As a Christian parent you want your children to engage in Scripture and read their Bibles, but how do you teach them to do that? In this video, author and executive pastor of Church of the City, Jonathan Pitts, explains that producing a love of the Bible in your kids may have more to do with how you act as a parent and less to do with what you teach them.
The entire video is above, and the complete transcript is below.
Early on in my fathering journey – I have four girls – and early on in my journey I thought a lot about what does it look like to get my girls to engage in God’s Word and to read their Bibles? And I think about what are the different things that I can do and systems that I can implement to help them read?
But the thing that I discovered as I just grew as a father and grew in understanding that my ability to convince my girls to do anything is really limited, I began to understand that it was less about what I say and less about what I teach them and more about what I do.
You’ve heard the saying that “you can teach what you know, but that you’ll reproduce who you are.” And so I’m a firm believer in the fact that I can try to teach my girls to do lots of different things, but if I’m not doing it myself I won’t reproduce it in them.
The thing that’s beautiful to me now is that I watch my girls engage in Scripture, not because I’ve taught them, but because we’ve just practiced doing it together and they began seeing the value of what Scripture does in their lives. I get excited to walk into their bedrooms one morning and just see them engaging in God’s Word together. I have twin daughters. Sometimes they’re doing little Bible studies. They play church sometimes and one of them gets to preach. And so it’s a lot of fun to watch my girls engage with God’s Word.
But my hope right now is that I’m actually reproducing who I am and to the degree that I’m actually engaging in God’s Word myself is to the degree that my girls will follow me in that.
