Latest / 5–Minute Parenting: Tips to Help You Raise Competent, Godly Kids. / Gospel Colors, Forgiveness, Creation and More: Natural Ways to Weave the Gospel into Daily Life with Kids and Grandkids

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Gospel Colors, Forgiveness, Creation and More: Natural Ways to Weave the Gospel into Daily Life with Kids and Grandkids · 5–Minute Parenting: Tips to Help You Raise Competent, Godly Kids.

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to another episode of the Five Minute Parenting Podcast.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Karen Ferguson, wife, mom, grandmom, and children's book author with a background in K-8 education and a passion for equipping parents to raise confident and God-confident kids.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: In this podcast, we'll cover parenting practices for both a practical view and a biblical view.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Our goal is to help you raise kids with a positive, godly self-image so they can become all they were created to be.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: I know you're busy, so we'll keep it short.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Let's take just five minutes and dive in.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to Five Minute Parenting.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're talking with Melissa Highland about how to share the gospel with children and grandchildren.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Melissa is a wife, mother of six, and grandmother of 12.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: She's an author, speaker, and founder and president of Beautiful Feet International, a missions organization that starts pregnancy centers worldwide.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Beautiful Feet has over 100 pregnancy ministries in over 30 nations.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Melissa's passion is teaching others to share the gospel and to protect life.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Melissa, welcome back to the show.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's great to have you on here again.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's great to be here, Karen.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: So you're going to talk about simple ways to share the gospel with our children and grandchildren, you know, looking for ways to do it in daily life rather than formal lessons necessarily.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: So please jump right in and share with listeners.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that we have opportunities with our kids all day long to share about the Lord and to share the gospel.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so I just gonna mention a couple of things that come to my mind.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: One is just forgiveness, because the gospel really is the message of forgiveness, right?
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: Of Jesus forgiving us for our sins.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that that there's opportunity to share that.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: When we make a mistake, we do something wrong that we go to them and ask them to forgive us, and then we can talk about the forgiveness of the gospel.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: And the same thing, maybe when they do something wrong, whether you're talking to littles that are doing something like, I don't know, not sharing, or older people, teenagers that have maybe, you know, who knows, like done something that is much more serious, like, you know, drinking and driving or whatever it is, um, that it gives us opportunities to talk about repentance and forgiveness and how the Lord um removes our sins as the East is from the West because of the death of Jesus on the cross.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: And and then another topic I think that comes up for kids of all ages is fear, you know, when the littles are afraid to go to bed at night, they're afraid of the dark.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: And we can talk to them about how the Lord is there.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: You feel like you're alone, but you're actually not alone.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: God is with you and you don't have to be afraid because he loves you.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: He loves you so much that he sent Jesus to die for you.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, again, that's with teenagers as they get older and they're afraid of things that are real, right?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, there are real things that that are fearful, like, you know, they hear about uh or experience even, God forbids, school shootings and things like that, that we can just talk about that that the Lord is always near to us and he is always caring for us and that we can go to him in prayer and he will protect us.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: And uh then the concept of thanksgiving, that when something great happens, you know, um, that that that came from God, right?
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, when this wonderful thing happens, you know, you oh, you know, you won your baseball game or whatever it is that we thank the Lord for that because we know that all good things come from God.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then just in creation, I and I even have an example from last night um with my grandkids that are two and three years old.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: We were walking home from the beach last night and it was and the and it was a gorgeous sunset, and we could see the pink and the orange in the sky.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I was just talking to them about, you know, look how beautiful that is.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, look, you know, Jesus did that for us.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus put the pink in the sky for us because he loves us so much.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: And Jesus made the sky orange for us because he loves us so much.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so, and I think that that again goes through very young children to older children that, you know, we see things that are beautiful and spectacular in nature, and that we recognize that that is God, that God is the creator.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: God created um our world and he created us.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: And when we see beauty, it is a reflection of the creator.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: The creator, yes.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: And and something else I think is really important is prayer.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it and it goes to all of these things, right?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: That we are praying with our grandchildren and our children when they're afraid that we're talking about God, but we are also going directly to God, like on their behalf, right?
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, we thank you, God, that you're here with us when we're afraid, that we're not alone.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: We thank you that you um, you know, made this beautiful sky for us.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: We thank you that you forgive us and and and forgive us, Lord, for the things that we have done wrong.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think praying before them, we're modeling that, we're teaching that and we're modeling that, and then we're allowing them to do that.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: We're saying, you know, very little children, if they've seen you and they've heard you pray, they will then, do you want to pray?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: And they can very little children will say, like, you know, thank you for the sky or thank you for the food and those kinds of things.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that there are really opportunities woven into every day that we can share about the Lord and make it a really natural thing, a very natural part of life, talking about God, talking about the gospel, talking about the death and resurrection of Jesus without um, you know, like sit down, now it's Bible lesson time, you know.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because I will say, especially young kids, you know, they want to move, they want to get out in nature.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so they, I don't know that they always appreciate having, okay, we're gonna sit down, be still, and listen, but but weaving that into daily life is so powerful.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: And then we want them to know that God's always there, right?
