When it comes to bringing truth to bare in our homes, God has been so kind to give us the precious gift of living with each other in a close environment 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week. This means that Christians have the opportunity to be a living billboard of the realities of God to everyone around them. Even though we are very imperfect (as those who live with us know best), through our imperfect yearnings for God Himself and our stumbling efforts to apply the things we are searching after, God brings truth before the eyes of the people we love.

With children, we practice family worship and talk about the realities of God throughout the week. We can point them to the memorization of scripture, not just as a whole, but particularly those passages where God reveals Himself in a striking way. We can point them to great hymns and explain that we sing these old songs because they give honest views of the Christian life and high views of our God.

More than all of this, our daily lives are able to help our children know how to apply the realities of God to a situation in the daily circumstances of life. For example, dealing with children in their disobedience, point them (and yourself) to the all-sufficiency of an infinite and incomprehensibly great and good God. If I do not know this, how will I talk to my children about this?

When we think of how to explain God to our children and how that might look in an everyday way, I think there are a number of simple things that come to my mind. I do try to keep it simple because family can be pretty complicated. One of the things that I try to remind myself of is that when it comes to bringing truth to bear in our home, God has been so kind to give us this precious gift of living with each other in a close environment where we really know each other 24 hours a day, seven days a week for all these years. And that means that the Christians in a home have an opportunity to be a living billboard of the realities of God to everyone around them. So even though we're very imperfect, and our family of course know us best, through our imperfect yearnings for God himself, through our stumbling efforts to apply the things that we're searching after, you know, trying to get the highest and clearest views of God from Scripture, God uses all of that to bring the truths in front of the eyes of the people that we love.

Of course there's teaching, so if you think about being a parent and a child, especially if you homeschool, but it's not just for homeschoolers. I remember with our children in homeschool situation, my wife in particular being able to teach them. There's family worship. There's ways of just talking about the realities of God throughout the week. We can point them to the memorization of scriptures, but not just scriptures as a whole, but particularly those passages where God unveils himself in such a striking way.

We can point them to great hymns and explain to them why is it we would sing these old songs. Well, it's because they give very honest views of the Christian life, but they also give very high and clear views of our God. But more than all of that, we have our lives Where we're able to, living with each other, we're able to help our children in the daily circumstances of life, to know how do you apply the realities of the God that we talk about to this present situation. So for example when dealing with children even in their disobedience we might be tempted to take what I would call a moralistic approach and so we say this is wrong and we don't do wrong things here we're not the kind of people to do that. I remember one father saying to his child to his boys who were in a tussle and they were probably 10 and 12 year olds and he said you know have you no self-control little babies don't have self-control that's why we put diapers on them do you want to act like a baby and of course the pride of the boys rose up and they quit fighting But I think it would be so much better for us to, as we deal with the problems or the happinesses of life together throughout those everyday circumstances, to be able to point our children, to be able to point ourselves to the realities of God.

And that really is one of the keys. If I don't know how to direct my own heart to the all-sufficiency of an infinite and incomprehensibly great, astonishingly good God, then how will I know how to talk to the kids about him? You know then all we end up having is kind of a knowledge by hearsay My dad said this or dad says he read a book that says this when while we point them to scripture To grade him, you know to two examples of Christians in the past It ought to come through the filter of our own experience, and to the point that really we're what Paul says. God makes us to be an aroma of the knowledge of Him to everyone that meets us, whether it leads to life or to death. You