Diligent Instruction

Or ... The Importance of Family Worship

"You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise."

- Deuteronomy 6:7

What does it mean to teach our children diligently? What are we supposed to be diligently teaching them? Well, if you read the beginning of Deuteronomy 6, we see that we're supposed to be teaching them God's Word. Verse six explains "And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart." These words...His words...His word, his scripture, his law, his instructions, his story. We should diligenltly be instructing our children in the ways of the Lord. But, why?

Our church is going through a series right now entitled The Bride. We're looking deep into the book of Revelation and studying out God's instructions to the seven churches of that time and how they apply to us, the church, today. Our message on this past Sunday was regarding the Church at Thyatira and the messsage is a great place to start when beginning to understand why family worship is so very important. It is our job as parents to raise our children up in the way they should go, and in this age of technology they are bombarded with the ungodly practically from birth. 

As parents, my husband and I have several ways that combat the ungodly and pour diligent instruction into our children. First and foremost, we homeschool. I know that, practically speaking, this is not an option for all families, but it is an option for us. We go without a lot of comforts and live extremely frugally in order to do this, but diligent instruction is worth it. Secondly, we have a family worship time for an hour a day, every day. Yes, you read that right; for one hour every single day we spend time worshiping the Lord, pouring into His word and instructing our children directly from His word. Our family worship time culminates from several key aspects:

Prayer

We always begin our morning with prayer. This composes our hearts into a posture of worship and quiets our bodies as we prepart to focus on God. Our morning prayer comes from our homeschool curriculum and is recited as follows daily:

Dearest Lord, teach me to be generous. 

Teach me to serve you as you deserve.

To give and not to count the cost.

To fight and no to heed the wounds.

To toil and not to seek for rest.

To labor and not to ask for reward;

save that of knowing I am doing Your will.

Through Christ, our Lord. Amen

Creed & Doxology

In addition to praying together, daily we recite different creeds and or historical prayers of our faith. We slowly add more as we learn them and then cycle through them throughout each week. Right now we've memorized and recite on alternating days the doxology and the gloria patri. Daily we also recite the apostles' creed as the first and most basic creed of the Christian faith. 

Scripture Memory

There are so many reasons for memorizing scripture that I can't possibly mention all of them here. Suffice it to say, the more of God's word that is in your heart, the more you can recollect it during the trials that most assuredly will come your way throughout your life. Our method of scripture memory has been so amazingly helpful to us. In the past year, we've memorized over 40 verses and passages of the bible together as a family. We mostly have been using the verse list found here. 

Catechism

A catechism is a series of fixed questions, answers, or precepts used for instruction; in this case instruction in the Christian faith. As a family we've been memorizing the Westminster Shorter Catechism for Children. Even our youngest daughter, who is only two-years-old has memorized several of the answers. Learning the catechism together gives us daily reminders of what we believe and why which will hopefully prepare our children for apologetics (defending their faith intellectually) as they get older. Our family devotional also goes through the Heidelburg Catechism. It breaks each series of questions and answers down, provides real-life application even for our youngest family members, and scriptural references. It is available for purchase here.

Scripture Study (SOAP Journaling)

Finally, in concordance with our devotional, we read scripture. We use a method for journaling called SOAP. We encourage each of our older children who can write well (from Jubilee - 10 and up) to have their own SOAP journal and to have their own personal daily time in the Bible in addition to our family worship. Our middle-aged children (Lily 9 & Isaiah 7) usually will draw a picture and write a sentence or two about what they've read. Everyone in our family owns an ESV Bible. This is Jeremiah and my preferred translation of the Bible and we've found it to be wholeheartedly enriching to our children to have their very own copies of the Bible to read along with us. 

Worship through Song

Finally, our worship time includes singing praise and worship songs. We include both hymns and contemporary songs, as well as scripture memory, books of the bible, creeds and more. We often listen to worship songs throughout the day and have found it imperative that the songs we listen to, memorize and sing be theologically and scripturally affirming to our faith. This is yet another way we are able to diligently instruct our children in our faith. 

