How To Exercise Faith 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 healthy spiritual exercise of faith 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 train and strengthen their body with exercise, so too must they learn to exercise the muscles of their faith for kids.

Welcome to Part 2 of our four-part series where we take a look at the areas of diet, exercise, skills, and rest one at a time to think about how to use them as spiritual illustrations for our children. Earlier in Part 1, “Promoting a Healthy Spiritual Diet of Devotions for Kids”, we talked about how our spirit needs feeding as much as our body does. Here in Part 2, we’re going to be talking about spiritual exercise and how it’s as essential to frequently exercise and strengthen faith for kids as it is to train their bodies. Let’s begin.

Faith For Kids Needs to be Exercised

The thing about exercise is that it can be hard to get started, but once you do it for about a month, you enjoy it more, it becomes easier, and you get excited about your progress. You’ll find yourself wanting to do more and to push yourself harder because success breeds success. You also learn to be careful to exercise correctly so you don’t hurt yourself and get set back. Exercise combats a plethora of health issues, gives you more energy, and improves your mood, sleep, and overall self-confidence.

Physical exercise can be likened to the exercise of our faith. Faith for kids and adults alike is like a muscle—it has to be exercised in order to grow. It takes effort, and when the effort pays off, you start reaping the benefits and it gets easier to maintain and continue exercising that faith for kids. James 1 says that the testing of our faith produces perseverance.

Faith for Kids Should be Exercised Correctly

Just like one can accidentally hurt themselves by exercising too much, too little, or inconsistently, it’s important that faith for kids is exercised correctly, though. For example, your kids need to have faith in the right thing, which is faith in God and in the truth of His Word. It can be easy for someone to have faith in faith itself, rather than faith in God or any of His teachings—saying things like “I have my faith, it will get me through”, as if they can simply will themselves to brave hardships or to grow in their faith. What if one day you wake up and are so discouraged your faith is gone? It’s important that you teach kids to rely on God and His Word, like the patient instruction of a personal trainer or dedication to a workout regimen, rather than their own inconsistent connection to faith. God doesn’t forsake us, so the basis of faith for kids needs to be in God and His promises.

Faith for Kids Requires Spiritual Strength Training

Sometimes, it’s hard to get off the couch and exercise, especially if negative thinking is a habit or you don’t exercise consistently enough. The same can be true of faith for kids if their spiritual health isn’t frequently tested through consistent spiritual strength training.

In physical exercise, strength training is one of the best ways to build lasting endurance and muscle by having a specific number of repetitions, or “reps”, and then a number of sets within those reps. Repeating the truths of scripture and statements you believe about God is like doing strength building reps as an athlete, helping to increase daily spiritual health and faith for kids. The more reps we do on a regular basis, the more that faith for kids grows and gets stronger. If building faith for kids is a struggle on a particular day, you can say to your athlete child, “let’s exercise our faith muscle” and treat approaching their spiritual health the same way they would their physical strength—as a worthwhile challenge that should be conquered with resilience and confident grit.

CEF Has Resources to Help

Child Evangelism Fellowship has many songs that can help strengthen faith for kids, many of which can be found on our YouTube channel, U-Nite Kids. One particular song, called “I Believe”, starts with a confession of faith about God, before diving into concepts of salvation and Christian living. This song is perfect for kids to play or sing aloud to themselves on days where spiritual strength training is required to exercise that muscle of faith for kids.

The benefits of faith are numerous. Without faith, you can’t even be saved, while faith also brings answers to prayer. It is faith that activates the power of God in our lives for good works, ministry, and an abundant life. Help children learn how to be a star athlete in God’s race of life by having a good diet of God’s truth and by exercising faith for kids.