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How To Get The Bible Into Your Family · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  we need to be really careful in a day and age where people are becoming less and less literate, less able to read books. God decided to write a book. He decided to introduce himself to us through the book. All the work that people do to translate the Bible into languages—
• 0:17
  Think about the amount of work it takes to go to a village of people and not only, you know, learn that language and translate the Bible into the language, but you also have to basically make the entire tribe literate in order for them to have access to the word of God. And each one of us is in that same situation as a Bible translator. We are the leader of a tribe of illiterate children.
• 0:39
  who need to become literate and who need to be introduced to the Bible as they are learning to read the English language so that they can actually understand who God is. Hi, welcome to the Family Teams podcast. Our goal here is to help your family become a multi-generational team on mission by providing you with biblically rooted concepts, tools, and rhythms. Your hosts are Jeremy Pryor and Jefferson Bethke, and we can't wait to chat about all things family.
• 1:09
  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. Excited to talk today about the Bible and how to get the Bible into your family team. So I am joined today by my lovely wife, April. April, welcome. Hello, everybody. Hello.
• 1:21
  Now, one of the things I've noticed about this topic is it can look very different depending on the stage of the family, the gifts of the parents, the culture of the family. And so I don't feel like I've ever seen the perfect one size fits all. This is how you get the Bible into your family kind of thing. So I'm really excited that we're going to have, we're going to talk about this topic in kind of two different parts. So this is part one. April and I are going to kind of walk you guys through the history of our family's
• 1:49
  engagement, the Bible, a lot of things that we've tried to figure out with our kids, what we did when they were little, what we did when they got older. And then the Akramis, Cameron and Michelle, will be on the podcast next week. And they are the August Community Coaches for the Family Teams Accelerator. So we're going to spend the entire month of August talking about how to invest in
• 2:14
  your family in the Bible, what does it look like to create rhythms of Bible time with your family at the various stages you're at? And so Cameron and Michelle are going to, they've written an amazing one pager, their top five tips for getting the Bible into your home. And so that one pager, you can find that at familyteams.com slash Bible. It's free. You can download that. So familyteams.com slash Bible, if you want to grab that. And then
• 2:38
  If you want to jump into the accelerator, you'll get the full playbook. And they've written an amazing playbook with three different plays, ways in which their family engages with the Bible. So you'll hear from them next week. They're also going to be on the Zoom in the accelerator as our community coaches. So if you guys want to jump into the accelerator, we'd love to have you guys for the month of August or for the whole year. A lot of you guys have joined for the year, and that's been awesome.
• 3:01
  But I wanted to talk to April today, kind of walk through the history of some of the things that we have tried to implement. And so going back, what's maybe one rhythm, April, you think about that we experienced with the Bible and our kids when they were little, in the little stage?
• 3:21
  Yes. I remember when we, let's see, our oldest was probably like six or seven. And so maybe we had like four kids at the time. And we were trying to figure out how to get our kids interested in the Bible. So I think we decided to do this because we were trying to pair it with something else that they already thought was fun. And so we, um, we, um,
• 3:48
  Got them each a picture Bible. I think it was just our oldest two were the readers at the time. Maybe we had our oldest three with a Bible, with their own Bible. We did the picture Bible. That was a Bible that Jeremy really enjoyed when he was a kid. Loved it. Growing up. It changed my life. Got me to fall in love with the Old Testament.
• 4:07
  Yeah. And it has crazy, like really good illustrations. And it's like written kind of like a comic book, but it is the Bible. And so the kids can see who's talking and it's really helpful. So we would take everyone to get their own Bible and we would take them to first watch kind of like a breakfasty brunchy restaurant around here. And we would read the Bible while we...
• 4:36
  ordered we would order and then we would read the bible while we waited for our food and um it was just kind of pairing two things together getting them out and about um helped them have like more um i guess interest in having the conversation around the table um instead of being at home then we just did it once a week and um that was it was really fun we have lots of fun memories from the time yeah man
• 5:04
  Yeah, I think trying to figure out, is there something that you can do that could interject some energy and some interest into this topic? And for whatever reason, yeah, I went from really being obsessed with the picture Bible when I was like eight, nine, 10 years old, reading that. And to this day, when you say like King David or Solomon or any character, I can see those illustrations and they're really well done. So and then there was a time where I transitioned from, you know, kind of.
