His Treasure Seekers

Look at those faces!  I cannot help but wonder where their journeys will lead them in the years to come.  So many hopes and dreams are wrapped up in this one picture.

Someday I hope I will be able to look back and say, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth” (3 John 1:4).

What can I do to help work toward that goal?  I hear stories of friends who “gave their lives to Jesus” when they were little, but I just don’t know what that looks like.  My children can tell you a lot of Bible stories (at least the older two can).  They could probably explain the basics of salvation.  Yet I don’t know to what extent they claim this faith for themselves.  So the big question for me these days is this:

How can I help guide them to a place of wanting their own relationship with Christ?

Right now that best answer I can give is to show them the difference between a life lived God’s way and a life guided by man’s own attempts at wisdom.  I want them to recognize wisdom and folly and to know which one they want to rule their lives.  I want them to hunger for a knowledge of God.  I want them to realize that trusting in the Lord is far superior to leaning on their own understanding.  I want them to look to Him to supply their deepest needs, especially their need for salvation.

But those seem like lofty goals when the oldest of my children is only 6.  Right now, I think the best thing I can do is to just fill them with the Word, pouring treasure into their hearts, hoping and praying that someday they will realize its value.

And so we read the Bible.  A lot. For a long time I struggled with “Bible first,” a maxim I’ve heard repeated over and over in homeschool circles.  We have a family Bible time in the evenings, and I wasn’t sure how do Bible in the morning without it affecting what we do with Daddy.  As I considered our long-term goals for our children I realized that what I really wanted to do was soak them in the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament.  Our evening devotions with Long Story Short by Marty Machowski have been wonderful for teaching our children about the stories of the Bible and how they tell God’s overall story of salvation, but we didn’t really get to spend much time in Psalms and Proverbs.

So for the last few months, our routine has been to start our school day on the couch, reading a chapter (or more, since Ian usually begs to keep going) out of one of the Miller family books and then 5-10 verses from Proverbs.  Sometimes it’s just Ian.  Sometimes the little ones join us.  But we’re starting our day in the Word, and I’m trusting the Lord that His Word will not return void.

I look forward to this sweet time every morning, and I think Ian does too.  The other day as we were putting away our Bibles, he turned to me and said, “Could we bring our Bibles to the park and do this with our friends?  I think they’d like to know all this too.”  I pray God will water the seeds I am planting and that Ian will share with all his friends and bear much fruit for the Kingdom of God.