Last weekend I mentioned on Twitter that I had finished planning out my kids’ daily devotions for another week; this led a few people to ask what these devotions look like. Though I am by no means an expert in this area, I am glad to share how I lead my children in their personal devotions.

I have always wanted my children to form the habit of doing personal devotions, but it took me a surprising amount of time to realize that if they were going to do this, I would need to take leadership—not just one time but on an ongoing basis. I find that the kids are quite eager to do devotions, but also very quick to lose the habit if I do not help them maintain it. It was not until I stepped up my leadership that they began to do it with regularity.

I aim to have my children do personal devotions at least 5 times per week (we also do family devotions every evening following dinner). Ideally I would love to have them doing devotions every day, but experience shows that this will be the exception more than the rule. On Wednesday evenings, for example, we have a mid-week service at church and are typically not home until well after the kids’ usual bed time. So for practical reasons, 5 seems like a reasonable target.

My children are currently 11, 8 and 5. The 11-year-old and 8-year-old are good readers and are largely self-sufficient when it comes to devotions. The 5-year-old is not reading much yet so we have a different system for her. Let me tell you what these look like.

Devotions for Children

Every weekend I budget a few minutes of time to sit down and organize a week’s worth of devotions. I begin with David Murray’s Bible Reading Plan for Kids. David has very helpfully put together a plan that takes children a few verses at a time through books of the Bible. You may like to read about the philosophy behind his program here. Essentially he emphasizes brevity, variety, simplicity, accountability and unity, seeking to have his children spend just a few minutes each day reading the Bible and reflecting on what they have read. I am indebted to David for this program but even more for modeling a father’s involvement in leading his children in their personal devotions.

David offers the devotions in two versions. The first is for families that will have their children doing morning and evening devotions and the second is for families that will have their children doing only one or the other. I have opted for just one time of devotion per day.

I recently wrote about Date Nights & Devotions or what the Lord has taught me about my relationship with him through dating my wife. In that brief article I simply sought to show that the purpose of our personal devotions does not need to be learning about God as much as just spending time with him. The great joy of personal devotions is not gaining facts about God but the joy of time spent together.

This leaves a question: How do we get to know someone better? How do we get to know God better? When pursuing God we tend to act differently than if we are pursuing another person. But I think we need to see that we should not break the rules of relationship just because we are attempting to relate to God.

Here are a few of the ways we relate to people which in turn point us to the ways in which we can relate to God.

We Spend Time

The way I came to know the woman who was to become my wife was by spending time with her. There was no trick to it and no shortcut. We sat in church services together, we went on dates together, we enjoyed one another’s company. We did this for 3 years before being married and we have continued to do so for almost 13 years since then. Any deep and healthy relationship will depend upon time spent together. This is true of human relationships and is certainly no less true when befriending God.

We spend time with God in personal devotions. Personal devotions need not be Bible study. They do not need to be a time where you depend upon commentaries and dictionaries, though these are wonderful resources. Personal devotions are simply a time to be with God, to enjoy communing with him. This is done by speaking and by listening, by saying words to God in prayer and receiving words from God through his Word. It may involve a long time of listening followed by a long time of speaking, or it may be far more conversational, far more back-and-forth. The purpose of it all is not to learn about God, but to know God, to grow in relationship with him.

We spend time with God in church. Jonathan Edwards was exactly right when he said, “The main benefit that is obtained by preaching is by impression made upon the mind in the time of it, and not by the effect that arises afterwards by a remembrance of what was delivered.” When we sit under the preaching of the Word we meet with God. We may not remember a whole lot afterwards, but that does not mean that we have not met with God. We can commune with God in prayer, in singing to him, in the Lord’s Supper. Free yourself to make each of these situations relational as much as intellectual (though I will grant that this is a bit of a false distinction).

We Tell Stories

Aileen and I have never been too good at date nights. We know that, according to all the experts, we are supposed to go out on a date, at minimum, every couple of weeks. Those experts must all have lots of money or access to free babysitters because there’s just no way we can afford to pay someone the going rate to watch the kids every 2 weeks. What we do instead is wait until all the kids are at school on a Monday or a Wednesday and we set out on a midday date.