• 5:33
  seeing it in that very hyper visual format into the actual words of scripture. And I think it's important to help your kids through that transition. But I think oftentimes, yeah, it's nice to have a season where they can really get a hold of the picture of the scriptures from like this, these illustrations. Yeah.
• 5:52
  Okay, so that was one thing that, April, you remember doing. I think for me, there was a time where I was trying to cut what I was learning from the scriptures into bite-sized pieces and feed it to my kids at our dinner table. And so I know that was one of the conversations we had that I can't remember who inspired me to do this, but...
• 6:20
  One of the ideas is that you as a mother or father, you are really eating kind of the meat of the word. And, but sometimes that's, that may be intense for your kids. So let's say you're spending time with the Lord or there's a devotional you're really into, you're reading through a book of the Bible.
• 6:37
  Um, why not let that your time with Lord, what is currently really resonating with you, what God's trying to speak to you? Why not simply share that with your kids? And that to me just felt so consistent with Deuteronomy six, which was just bring it up, make it a natural part of the conversation as a family. And so at the dinner table, um, I think it's really important if you're going to start a new rhythm or a discipline like this, that might feel a little unusual at first.
• 7:01
  you've got to first start with discipline. So you've got to do something to remind yourself. So I would bring my journal every night to the dinner table. And that reminded me, and I could see exactly what I was studying that morning in the journal. And even when I was doing my journaling in the morning, the way I like to spend time with the Lord is I'll be listening to passages of scripture, writing all these notes. There was a time where I just kind of put a line in and just wrote a couple of notes that I was like, okay, this is what I want to share with my kids tonight. And that actually was really interesting
• 7:29
  You know, it took just another two or three minutes with my time in the Bible in the morning. But then I was able to immediately share this with my kids at the dinner table. So that was one of the things that I remember. I don't know if you want to share anything more about that season. Yeah, I feel like that...
• 7:47
  If you are a wife out there and you are really like hoping that your husband will lead more at that, like spiritually, we definitely had that journey as well. And I remember Jeremy feeling pretty uncomfortable leading any kind of like spiritual talk or whatever.
• 8:08
  conversation at the table when the kids were little. I think part of it was like we're also dealing with like behavior stuff at the same time. Part of it was he said, you know, you could put me in front of 100 screaming middle schoolers and I could handle them. But putting me in front of my
• 8:24
  own children at the table, I think it's just intimidating. So even though Jeremy has a bit of like youth ministry background and theology training, it was still very uncomfortable for him. So I just want to say like anything, anytime your husband tries to lead, do whatever you can to support him, to encourage him, to help the kid's attention be turned towards him.
• 8:47
  And to not worry about the behavior at the table, if it's happening at the table, just the behavior at the time, to not have that be what you focus on, but to really just encourage your husband to be able, whatever would make the situation.
• 9:03
  environment more friendly to him being able to lead and not be distracted to help him do that. So I really appreciated this. This is when Jeremy really started to step up. And that's how he said it. He said, you know, I take what the Lord has been teaching me and cut it up into bite-sized pieces for my kids. And that really was kind of a, I feel like a turning point, a bit of a turning point for him and our family being able to have those kinds of conversations around the table.
• 9:34
  I would say, too, the other part of the Bible that for little kids is really useful is the Gospels. And I love sharing. I remember just acting out different parables or scenes from the Gospels. They're so clear, so simple, but incredibly deep.
• 9:49
  And so I love introducing our kids to the way of Jesus, how Jesus interacted, for them just to fall in love with him as a person, as a character in the biblical story. And then to be able to bridge that into a personal relationship with Jesus. So I would say that that's, if you're looking for a place in the Bible to find even these very small little stories, these little vignettes, these parables or these, these, um,
• 10:13
  different elements of his life that you can talk about, that you can talk about what it would look like for us to obey Jesus, follow Jesus. So I think obviously the Old Testament, it's fairly dense and that's where the picture Bible is really useful, where I find,
• 10:27
  going straight to the Gospels really useful is, or the Bible is the Gospels themselves. I think that they're simple enough that children can often understand them. So I love that part. Now, probably the longest amount of investment that I think of is just,
• 10:44
  how much time April you've spent with the kids in the morning. So I know that some families do this all together. I am fairly zombie ish in the morning. And so it's not the best time for me. I just don't have a lot of energy. I have much more energy in the evening, but April, you, you are up in the morning with the birds and, and your coffee. And so, yeah, talk through how that has worked for you and how that maybe has evolved.
