Our daughter, fascinated with the idea of having a baby brother, exuded excitement the entire time I was pregnant. My belly was the target of her kisses each morning and she delighted in feeling him kick as he grew big enough to make his presence known to her.
Her little brother was born just four weeks before she turned 3 years old and she couldn’t have been more proud.
As often happens with older siblings, the excitement began to wear off once she realized this little human was sticking around and took precious time away from her mommy and daddy.
Finding ourselves reminding her daily to “be gentle” and “be kind,” we decided it was time to teach her a memory verse. We chose Ephesians 4:32, “Be kind to one another.”
Even now, two years later, this is a verse we can come back to as a reminder of how God wants her to behave in situations where she naturally may tend to be selfish or, let’s say, less than kind.
The intentional choice we made to make scripture a part of our parenting process has planted the seed of God’s truth in her heart.
Note that we didn’t use any special curriculum, flash cards, hand motions, or anything else typically associated with teaching toddlers Bible verses. While those resources are SO HELPFUL, they’re not absolutely necessary to create a God-centered home with your littles.
3 Keys to Making God’s Word a Priority in Your Home
The keys to making God’s word a priority in your home are found in Deuteronomy 6:6-9.
These words that I am commanding you today must always be on your minds. Recite them to your children. Talk about them when you are sitting around your house and when you are out and about, when you are lying down and when you are getting up. Tie them on your hand as a sign. They should be on your forehead as a symbol. Write them on your house’s doorframes and on your city’s gates.
1. Fill our own hearts and minds with God’s Word first.
Need help? Check out the post in this series on Maximizing Your Mornings. I share lots of helpful resources!
2.Talk about God’s story and His Word in our homes and read God’s Word out loud.
Like I said, you don’t NEED anything special to accomplish this in your home other than a Bible. However, I think it’s wonderful that we also have access to fun and engaging tools for sharing God’s Word in our homes.
I’ll be sharing lots of great resources for accomplishing this in future posts in this series. Tomorrow I’ll have the first of weekly giveaways during this series…you don’t want to miss it!
If you’re visiting after October 2014, you can find all the posts for this series on the Parenting With Purpose Series page.
3. Fill your home with visual representations of God’s Word.
There are so many amazing ways to incorporate scripture into your home’s decor. I’m excited to be sharing some of these options in upcoming posts in this series as well.
Follow Along!
If you’re not already receiving blog posts by email, you can sign up to follow along with the series and have the posts delivered right to your inbox. Or, if you’d prefer, follow along onFacebook,Twitter, Pinterest, or BlogLovin.
For those of you who would like to dive deeper into the topic each day, join the moms gathered in our private Facebook group for this series. I can’t wait to meet you and encourage one another on this parenting journey!
My husband and I were just reading that passage of scripture together this morning. Thank you for the encouragement to make God’s word ever-present in our children’s lives. We use this tool to help hide God’s word in out hearts.
This series has been so great for me! Thank you for all the work you’ve put into it. I’d love for you to stop by my shop on Etsy and pick out a print for me to email you for free as a small thank you 🙂
Number 3- YES! So important and so often overlooked!
Loving your series, LeeAnn!
I participate in hellomornings.org and I absolutely love it. It doesn’t always work out for me to get up before the kids and get my Bible study done, but it is something I strive for. I finally made “good morning baskets” for the kids so that if they were up early, they could also participate in quiet time with mama. You can find that here https://www.townsend-house.com/2014/07/good-morning-basket-kids-edition.html I really like the idea of visually adding scripture to your home. It is something I think I will look into. Maybe the kids could do it as a craft 🙂