How To Teach Your Children About Your Faith

One of the most difficult challenges that life can pose is understanding people from different perspectives. Everyone holds different beliefs, even when coming from the same religious context and background, so it’s important to honor beliefs outside of ours. Therefore, we must teach our children important life lessons that can turn into skills later in life. Here is a model of how to teach your children about your faith without overcomplicating things. Luckily, this approach can be as easy and comfortable as you wish to make it.

Show Them Love and Truth

The most important thing to do is instill a good relationship with your children. This is challenging, depending on the environment and the child, as not all children are the same. Some require more focus and attention than others. When you establish a good relationship, you will need to fill the time that you have with them with as much love as possible.

Along with this, you should try to surround everything you say in truth. Then, you will become a model of truth, where you will always provide an example that they may lean on for guidance. When you do this, they will have an easier time absorbing scriptural and gospel truths as you teach them through the bible and other religious practices.

Read Alongside Them

Part of developing a relationship with your children is doing things with them. Parents don’t always have time to dedicate to their children’s wants, and they miss out on a lot of important time that they could have had with them. However, you can still make time to read with them and teach them through scriptural stories. Then, draw parallels to real life, so they can begin to put these complicated concepts together.

Don’t Be Forceful About It

The last thing you would ever want to do is force-feed your children religion. Keeping an open stance is healthy whenever learning anything. The education system prides itself on that. But to be taught that there is only one way of thinking about religion or spirituality is one of the greatest travesties you can teach them. Allowing your children to grow into their faith and belief is the healthiest way of approaching spirituality and religion that will foster true enlightenment. Also, it will help them solve all the challenging problems that they will face throughout their lifetimes.

Encourage Them To Ask Questions

Many monotheistic religious belief systems start teaching early that questioning a deity is out of the question. However, that is an authoritarian stance coming from the institution that supports those beliefs and the belief system that supports those institutions. If children cannot question their beliefs and your religious teachings, how can they learn more about what they believe? This can also hinder their educational growth later as they enter school years. If you teach them never to ask questions, they won’t have the proper skills to think critically about what they are learning.

Teach Them the Art of Prayer

Different religions hold different spiritual practices, but one thing remains relatively and uniquely the same: the art of prayer. When we think about prayer, we often look at it as a spiritual practice used by more modern religious belief systems. However, it is an ancient practice. You could look at prayer as a time of rest or meditation. Conversely, you can view it as a time of reflection for those who need to look more introspectively at their lives. Through this, they can learn how to properly attribute the spiritual lessons they have learned to who they are and their beliefs.

Recognizing Spirituality

In contemporary monotheistic belief structures, the Spirit, or the Holy Spirit, is another way to identify spirituality in the form of the deity. When shown in this perspective, people pay more attention to it. Thus, we focus on it more frequently. The idea is that people learn to become spiritual through and by the Spirit itself. In other religions, people practice spirituality in many ways. However, no matter how you reach your relationship with divinity, what matters is you understand that you are in a spiritually connected relational bond. As your children mature in their faith, their spirituality will also mature, and these truths will become more evident.

Teach Gospel Principles

When teaching spiritual truths to your children, you must investigate your teachings through the same method you will try to convey them in. The only way you can do this is through the context of what you read to them. For example, certain scriptural books rely solely on storytelling. However, others use poetry, philosophies, and parables, which are stories that have hidden meanings or parallels that help shape understanding through analogies. Whatever the case may be for your belief, you must follow what those teachings intended. By doing so, you can ensure your children will receive the correct message. Then, they can gain a greater insight into what the story conveys.

Explain Your Beliefs

Teaching your children spiritual and religious practices also means that you must defend your spiritual beliefs and practices. Also, you must explain to them why you do things in the manner that you do them. This is not an easy feat and requires a level of finesse to keep from offending yourself and your children in how you choose to explain what you believe in. Therefore, you will need to thoroughly read through your scripture for the evidence provided in the text. This is the best way to explain your beliefs so that your children can understand. One great example of how you can do this is through the King James Version wide margin bible for study and an instrument of faith.

There is more than one way to teach your children about your faith and what your beliefs mean, just like there is a right and wrong way of doing everything. Therefore, you must be careful in how you choose to teach them because you will be their model for their spiritual practices and leadership later in life.