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What is your favorite meal of the day? Our family loves breakfast, because we LOVE bacon! Bacon is my secret to get the kids out of bed on the first day of school. It really does work! Bacon helps cheer them up and bacon now helps them desire God’s Word. Let me explain. 😉
I learned from a pastor and his wife years ago about taking your teen out to breakfast once a week to spend one on one time together and study God’s Word together. Brilliant, I thought! So, I began taking my 8th grade son out to breakfast once a week. It worked out nicely, since they had a delayed schedule on Wednesday mornings.
I decided to use this time to get to bond and teach him different ways to study the Bible. My hope is that when he leaves the “nest,” he will feel comfortable reading and studying his Bible and not intimidated by it. My husband and I attended a parenting conference by Paul David Tripp when our kids were little. Our biggest take-away was that as our kids get older, we want them to lean less on us and more on God. If we want our kids to lean more on God, they need to know God. In order to know God, they need to lean into His Word.
The Bible can be quite intimidating to read and very hard to understand. So, my son and I began the journey of reading and studying the Bible together. He is a high school sophomore now and this has been the highlight of his week! He truly has loved having breakfast and Bible study together. We have had so many good conversations come out of this time together that probably would not have happened without this open door. It has truly been a blessing.
Here are some ways we have studied the Bible together. We began with a simple Bible study book on Galatians. Take your time. I did not have him do any kind of homework–it’s overwhelming. We only worked on the study during breakfast. Keep a bookmark to remember where you left off each week. Don’t feel rushed. We took an entire school year to study Galatians. We also did a Bible study book from our church on Philippians.
Next, we took a book of the Bible and used the SOAP method. “S” stands for Scripture. Write down a scripture that stands out to you, that you really like, or that doesn’t make sense to you. “O” stands for “Observation.” Write down what you observe about that scripture. “A” stands for “Application.” Write down how the scripture applies to your life. “P” stands for “Prayer.” Write down a prayer regarding that scripture and what you have learned. Most of the time we don’t write down the prayer at breakfast, we just pray it out loud together. We use a study Bible for this, so we can read the notes. In this process, he is learning how to use his student study Bible.
Another great resource is the Bible Project. https://bibleproject.com/church-at-home/ Watching the Bible come alive through their videos has been very helpful to both of us. We watch the video for the book of the Bible we are studying. It really helps you to see the big picture and bring everything together.
I hope this helps give you an idea of how to connect more with your teens and to help them start loving God’s Word. May our teens begin to lean more into the Lord and trust Him in their daily lives as they grow.
God, You are the Bread of Life.
John 6:25-35
