, or simply not knowing how to do it. Our family has experienced all these things at different times.
We have four kids between the ages of 4 and 12. The oldest and youngest are girls and the two in between are boys. After being parents for the last 12 years, my wife and I feel like we have finally found a regular rhythm for our family that seems sustainable.
Our routine has changed and evolved based on various factors, particularly the age and stage of our children. But I want to share our present daily routine with you. We usually follow this routine five days a week, on weekdays. It mainly involves our three older kids who can all read, though our third one still needs a little help.
This routine is not meant to be prescriptive. Each family has many factors to consider when settling on what works for them. But perhaps it can serve as a template you can use to create your own daily family routine of spending time with God as a family.
Getting Up with God
This is the latest component of our daily routine. As painful as it is sometimes, we all wake up 15 minutes earlier than we normally would, to spend time reading the Bible and praying. We all read the same passage (usually about 10-15 verses) silently out of our own Bibles. Then we have a short discussion on what we have read.
Initially, I expected our kids to discern the main point of the passage and to come up with some application. But we quickly realised that this was too difficult for them at this point. So now my wife and I ask them some basic observation questions. Then we try to arrive at the main point and applications together. We end our time with a short prayer, in light of what we have just read and discussed together.
We are learning God’s Word together and it is helping our kids get into the habit of daily quiet time. But this practice has several other benefits too. It is now easier to motivate our kids to get up to spend time together with God as a family, rather than getting up to go to school.
It also provides a subtle message that school, work, and everything else are just small parts of a whole day and life lived for God. They are not ends in themselves. Also, it is great for all of us to start our day with our minds fixed on God and his Word, rather than on uniforms, tiffins, homework, and so on. As an added bonus, my wife and I are also able to be much more regular in our own times with God.
Hiding God’s Word in Our Hearts
Something else we have been doing for some time now is to memorise Bible verses every morning. We do this on the short car ride to the bus stop. We probably memorise 2-3 verses per week on average. Then we talk about the meaning of the verses. Over the last few years, we have memorised dozens of Scripture passages. Some days we spend time reviewing the verses we learned previously. Once again, an added bonus is that my wife and I end up memorising more Scripture too.
Evening Bible Reading
This is the oldest part of our daily routine. We started it when our eldest child was still a baby. Over the years, we have done different things with our kids in the evening, as they went through various stages of growing up. We read stories from children’s Bibles. Our favourites are The Jesus Story Book Bible and Rhyme Bible Storybook. We sang worship songs and read Christian books like Narnia and Wingfeather.
Our current practice is reading aloud one chapter from the Bible together. Then we read a few pages from a Christian biography for kids. Lightkeepers Girls and Trailblazer Heroes & Heroines are particularly good. Our kids also take turns praying each night, along with one of us.
Sticking with It
If all this makes you think that our family must have the most idyllic times of worship together, let me assure you the reality is very different. We have our daily share of grumpy kids (and adults) in the morning. Our kids often zone out in the car, while the rest of us are trying to memorise Bible verses. The siblings poke each other during our evening Bible reading time. Our littlest one is on a different track than the others, so she causes her own share of noise and disruption. Yet, we continue to stick with this routine every day. We do this because we know that we will only see most of the benefits of these practices in the years and the decades to come.
If you are just starting to spend time with God together as a family, I recommend starting small. I know many families who do family worship just once a week. This might be a great way to begin. Then you can see how things evolve, especially as you all get used to it and your kids get older. The most important thing is to be consistent. There is nothing more important we can do as parents than help our kids meet God and spend time with him.