• 11:08
  Yeah, it's definitely evolved. I think when we started homeschooling, I started seeing our morning routine as like a precious opportunity for we didn't have to like rush out the door anywhere. We didn't have to hurry up and pack lunches and all that. And so I really enjoyed getting to.
• 11:28
  Spend time eating breakfast. And I was really big on our kids getting ready for the day. So I wanted them to have like a morning routine that involved them like getting physically ready, but then also getting spiritually ready for the day. And so once everyone got physically ready for the day, then we there was a whole season where we did it around the breakfast table.
• 11:48
  Everything from just like practicing a Bible verse that we're trying to memorize, that's when we would practice it. Or we would do like I would read to them from the Bible. Sometimes that's when we were studying the words of a hymn. Instead of just memorizing a hymn, sometimes those words are super rich and meaningful but really hard to understand for children. So taking that time to really like...
• 12:13
  dive into a hymn for like a prolonged, like maybe a week or two in the mornings to try to understand it. And then it kind of transitioned into everyone eat at the table and then we'll go sit on the couch and then talk and then do our Bible reading. And then as the kids got a little bit older, we, Jeremy and I were really trying to figure out like how to...
• 12:37
  get our older children to desire to read the Bible and to want to do it on their own. And so we transitioned at some point to our older kids having the freedom to decide. Like, it was my job to provide the time for them in the day, and then they could decide what?
• 13:00
  whether they were going to read, but then also what they were going to read. And so we let them kind of decide if they wanted to continue to read with our Bible plan, like which of the days, because they could kind of swap it around. It didn't really matter what order you did it in. It just gave them some autonomy in that and gave them kind of the choices to be able to participate or not in that discipline. Yeah.
• 13:29
  Yeah, I think that's really important. Each of these stages is really important because, like April said, you want to be able to, you want your kids to fall in love with Scripture. You want them to, you don't want them to put it in a category. There was even a time where we had enrolled Kelsey, our oldest, in a...
• 13:46
  in a co-op program that was very rigorous, like very academic, but they studied the Bible in a hyper-academic way. And we kind of knew the way she was wired and how hard that would be on her in particular and how that could easily shift the category the Bible fits into as like, wow, this living, active, life-changing book to this academic thing I need to just simply become familiar with.
• 14:13
  for the test. And so we kind of opted her out of, out of those Bible classes for that reason. I don't think that's necessarily, you know, that's, that could look very different depending on the kid. But, but I think that the idea of wanting your kids to fall in love with scripture at that age, around 12, 13, 14, when they start to really have the ability to think through some of the complexities of the Bible, right?
• 14:36
  I think that's super important. Now, one of the things that we're all up against when it comes to our kids studying the Bible, reading the Bible, getting a lot out of the Bible is their literacy level, right? So I think that, you know, one thing.
• 14:50
  One of the things I found really interesting, you read like, for example, Jewish history during the middle ages, the Jewish community, both men and women were something like 98% literate. Whereas the vast majority of the Christians at the time were illiterate. Now it was, it was a time in history where Christians weren't even allowed to read the Bible.
• 15:07
  And this is before the Reformation. And so the Jewish people who really saw themselves as people of the book knew that they needed everyone in their family to become very literate and their faith-based life, their relationship with the Lord or their understanding of ultimate things and their place, their ability to develop any kind of connection with God, the divine, their faith.
• 15:32
  was dependent on their literacy level. And so they made a community of hyper-illiterate people in a ocean of illiterate people. And so I think about that picture often because I think that we need to be really careful in a day and age where people are becoming less and less literate, less able to read books, less able, like we're very into...
• 15:56
  text, texting and visual images. We can't let our kids... God decided to write a book. He decided to introduce himself to us through the book. Our faith is dependent on divine revelation. One of the things we believe about humanity is that the existence of the Bible and the decision of the Holy Spirit to give us the scripture and inspired word, the inspired word of God means that
• 16:21
  We are by definition, revelation dependent creatures. And so all the work that people do to translate the Bible into languages, think about the amount of work it takes to go to a village of people and not only, you know, learn that language and translate the Bible into the language, but you also have to basically make the entire tribe literate in order for them to have access to the word of God and that 20, 30, 40 year project.
• 16:50
  is necessary because of the way God chose to reveal himself to us. Each one of us is in that same situation as a Bible translator. We are the leader of a tribe of illiterate children who need to become literate and who need to be introduced to the Bible as they are learning to read the English language in our case, so that they can actually understand the Bible.