We take our faith very seriously. We take God's instruction to teach our children diligently daily, very seriously. I hope you've found this post helpful and encouraging. If you've found different ways to instruct your children in the faith diligently please feel free to share in the comments below!

Why We Choose to Homeschool

This post was originally posted on a former blog that Tikatia had. It has been updated to reflect our journey since then.

When our family was just beginning our family we never questioned that our children would go to school.  We sent Cali to public preschool, and then public kindergarten.  Her first year in Kindergarten, we place Shiloh in the same public preschool.  This is when we started noticing problems.  Cali had been diagnosed in preK with a Sensory Processing Disorder.  The school thought she had ADHD.  She was actually diagnosed with ADHD due to the school's form (though less "symptoms" on the parent form).  She was placed on meds.  The first meds did nothing, so they tried another, Adderall.  She lost 5 pounds within two weeks, she was talking about hating herself and wanting to die.  Remember, she was also only 6.  This led us to bring her to an ADHD specialist, who evaluated her, and talked to us more in depth.  The result, she does not have ADHD, instead she is a very bright and gifted child who is bored.  We brought the results to the school asking if they could challenge her more and were told that there were several children just as bright as her in the class and that she just needed to learn to listen better.

Our pediatrician suggested homeschooling.  We'd never considered homeschooling before.  Neither of us had been homeschooled.  Would it be a lot of work?  I didn't think I would be organized to do it.  We had 3 children at the time, so we also wondered, should we just homeschool Cali or both her and Shiloh?  Was it okay to send Shiloh to preschool and homeschool Cali? 

Well, I researched, and I prayed, and I researched.  I knew of a few families within our church who also homeschooled, so I asked them questions and spent months observing them and their children.  I got excited. It thought that this would be a great choice for Cali.  DH wasn't as completely on board as I was, but I convinced him to let me try.

For my first year homeschooling, I just homeschooled Cali.  Shiloh continued at his public preschool, Juby was a baby.  By the second year homeschooling Cali, I loved it.  But I knew that Shiloh had special needs and that in a public school he should be able to get services.  So, I homeschooled Cali, who was in 2nd grade but doing 3rd and 4th grade work, and sent Shiloh to the same public Kindergarten.  I fought with the school for months.  They insisted that there was nothing wrong with him and that he was fine, his speech was fine and he didn't need services.  He was missing school all the time and was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.  Finally, I got tired of fighting with the school.  Cali was excelling in homeschooling and she loved our homeschool co-op.  I withdrew Shiloh from school in February.  I continued to homeschool Cali, Shiloh and eventually Jubilee for a total of 3 years and I loved it.  

Circumstances changed for us after Number 5 (Isaiah) was born. After 11 weeks of bedrest and then dealing with a colicky newborn, I felt like a failure as a mother, let alone a homeschooler. Isaiah was born in April of 2008 and by that September we were ready to enroll them into school. Cali started fourth grade and Shiloh started second. We weren't quite ready to try a preschool, so we kept Jubilee home with us for that year still "homeschooling" just her. 

The kids were enrolled in public school for three years. In that time we saw Cali go from a precocious, curious and engaging little girl to a sullen and apathetic preteen. She left for the bus before sunrise, arrived home just in time for dinner and to lock herself back up in her room to do homework. We missed our kids. We missed seeing them learn new things, and being involved in their lives. And mostly, we missed the godly character that we'd been cultivating since their birth. When you don't see your kids more than a few hours per week, it is impossible to fully reinforce faith at home. So, after the end of the school year 2011, we took the kids back home. Cali had completed 4th-6th grade, Shiloh 2nd through 4th and Jubilee K-1st grade in public school. For two of those years, Lily also attended free public preschool. 

After our experience with public school, we started doing a lot of research into government schooling and our role as parents. Continuously, God brought me to Deuteronomy 6, particularly verse 7.

You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.

In this verse, we saw that God's best plan for our children was that we educate them at home and so we made the decision to homeschool all seven of our children through high school.