We were sitting at the table, waiting for dinner to start, when our four-year-old son surprised us with a prayer: “Thank you for your dyingness, so that you could save the world.”
It was a simple prayer, grammatically incorrect, but it warmed my heart as a mother as it showed me that he is getting something from the Bible we are currently using and from the video we watched that morning.
You see, it has not been easy for me to find a Bible that engages my children. Though my kids love reading stores, the Bible seemed to be the last book to catch on. The first Bible we tried had pictures that were too scary, the second one had stories that were kind of boring and was not very Biblically correct. Then my mom bought a new children’s Bible for us from the bookstore at our church: “the Jesus storybook Bible” written by Sally Lloyd-Jones & illustrated by Jago. I had seen the Bible before and had been unimpressed with it’s accuracy. With our other Bible’s out of the picture, however, and with our kids being interested in “the Bible grandma bought,” I decided to give it a try.
We loved it!
With much fewer stories than many children’s Bible’s, this Bible ties all its stories together to point to Jesus and to God’s “Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love” (Lloyd-Jones, 2007, p 36.). No, it doesn’t specifically stay close to scripture and it adds quite a bit at times, but it doesn’t make the stories less true. And after just having finished our Bible this morning, I am more than happy to start on our second go-through.
So why am I telling you all of this? It is not because I want to talk all of you into buying this specific story Bible, although you may feel free to give it a try. No, my reason for writing this lies deeper.
Here at Youth With A Mission, we do our work because we want to “Know God & Make Him known” and I am sure that many of you want this same thing. But no matter how important and powerful outreaches and later-life discipleship can be, we cannot forget to also disciple our own children. Yes we have Sunday school and our kids might be going to AWANA or another club, but it doesn’t take away from the precious time we could spend with our kids by just reading 1 Bible story a day from a Bible our kids can like and understand. Because our children do take away a lot from the times we spend with them. And because their views on the Bible are not just precious to us, they are the starting blocks for getting to know God more in the future.
I pray that you may all be blessed and may we all have the privilege of seeing our children grow up to love our Lord.
YWAM Utah Campus staff
Ps. The video I watched the morning of my son’s prayer was from “Buck Denver asks… What’s in the Bible?“
YWAM Utah Campus 