Promoting a Healthy Spiritual Diet of Devotions for Kids

Do your kids or the kids you teach in church participate in sports or have a favorite athletic activity? If so, you have an excellent opportunity to help kids understand their own spiritual health and promote a healthy spiritual diet of devotions for kids. Anyone who is athletic and wants to excel in their chosen sport learns to care about diet, exercise, skill, and rest. They want to get every possible edge in order to do well. Many kids in sports are always trying to come up with the best protein shake or recovery drink, the best exercise to improve that weak muscle, and the best technique to master a particular skill. Great attention to even the smallest details can make all the difference, and the same is true for our spiritual wellbeing and strength. Just like kids need to nourish their body with good food, so must they nourish their faith with daily devotions for kids. While we plan to look at all the areas that help us grow our spiritual muscles—diet, exercise, skills, and rest—first, we’re going to start with diet and what good food for the spirit looks like.

A Healthy Spiritual Diet Looks Like…

Quality: Help Kids Consume Good Food for the Spirit

An athlete pays close attention to the quality of the things they eat and consume. The right food going in, means the right muscle and energy coming out. You may have heard the saying “garbage in, garbage out”. Well, the same is true of us spiritually. A diet of corruptive TV and online garbage makes for a sluggish spiritual life that just can’t perform well when needed. We can’t be full of courage or overflowing with love for God and others if we spiritually consume a diet of fear, discouragement, and unloving thoughts. Even if the media we look at isn’t negative, only neutral, it can still prevent that quality nutrition that our spirit needs to grow. This is why it’s so important as parents and teachers for us to pay careful attention to the kind of content kids are consuming online and in the world around them.

While one should always take precautions to guard children from the garbage they can access on devices, they WILL stumble across bad stuff eventually or be shown it by peers. So be sure to teach them to make quick, good choices for themselves so they can enjoy the result of a clear conscience by saying “no” to the bad stuff around them. Practice saying to your kids “good food for your stomach, good food for your spirit” and then present them with good choices for their media diet. Pay, also, careful attention to their spirit—if it’s going downhill, they’re probably consuming something unhealthy. If and when you do find some unhealthy media content on their devices, while you should always take corrective action when needed, whenever you can, practice giving children a choice to experiment with how different types of media makes them feel—giving them the opportunity to compare, take notice of, and feel responsibility for their own spiritual nourishment. 

Quantity: Encourage Daily Devotions for Kids

Besides thinking about the quality of our spiritual food, we must also think about the quantity of that spiritual food. In the same way that childrens’ bodies are dependent on food for nutrients, their spirit is also dependent on frequent nourishment through daily devotions for kids. We can’t rush around trying to live the Christian life on little substance, as if we’re athletes trying to survive on one potato chip. We need to feed on the Word of God like we’re starving and our very existence depends on it—as indeed it does! One of the best ways to do this for children is to start them young with the habit of daily devotions for kids to grow spiritually. Don’t have age-appropriate devotions for kids laying around? You can find many different devotions for kids, suitable for a variety of age and maturity levels, by searching “devotions for kids” at www.cefpress.com. 

However, just like you can’t eat breakfast and then hope to survive all day on that one meal, you can’t just have devotions in the morning and then starve your spirit all day. Children need to have the practice of frequent moments of worship, prayer, and spiritual reflection on the things of God throughout the day, beyond just their morning devotions for kids to grow spiritually. To encourage this, practice hanging reminders up throughout the house, or coming up with an incentive for any Scripture learned in their devotions for kids to share at the dinner table. Sharing Scripture like this at mealtime also goes well with the earlier saying we recommended above: “good food for your stomach, and good food for your spirit.”

Matthew 5:6 says “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be filled.” Teach kids to recognize that their spirit is hungry for God’s goodness—goodness they can find by practicing healthy habits through the media they consume and daily devotions for kids to thrive. When an athlete is working out hard, more nutrition is needed to sustain them. The same is true for our spirit and walk with God; the closer we get to Him, the more we need to nourish our spirit to maintain that closeness.  A steady diet of God’s encouragement is just what our kids, and each of us, needs—while there are always emotional signs for when our spirit is starving and needs more.