4 Spiritual Disciplines for Christian Family Devotions

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 discipline and skill. Just like kids need the diligence and physical aptitude to learn new athletic skills, so too must they learn the four disciplines behind Christian family devotions and how to train themselves to get the most out of their interactions with God. 

Welcome to Part 3 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. So far, we looked at diet and how our spirit needs feeding as much as our body does. Then we looked at spiritual exercises where faith grows stronger with daily “reps” or repetitions of applied truth. Today, we’re looking at athletic skills and the discipline it takes to learn the four important pieces to having rich Christian family devotions and personal quiet time.

The Four Disciplines to Christian Family Devotions

Have your kids thrown thousands of baseballs or dribbled a soccer ball for hundreds of hours? Do they do extreme stuff like hang from their fingers to improve their climbing skills? All you have to do is ask your kids to list the athletic skills they want to master and you’ll probably come up with a dozen separate disciplines they’d have to learn for each one. And yet it’s only when you put all those skills together that you have an excellent athlete in their own chosen sport. 

Our spiritual life is also made up of several individual skills or disciplines, and it’s by practicing them diligently that we can richly improve our relationship with God, deepen our faith, and have powerful Christian family devotions. The four important skills or spiritual disciplines for Christian family devotions involve Scripture, worship, prayer and giving. The Bible commands us to practice each of them diligently.

Scripture

Let’s start with the skill of studying Scripture in your Christian family devotions. Although it might seem like hard work, the benefits from learning, meditating on truth, and storing up God’s Word in our hearts can pay off like a gold medal. Childhood is the best time to start memorizing Scripture because it comes easily to kids and will last a lifetime.

To help your kids memorize Scripture in your Christian family devotions, choose a passage that would fill two white boards and hang them in the kitchen or common area. Then, every day, recite one line of the passage together during your Christian family devotions and repeat it again in the evening at meal times, slowly adding another line to your recitation with each day until you’ve completed the entire passage. By the time you learn the last verse, the repetition of the rest of the passage will have you well on your way to having the whole passage memorized. 

Worship

Another important skill to practice with your kids during Christian family devotions is worship. Worship gives life perspective as we meditate on the attributes of God, especially His power and sovereignty. Music is a tremendous form of worship that can help bring one into the right attitude to meditate on God and sing His praises—something that can also be played in the background of your home throughout the day or during your Christian family devotions. However, it’s important that we teach kids that worship can also be spontaneous prayer or exclamations of praise. When we frequently worship God in this way, it improves gratitude, which leads to contentment.

For free, kid-friendly worship music that’s great to play around the house or during your Christian family devotions, check out CEF’s Youtube channel, U-Nite Kids. You can find it by clicking here, or going to YouTube and searching for “U-Nite Kids.”

Prayer

Our third spiritually athletic skill and important discipline to learn, both in and outside of your Christian family devotions, is prayer. Encourage your kids to pray aloud as if having a conversation with God, both in private, as well as with your family during your devotions, so they can become comfortable with expressing their hearts to God. To express one’s heart means we have to be able to identify our emotions and verbalize them in conjunction with honest thoughts. Prayer is an important discipline to learn, not only to help benefit others and strengthen faith, but to deepen our relationship with God and invite Him into our lives. The Psalms are a great model for how we can pray and talk to God.

Giving

The last spiritual skill to practice with the same fervency as an athletic discipline, is giving. Before your kids leave home, you should teach them how to practice stewardship of God’s Kingdom with their time and money. When they practice giving frequently, it helps them give more easily, as they quickly learn for themselves that God—never one to be outdone—loves to return the good gifts we give tenfold. By incorporating acts of giving as an everyday part of your Christian family devotions, you can help kids practice selfless obedience and love, while witnessing firsthand how God provides for us when we trust Him.

To help enrich your Christian family devotions and the personal quiet times of your children, these four disciplines of the Christian life can be reinforced with devotional books from CEFPress.com. Every Day with God is a great devotional book for younger children, while The Wonder devotionals are best for older children. See an assortment of devotionals book options for your Christian family devotions at CEFPress.com.

By teaching your children to learn and practice these four spiritual disciplines in your Christian family devotions with the same tenacity of an athletic skill, you will equip them with a spiritual prowess that will last their entire lives.