Here is an excerpt taken from pages 33-35 of Starr Meade‘s newest release, Give Them Truth: Teaching Eternal Truths to Young Minds.
“When parents and teachers become convinced that, yes, their children need to learn Bible—the Bible’s big picture, its individual narratives, its characters, its genres, its commands and promises, its doctrines, its gospel in all its fullness—or when they become convinced that they must instruct their children in the rich doctrinal truths of the Christian faith, two worries may surface. One worry is that this kind of teaching will take big chunks of time. I agree. It will. There is no way around this. It takes time to chauffeur our children to soccer practice, wait with them through the practice, and drive them to all the matches. It takes time to take our children to their piano lessons every week, and, if the children don’t spend time practicing daily, we’ve wasted the money we spent on the lessons. It takes time to make sure our children acquire competency in math, as we supply regular instruction for them, drill them on math facts, and make them finish assignments before they go play. Can we learn anything without spending time at it? The answer to this concern is not easy in our modern, overstimulated culture, but it is simple. Make the time to give your children (or students) rigorous, diligent instruction in the Bible and in Christian doctrine. You don’t have to teach it all overnight; you can take years to teach, then go back through and reteach. But find or create a plan, and then work your plan. Purposefully teach the whole Bible, in its broad overview and in its details, to your children. Choose a method for making sure they are learning the doctrines of the Christian faith well enough that they will be able to articulate them back to someone. Then find thirty to sixty minutes several times a week to work through these plans with your children. Forget about one-minute Bibles or five-minute Bibles or any other promises to teach the Bible in leftover minutes we won’t even notice, and make the time to teach your children Bible and doctrine.
The other worry that can surface when parents and teachers realize they need to exercise greater diligence in teaching their children is the concern that they themselves don’t know the Bible and Christian doctrine all that well; how, then, can they teach it to their children? Some how-tos and a list of resources, both for your own learning and for teaching your children, will come later in this book. For now, though, I’ll say this. The answer to this worry is similar to the one for the concern about time constraints. Just begin. Begin somewhere. Begin to educate yourself and, at the same time, begin teaching your children. Find one of the many Bible reading plans available and/or a good commentary or two, or a comprehensive study Bible you can trust, and begin to get to know God’s Word. Get acquainted with some of the classic creeds, confessions, and catechisms of the Protestant church, or read some of the many authors who can help you to not only understand, but also to love, theology and doctrine. One bonus of making a commitment to teaching your children is this: the best way to learn anything well is to teach it to others. Even just memorizing a catechism along with your children will open to you whole new worlds in understanding the riches of the Christian faith.
Head knowledge—Bible characters, events, places, and stories; propositional truths; specific doctrines spelled out in confessions and catechisms—this is what I’m begging Christian parents and teachers to learn to value once again as they teach their children. Biblical, doctrinal, Christian knowledge is the foundation of all we long for our children to have. If their religion consists of experience or emotions or good behavior, their religion will crumble in the end.
In the introduction to their book Give Them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus, Elyse Fitzpatrick and Jessica Thompson write, “It’s the premise of this book that the primary reason that the majority of kids from Christian homes stray from the faith is that they never really heard it or had it to begin with. They were taught that God wants them to be good, that poor Jesus is sad when they disobey, and that asking Jesus into their heart is the breadth and depth of the gospel message. Scratch the surface of the faith of the young people around you and you’ll find a disturbing deficiency of understanding of even the most basic tenets of Christianity.”* The authors go on to explain how parents can demonstrate the gospel all day, every day, in how they teach, discipline, and correct their children. These authors would never be content with Bible facts and doctrinal content alone for children, and neither am I. I only plead that parents and teachers take care to instill those facts and that content as an adequate foundation on which to build all the rest.
Don’t be afraid of head knowledge. Supply it for your children in great quantity, beginning when they are young and able to absorb so much so easily. By all means, seek loving hearts for your children. Train them in godly character. Nurture them in spiritual maturity. Show them how to apply the Bible’s teaching to life. But don’t neglect to jump with them, head first, into the biblical and doctrinal knowledge they need.”
* Elyse Fitzpatrick and Jessica Thompson, Give Them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011), 18.
Excerpt taken from pages 33-35 of Give Them Truth: Teaching Eternal Truths to Young Minds by Starr Meade, copyright 2015, P&R Publishing, Phillipsburg, NJ.
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