Getting Going on Family Devotions
Author: Daniel Owens, PhD
May 10, 2024
Deuteronomy 6:4–9
4“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 6And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 8You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
God gave us, his people, a clear responsibility: to teach his word to our kids.
Now, I am not the king of family devotions. When our boys were little, we read The Big Picture Storybook Bible or The Jesus Storybook Bible to them. Sometimes. And when homeschooling, my wife usually spent the first moments of the day curled up with our two boys on the bean bag chair talking about the Bible and praying. She was always better organized than I was. The first book our older son read on his own was The Big Picture Storybook Bible. I was sitting with him on the couch after I returned from a trip overseas, jet-lagged and sleepy. He picked up the book and started reading out loud. I had moments of pride and delight between bouts of drifting off. He read chapter after chapter while I struggled to stay awake, mostly failing.
That’s probably how I would characterize my overall success rate at leading family devotions: mostly failing. But over the years a few key tips have crystalized in my mind.
First, the best devotions are the ones that happen. Don’t make it elaborate, just do something that gets you reading God’s word, meditating on God’s truth, and praying to God. Anything you do will be better than doing nothing. Moses’ prescription in Deuteronomy 6 is pretty simple: find moments to talk about God’s word. They don’t have to be formal gatherings like a Sunday morning service. They can be at any time or any place. But they should happen.
Second, the best devotions are brief. If you try to study the Bible formally for an hour, or a half hour, or even 15 minutes a day, that might not happen for long. Kids lose focus and start wiggling or joking or complaining, and parents get tired and won’t have the energy to fight. So keep it short and doable, even into the teenage years.
Third, the best devotions are habitual. Find a time when you’re usually together. Find something that you can pick up each day and not have to think about it. If you have to make a big plan, it likely won’t happen. Our family currently reads a psalm and prays after the evening meal. For longer psalms, we break them up. For prayer, we made a list on Google Drive for the weekdays, with four topics a day. I pull it up on my phone, and each person volunteers to take a topic. We’ve not always read psalms, though. A couple years ago we used a reading list on the Bible App from the Bible Project, which allowed us to read through the entire New Testament.
Finally, give yourself grace. You will miss days. Naturally produced sounds will interrupt concentration. A particular plan may fail. Don’t stress about it. Just get back to it the next day. If something doesn’t work, try something else. Don’t stick to a plan that is torturing your family. God is patient, and he works over the long term. I mean, he took over a thousand years from when he called Abraham until when Jesus came to fulfill God’s promises.
If you are looking for inspiration and resources, I highly recommend this blog post from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/melissa-kruger/today-the-perfect-time-to-start-family-devotions/. In it, Melissa Kruger gives helpful advice and a list of various age-appropriate resources for kids at various stages. We have used many of these resources over the years. I was encouraged that her solution for teens is exactly what we do (except she uses real paper for the prayer cards). So take a look and just get going!
Daniel Owens, PhD, is NCC’s pastor of discipleship.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.
BACK