This has worked well for us. And i think we’re good at dating. We both know that the main point of spending this kind of time together is to return home with a lot of new knowledge about one another. We like to head to a favorite restaurant and split a sandwich and an order of 4-cheese spinach dip. We just sit and talk. And when we head home we know we’ve had a good date if we’ve learned things about the other that we didn’t know before. If we haven’t learned anything new we know that our date hasn’t been so good and we swear that we’ll do better next time. Because this is the point of dating—to accumulate knowledge about the person you love.

I’m lying. Well, only partially. That is exactly how we date these days. But it’s not at all how we gauge the success of our dates. We know we’ve had a good date when we’ve enjoyed spending time together. We don’t need to learn anything new. We don’t need to gain facts. We just need to be together, enjoying one another’s presence. We can go shopping and sit in a bookstore and consider it a great date. We return home refreshed, renewed and loving one another more than when we set out. And that’s a great date.

But isn’t it funny that when it comes to personal devotions, when it comes to our relationship to the Lord, we change the rules. We judge the success of our time with the Lord by what we get out of it, by what we remember, by what we’ve learned. We consider our devotions a success when we learn some new fact about God or about the Bible. We admire those who have great biblical knowledge or a great memory for the facts of what they’ve read. We get discouraged and want to give up when we feel like we have learned nothing through that day’s devotions.

I’ve shared here before that I often find it difficult to find real joy and freedom in my personal devotions. At times things go very well, but then inevitably it seems that difficulties creep in and I find that I come to dread my time spent reading and praying. What is at some times delight is at other times the most difficult of duties.

Over the years I have often tried programs, structures to keep me in some kind of reading plan. I’ve tried the plans that take me through the Bible in a year (or two years or…) and always I’ve found them difficult. If I make it through the Pentateuch I fall apart in the prophets. I’ve never successfully completed one.

A while back I stumbled upon Professor Horner’s Bible-Reading System. Though something always disturbs me about getting involved in a Bible-reading system (Would I want to do a date night system? A play-with-your-kids system?) I decided to give it a go. It’s unique among the systems I’ve attempted in that it requires more reading and yet somehow makes all that reading seem so much easier, enjoyable and attainable.

The system is quite simple—every day you read ten chapters of the Bible. That seems like a lot, so stick with me as I explain it. Each of the ten chapters will be from different books, which is to say that at any given time you’ll be reading ten books of the Bible concurrently, one chapter per day. So on day one of the system you will reading the first chapter of Matthew, Genesis, Romans, 1 Thessalonians, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Joshua, Isaiah and Acts. You will read each of these books, one chapter per day, and then go on to other books before repeating it all again. This means that every year you’ll read through all the Gospels four times, the Pentateuch twice, Paul’s letters 4-5 times each, the Old Testament wisdom literature six times, all the Psalms at least twice, all the Proverbs as well as Acts a dozen times, and all the way through the Old Testament History and Prophetic books about 1 12 times.

From the outside it looks like this will be a massive amount of work, a huge commitment of time. But I have found that it is not. The beauty of the system is that you will be reading every day at a pretty good clip. The purpose is not to spend a great deal of time in pondering each word, but in reading the Bible so much and so often that Scripture begins to explain Scripture. I have found that it takes me between 30 and 40 minutes per day, either in one chunk in the morning or in two chunks, one in the morning and one in the evening.

My knowledge of Scripture is nowhere near encyclopedic. However, I am quite sure that if I were to sit back today and read the Bible from cover to cover I would not find a direct command from God saying “Thou shalt read the Bible daily.” I would not find a guide to personal devotions and I wouldn’t find chapter and verse requiring daily quiet times. However, neither do I need to have that kind of explicit command in order to understand the value of spending time every day reading the Bible.

When I think about the area of daily Bible study I find my mind drawn to the issue of assurance of salvation—whether or not a Christian can be certain that he is saved. I think I am led this way because the Bible is so central, so integral to the Christian life, that to feel no love for it, no desire to study it, must be a sign of spiritual sickness. I would certainly never say that a person who does not want to study the Bible or who does not enjoy studying the Bible is not a Christian. But I would venture to say that the Christian life is so dependent upon Scripture that a person who has no regard for the Bible and who shows little interest in it would have good reason to seriously consider his salvation. Such a person would do well to examine his soul to see if he really has come to know the Lord.

Let’s look to just a few reasons why we, as Christians, should desire to know and study the Bible.