• 17:12
  who God is and really take seriously this, this letter. And so part of that means that all the things you're doing to help educate your children is, is, is all kind of implicated in this conversation around how do you get the Bible into your family? Your kids need to become literate. And the way, the way anybody becomes literate is you have to read books that,
• 17:33
  that are one level above what is currently very comfortable for you, right? So if you're really comfortable with, your kids are really comfortable with Narnia, it might be time for Lord of the Rings. If they're really comfortable with Lord of the Rings, it might be time for Charles Dickens. If they're really comfortable with Charles Dickens, then maybe it's time for them to read Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Victor Hugo. Yeah.
• 17:54
  Yeah, if they could become really comfortable with that, then that may be an opportunity for them to read Shakespeare. Like there are levels of literacy, there's a ladder of literacy that you constantly be, you want to be helping, encouraging your kids to go up that ladder for the sake of their ability to sit down, read a chapter of the Bible and go, oh, this makes sense to me. Like, I understand this. So many people read the Bible and they're like, I just can't understand what it's saying. I don't understand Hebrew poetry. You know, I don't understand how to interpret story.
• 18:23
  I just, even reading Paul, there's just a very long argument he's making here and he lost me, you know? Like, can you give me the Cliff Notes version or whatever? So I think that whole conversation around education is really implicated in this whole thing as well. So April, you did the time in the morning. I think another element of this that was big in our family, maybe you can share like, so on the Sabbath,
• 18:53
  We always want to bring our kids into a day of rest, really grounded in the gospel. So maybe you can describe what that's like in our family. How do we try to use that rhythm that happens every single week in our home on a Friday night to cause us to have a time with the Lord through scripture or through our understanding of the gospel?
• 19:17
  Yes. Well, we're currently on a reading plan that has five different, kind of divides the Bible up into the five different categories. The Old Testament has three categories, the Torah, the writings, and the prophets. And then the New Testament has the Gospels and the epistles. And
• 19:42
  In the Gospels one, Jeremy will read to us from that passage at the Shabbat table, and then he'll, we'll have a conversation around it. Now, our kids are older now, and we are able to do that. We're able to sit and have like an extended time at the table. We've eaten, we've pushed back our plates, and then Jeremy is like, okay, guys, I'm going to read this to you, and then we discuss it. And it's a really fruitful passage.
• 20:11
  Really sweet time that we get to kind of all get on the same page about a passage and have a great conversation. And then it gives us something to kind of talk about, you know, in the in the as the weekend kind of unfolds. Yeah.
• 20:28
  And also, like April's been making mention of our Bible reading plan, I think it's really important to consider reading the Bible in sync as a family because this allows for you to do the Deuteronomy 6 conversations. So April and I will often be reading the same passage in the same, certainly the same week, but sometimes the same day. And so that allows us to have conversations. We have...
• 20:49
  a special day set aside. We call it Midrash Monday. This is where we, during our dinner, it's like, this is the time if you have questions or want to talk through particularly the Old Testament or some of the harder passages. So the way that this works with our Bible reading plan is the...
• 21:04
  Monday, we really talk about anything that we might be learning from those first three sections of the Bible, really the Old Testament. Like April just said, on Shabbat, I will lead a discussion on some section that we read from the Gospels. And then in our community, we have a house church. We talk about...
• 21:23
  a section of what we're reading in the epistles, which is really letters written to churches designed to form a certain kind of community. So we wanna be constantly thinking about what are each of these genres of scripture that we're in right now? And what are each of these books or sections of the Bible attempting to, how are they attempting to form us?
• 21:41
  So the Old Testament is this Hebrew meditation literature that as you think about the poems or think about the stories, it just, it really becomes the lens through which you see all of reality, these characters. So we may become very familiar with both the beauty and the kind of the intricacies of the stories of the Old Testament.
• 22:02
  Then, of course, the gospels themselves are designed to enhance our discipleship. Like we are following Jesus as our king, as our Lord. And so we're trying to understand what does it mean to obey Jesus, follow Jesus, live like he lived. And so we want to constantly have those conversations around sections of the gospel. And then the epistles are really there to form this new community. And so we want to be having those conversations that we do with our kids, but also with our community. And we really believe that, as it says in Acts 2.42, they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching.
