the duties of parents: #5

We have been discussing J.C. Ryle's little book, The Duties of Parents.  Today we're looking at duty #5:

Train your child to a knowledge of the Bible.

This is a mighty big duty. :) Ryle writes:

You cannot make your child love the Bible, I allow. None but the Holy Spirit can give us a heart to delight in the Word. But you can make your children acquainted with the Bible; and be sure they cannot be acquainted with that blessed book too soon, or too well.

He goes on to say:

He that is well-grounded in [the Bible] will not generally be found a waverer, and carried about by every wind of new doctrine. Any system of training which does not make a knowledge of Scripture the first thing is unsafe and unsound ... [Some] fill the minds of their children with miserable little story-books, instead of the Scripture of truth. But if you love your children, let the simple Bible be everything in the training of their souls; and let all other books go down and take the second place.

I think Bible story books are perfect for little kids before they're ready for an actual Bible, but you want to find one that gives kids a clear, big picture of God's sovereign purpose, and that shows them God's faithfulness in redemption history, rather than a bunch of stories of Bible "heroes" or little "moral lessons" that don't seem to relate to each other in any way. 

In our home, Claire enjoyed The Big Picture Story Bible when she was younger, which gave a clear view of God as a God who made and then kept His promise to send Jesus as the Messiah.  (She still likes to look at it.)  She also now reads the ESV Children's Bible.  I used to read The Big Picture Story Bible with her so that I could moderate the content -- sometimes there were parts that weren't age-appropriate until later, and there were big ideas that needed explaining -- and now for the same reasons I read with her or give her specific passages to read. She also gets Bible teaching at school and at Sunday school, so I try to piggyback off what she's reading with her teacher or Sunday school teacher, so that she's not getting too many different things at once, which gets confusing, even for grownups.  

Ryle then gives three practical points about what to look for when our children read the Bible:

See that your children read the Bible reverently. Train them to look on it, not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the Word of God ... all true, all profitable, and able to make us wise unto salvation, through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

Then he says:

See that they read it regularly.  Train them to regard it as their soul's daily food, as a thing essential to their soul's daily health. I know well you cannot make this anything more than a form; but there is no telling the amount of sin which a mere form may indirectly restrain. 

That is to say, you cannot MAKE your child crave God's word, but you can give your children the daily habit of reading it, with the hope that they will one day take it to heart. What your kids read in the Bible can affect their choices and their thinking even before they have a saving faith in Jesus.

Ryle also says:

See that they read it all. You need not shrink from bringing any doctrine before them. You need not fancy that the leading doctrines of Christianity are things which children cannot understand.  Children understand far more of the Bible than we are apt to suppose.  

Tell them of sin, its guilt, its consequences, its power, its vileness; you will find they can comprehend something of this.

Tell of the Lord Jesus Christ and His work for our salvation -- the atonement, the cross, the blood, the sacrifice, the intercession: you will discover there is something not beyond them in all this.

Tell them of the world of the Holy Spirit in man's heart, how He changes, and renews, and sanctifies, and purifies: you will soon see they can go along with you in some measure in this. In short, I suspect we have no idea how much a little child can take in of the length and breadth of the glorious gospel. They see far more of these things than we suppose.

I agree with this, and have been surprised at how clearly children can understand some of these really big concepts.  

When Ryle says "see that they read it all," he does not mean that little kids need to find out about the birds and the bees, for instance, or explicit details of immorality or violence that occur in the Bible before they are able to handle or understand it.  Nope.  

His point here is that we aren't to just pick and choose the bits of the Bible that seem relevant to us.  Our kids need to hear the whole counsel of God, and the complete Gospel ... and at each stage of a child's development, we can present the Gospel to him or her in its entirety, in a way he or she can grasp, adding further details as he or she grows older.  

I can remember reading the Gospel of John in The Children's Living Bible when I was nine or ten, lying on the guest bed in our house in Australia (because that room was always so clean and quiet), and understanding most of what I was reading.  I didn't come to a saving faith in Jesus until four or five years later, but I can testify that that early reading planted seeds in my life that grew later. :)

If you would like a good Gospel presentation to share with your children one day (or periodically) before or after you read the Bible together, the Australian organization Matthias Media has a good online Gospel presentation for adults called Two Ways to Live that they also offer in a children's version.