Learning to Study the Bible

One of our most important responsibilities as a parent is helping our children learn about and get to know their heavenly Father. The best way to know Him is to read and study the Word that He gave us. It is important that we not just study what others have to say about Him and the Bible, but to actually dig into the Scriptures ourselves and discover what they have to say to us. A great way to do this is through inductive Bible Study.

A wonderful tool that we discovered for learning to study the Scriptures this way is the Discover 4 Yourself series that is written especially for kids to teach them to dig into the Word at an early age. A great place to start is How to Study Your Bible: For Kids. This is an introductory book to teach the tools to read, mark and dig deep into Scripture for yourself but written so that a child can understand. You learn to find the facts, observe the who, what, when, where and why of what you are reading, how to figure out what the words mean in the original text, the historical and cultural context of the text, etc. These all help you to understand what God wanted us to know.

When we started these books, my kids were not all independent readers and writers due to various learning challenges so we did them together. We would read the text and we would discuss the answers and I would help them as they needed. So, even if you have a struggling learner, they can still learn how to study God's Word.

There is a whole series of these books that center on various topics of the Bible such as specific books of the Bible, prophesy, prayer, etc. We very much enjoyed going through these together and learning together how find out for ourselves what the Bible says.

Now that my children are in their teen years, they join me in a multi-age inductive Bible study at church and are able to use the tools that they learned at a young age to dig deep and participate fully in a class of mostly adults. They are equipped, confident and, most importantly, interested enough, to be able to dig and and find the meat in the Scripture. Or as our Bible Study teacher likes to say, "Gut it out".

If you are not comfortable or familiar with Bible Study and don't feel ready to teach your kids, these are great introduction to help you a long the way as well.

Jen