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: That it's not like something for Sundays, you know, necessarily or for church time, but that He is involved in every every aspect of our lives, good and bad.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what about gospel colors?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Can you walk us through those?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's something that I learned many, many years ago, and I learned it through um Child Evangelism Fellowship CEF, which is a wonderful organization, and um teaching children through colors, the colors of um gold, which represents the streets of gold in heaven, and you know, explaining about heaven and when we get to heaven and and how we get to heaven, right?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great way to talk about the gospel and then black or the dark color, which which represents our sin, right?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that we do bad things.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: We all do bad things.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: And most kids, even very young kids, when you talk about it, they'll they'll be able to think, oh yeah, like, you know, I hit my sister or, you know, something like that, up to again older people that know sins that are much more consequential.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that because of that sin, we're separated from God.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then the red color represents the blood of Jesus, and that we want to go to heaven and be walk on those streets of gold, but um, it be because of the bad things that we do, we we can't, we can't get there.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's a perfect place and we would we would ruin it because we're not perfect, but God loved us so much that he sent his son to die for us and he took the punishment for us.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: And with littles, I'll usually talk about, you know, like imagine, you know, if your sister did something bad, but your brother said, Hey, I'll go into timeout, mommy.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: I you don't have to send Abby, I'll go to timeout.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: Then that's what Jesus did for us.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then the white, the clean color that our hearts can be made clean when we trust in Jesus, when we tell him that we're sorry for the bad things that we've done and we believe that Jesus died on the cross and rose again, then our hearts can be made white, they can be made clean.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then the green is for growing, and just the same way that like trees and um grass, they need water and sunshine to keep growing and be green.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: That after we ask Jesus into our hearts, after we trust Jesus as Savior, then there are things that we need to do that help us to grow closer to God, like reading the Bible and praying and going to church.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: And there's all kinds of ways to integrate this.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we I do gospel face painting where, you know, we're painting the colors or you know, even making, yeah, or even making like um chains with the colors, making a bracelet.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: There are all kinds of ways that you can use those colors to like fun little activities that help them to remember this story, which is the gospel.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think of the color black and our sin and tying back to what you were talking about with forgiveness, you know, as we model that, that we need forgiveness, and that as we forgive our children and other things, that's gonna make our kids, especially as they they grow older, it's gonna allow them to be more open when they have messed up, you know, to open with us as parents and grandparents and not sitting in shame, you know, so much, but knowing that that free gift of forgiveness is there.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's a powerful thing.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the gospel colors.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, this is natural ways to do this throughout daily life, but family devotions is important.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have a specific family devotion that you recommend?
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, one of the things that we used with our kids a lot is called Keys for Kids.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I it's it's actually like a free resource that you can get.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it's, I think it's really good.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: It has little like Bible stories in there, kind of devotionals, but that are geared towards children.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: And we used to do it, we have six kids, and there's there's a 15-year age range between the oldest and the youngest, but we found it was something that we could use with them.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, it could relate to kind of everybody in different ways.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: So that's one that we've used.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm sure there are lots of other great ones out there, and and even just the Bible itself, you can use.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, very important.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, these are fantastic tips.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: I know they'll be a help to many parents and grandparents.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but before we close, Melissa, tell us a little bit about your missions organization and what's happening these days with that.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: We are, thank you for asking.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: We are Beautiful Feet International, and we train churches around the world to use pregnancy ministry to protect the unborn and their moms and to reach their communities with the gospel.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: So we train nationals and we do um one-on-one evangelism and discipleship with moms and dads.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we are we have over 200 ministries now in 45 nations.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: So God is just really growing this ministry.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that's one of the things that we're doing is teaching moms and dads um from even the time before their babies are born about the Lord and so that they can raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yes, you have been growing.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: I need to update my bio for you.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's wonderful.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: So you said 45 nations.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: 45 nations we're in, yes.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's wonderful.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you so much for being here, Melissa, and sharing on this topic for for uh raising our kiddos up in the Lord.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Appreciate it.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: And listeners, thank you for joining us.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: God bless you.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you too, Melissa.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: And be sure to check the show notes, listeners, for links to Melissa's website so you can connect with her and share this episode with another parent or grandparent you want to bless.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, have a blessed week.