We all want our kids to emotionally healthy. What about spiritual health? Is that an automatic by-product of eating supper with your family? Well….depends on a number of factors. First of all, if you are a splintered family at supper time, maybe you should seriously reconsider your schedule and do something drastic—like drop out of half of your activities! But secondly have you ever considered that this might be the perfect time to impact your children deliberately and purposefully with spiritual issues–when everyone is together even for a short time?
Scary Truth!
The scary truth is the average parent spends 38.5 minutes per week in meaningful conversation with their children. (A.C. Nielsen Co.) So when, Christian parent, are you passing your faith values and beliefs on to your children?
Tonight the supper table, at family time when you discuss the things of God, talk about this Scripture tonight. James 1:27 “27 Keep yourself unspotted from the world” Ask your children if they know how important the Bible is. When a Muslim child picks up the Quran, he kisses it. When you go to a Jewish synagogue, people dance around the auditorium holding a copy of the Torah in their arms, and as they walk by it, they will kiss it. We don’t kiss our Bibles, but this shows how valuable and special they believe their holy books are. How can we show that we believe the Bible is valuable? Here’s something to talk about at supper tonight with the kids—how do we live in the world but not be of it? And how do we pass this concept on to our children and teens? A lot of it just boils down to understanding who we really are—we’re children of light living in world of spiritual darkness. I like to tell kids that when we are truly walking in the light of Jesus it’s like we’ve swallowed a Holy Ghost light bulb and people can actually see us glow.
But when we compromise and begin to let the world get into our hearts, even in small ways, our light gets dimmer. We can become “spotted” and if we are not careful we get so many spots our light gets dim, and people can’t see our light any more. The Bible tells us to keep ourselves “unspotted” from the world.