• 22:32
  We have that preserved in the epistles to help us understand the doctrines that create this kind of community, the actions. And so these are oftentimes very direct teachings, right? That Paul, Peter, John, the different epistle writers were giving to us. And so we think about, so this is our Bible reading plan. We're trying to.
• 22:49
  I just find it really difficult to go for months without having read the gospels months without having read the epistles. Like, so we created this Bible reading plan. Um, you can, by the way, you can always get our Bible reading plan if you want. I think it's at one cage.com.org slash Bible plan. Yeah.
• 23:05
  So we publish like a, we just started a new section because every six months, so July 1st was a whole new section of it. So if you want to go to, yeah, onecage.org slash Bible plan, you can get, you can download our Bible plan. Our family uses, our community uses this. We have a lot of friends who use it.
• 23:20
  So you're welcome to take a look at that. But obviously, if you go to the Bible app, the YouVersion app has all kinds of Bible plans, something that your family can enjoy and do together. So yeah, so those are some of the ways that we get the Bible into our lives. So I don't know if that stirs up anything else for you, April, before we go.
• 23:40
  Yeah, I just want to kind of circle back around to the literacy topic. I believe this very, very much that especially if you are the mom and you get to like stay home with your kids, you have more time with them, that this should be a big focus of your time. So I want my kids to not only be reading scripture.
• 24:00
  But also to be memorizing it and hiding God's word in their heart. And also just to be familiar with the where to find things. So even if they don't know, don't have the whole thing memorized, let's say they need to know where to find the story of Noah and the ark.
• 24:19
  Or where to find that really cool story we read about Elijah raising that widow's son from the dead? Or just like, where would you go in the Bible to find that? So we wanted them to become very comfortable with that. So I would come up with games that we would play. We had index cards. We had matching games.
• 24:36
  We did the Bible drills that maybe if you are grew up in Sunday school, you might have done those in Sunday school where the kids are holding their Bible. And then I would like say a reference and they have to find it as fast as they can. Of course, it's always some obscure minor prophet. But, you know, helping them. And then I'm also very into paper Bibles.
• 24:57
  especially with children and mothers. Like they need to be seeing the mother read her Bible, turn the page, know where that if it's at the beginning of the Bible or towards the end of the Bible, right in the middle. So being able to just be so comfortable with a paper Bible, where to find things, and encouraging them to memorize like things.
• 25:18
  where things can be found, even if they're not memorizing the actual Bible verse, just knowing where something could be found. Where do you find the Ten Commandments or just different things like that, helping them memorize those things. We've done that. There's also passages that are really hard to read.
• 25:37
  Like in the Psalms, you'll find a lot of poetry that are hard to memorize because it's kind of like the same word that it's being poetically said several different ways. And so we came up with different like matching games and things like that to help us remember which order they come in. And then maybe even picking a version that your family has, you know, decided that's going to be the version your family uses. So that when you do memorize scripture or you're talking about these things, it's all...
• 26:05
  in the, um, the same version. So good. Awesome guys. Well, yeah, it's just, please take this part of your family's life very, very seriously. We always challenge dads in particular to lead the family into their understanding of the Bible. Um, and so this obviously requires us to have a vibrant life, uh, within the scriptures and that our relationship with God is, is really deeply informed and saturated with our time in scripture. So,
• 26:33
  We'd love to spend time. If you guys have questions or you have ideas that really have worked for you, we'd love for you guys to help us out and talk to us this month in the Accelerator. So again, if you guys want to join the Accelerator, you can go to familyteams.com if you want to get that free download. The five tips.
• 26:50
  for getting this into your family that the Akramis have written for us. They can go to familyteams.com slash Bible. But we'd love to see you guys there and spend the time. So the way the accelerator works is to kind of recap is the first week we give you guys the playbook. Second week we give you guys, you spend time on a zoom call with the Akramis, with our community coaches. The third week, April and I are going to,
• 27:12
  send out a kind of a tutorial video for how to how to do some of the things we're describing in this podcast and then the fourth week we do a town hall with um usually it's me april and some of our kids and you guys can ask any questions about how we've been kind of put bible time into our family but also any questions you want to talk about in terms of how you're developing as a family team everything that would be helpful for you guys so join us in the accelerator if you're interested and april thanks so much for jumping on here today absolutely you guys
• 27:40
  Thank you for listening to the Family Teams podcast. If you're enjoying this content or have learned something new, please make sure to leave a rating and review and share with a friend. To stay up to date with our events, new content, and products, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Family Teams.