Help Your Kids Learn and Love the Bible | Ep. 88

Clay Kraby: for those, even the title maybe piqued their interest. This isn’t some theoretical book written by someone who has a lot of good ideas. This is well earned, wisdom from years of, no doubt doing some things not so well, doing some things that worked out really well and trying to help others maybe have a bit of a shortcut into doing it well in their own home.

Danika Cooley: Yes, exactly.

Clay Kraby: That’s great.

Parents Can Feel Intimidated By Discipling Their Own Children

Now, I think a lot of parents can feel intimidated by the call to be more intentional in discipling their own children, particularly in their understanding of the Bible, developing doctrine, developing themselves theologically. So what advice would you have for someone that they hear it when they’re in the pews, they hear it at retreats, they’re listening to this conversation. They know they need to do this, they need to take it seriously, but they’ve just never seen it done. It wasn’t done in their own home. They haven’t seen it done in other people’s homes. What advice would you give to someone like that?

Danika Cooley: I think almost every parent is in that situation. There are parents today who were raised in very intentional homes, but a lot of us were raised in Christian homes where we went to Sunday school, we went to youth group. maybe we went to Christian school. I memorized a bunch of verses when I was a kid, and that was really formational for me. But I don’t remember anything else about Christian school except that God’s word is in my head. and a lot of us haven’t read the Bible all the way through. I think anybody in that situation is in good company. We’re all kind of there. But the Bible is a story, that God wrote for us so that we can understand more about who he is. That’s what the word theology means is the study of God. We learn about God in the Bible, and the Bible isn’t written in code. You don’t have to read the Bible in advance to teaching it to your kids. You can read it with your children because it’s a story just like you would any other story. and there are things we want to do, to teach the Bible soundly. We want to be faithful to God’s word. So that’s kind of why I wrote this, is so parents can have a crash course in how to think about Scripture and how to avoid major pitfalls and stay on the main path. But we can read God’s word with our kids and learn, about it with them. and when we come across things that we don’t know what they mean, it’s okay to say to our kids, I’m not really sure that I know what that means. So let me go do a little bit of research, and I’ll get back to you. Let’s talk about it, like, say, tomorrow.

Clay Kraby: And even that’s good teaching for the kids, right? Don’t just pass over it. Don’t m make it up. but just say, I don’t understand this. I’m not sure. Let me get some good resources. And even showing them, here’s where I looked and here’s what I found. It exposes them to whether it’s maybe a commentary or a Bible teacher or a book or whatever you’ve done to educate yourself a little bit. All that’s helpful. You’re training them to do the same, because no matter how good a job you do, when they leave that house, they’re not going to know everything there is to know about Scripture. They’re going to need to know how to look things up and wrestle with challenging parts.

Danika Cooley: Exactly. And as your kids get older, I think it’s great to include them in the research of what does this mean? How do I find that? Like, here are resources. I advocate having lots of books about the Bible that your kids might just want to pick up. There are great resources out there that can help children learn about the Bible, too.

Clay Kraby: Yeah. And for those who are intimidated by this, moms and dads listening, I think a lot of times they feel like, oh, I need to be a scholar. I need to know this backwards and forwards before I can ever teach it to someone. And yes, you need to make sure that you are being fed that you know the word before you teach. I get that element, possibly. but it’s not unlike the conversation, the thoughts people have before. Maybe even homeschooling, is you really don’t have to know everything perfectly. In a lot of cases, you need to be a week or two ahead of people, so that you can turn and teach your kids that. And the Bible is not. There are parts that are hard to understand, of course, but in general, it is meant to be understood even at a young age. And so if you’re reading Scripture with them, using some helps ahead of time for any sticky parts that come up, you can do this. Is that something that you’ve run into before in conversations with people?

Danika Cooley: Absolutely. That’s one of the two primary concerns I hear all the time from parents. And one of the things I tell parents that I work with one on one, is, if you want to read the Bible before you start reading it with your kids, that’s completely valid. Take 90 days and do that in 45 minutes a day. You can read twelve chapters of the Bible and you’re through it cover to cover. And the first time I read the Bible cover to cover, I did it in 88 days. I think I did that five or six times just to get the overall feel of the main themes of God’s story to us. your kids aren’t going to, be harmed by waiting three months to go through the Bible with you if you want to go through it all the way and really have a good understanding for what it is. I think sometimes we expect our children are going to have, the same kind of questions that say our 35-year-old coworker does about Scripture, who’s been reading anti-Christian books. And that’s not the case. Our kids are, if we present God’s word as an adventure, it’s exciting. We’re going to read this story that God wrote to us, they are going to be excited about it, they’re going to learn stuff, and they’re just going through it for the first time and they’re children, so they’re going to see it from a different viewpoint. I think sometimes we build up these reasons in our head why we are not able to take our kids through this book. It’s too big, it’s too hard. There’s some stuff in it that we don’t want to introduce our kids to. And I’ve always been a big advocate for. Maybe don’t read Judges 19 to your five-year-old. Maybe she just skipped that chapter. It’s okay to do that if there’s something that’s just truly, you don’t want your child exposed to it yet and then read it with your middle school or your high schooler. You may have to answer some questions there.

Clay Kraby: Yeah, no, that’s helpful advice. We do want to walk them through Scripture and there’s some parts, whether, because it is just going to be way over their heads or whatever else, you just as a parent are going to have to figure it out with your kids and just getting them Scripture is the key.

Biblical Literacy and Family Discipleship

So what is the format that you recommend someone picks up your book on? Help your kids learn and love the Bible. What is the format that you are teaching them in terms of getting your family in the Word?

Danika Cooley: Yeah, so I’m a big fan of family discipleship and biblical literacy, and I think the only way to become biblically literate is to read God’s word. So, I advocate reading and, in one of the chapters I say you can just start, by reading proverbs with them every night. We did that for a long time. In addition to the other family discipleship, we did. While you’re wrapping your head around what your format is going to be, you can just read the proverb of the day with your kids. But I advocate going through the Bible with your kids and then having a time of prayer and discussion.

Danika Cooley: My boys and I, when they were in middle and high school, we would read maybe three to five chapters every morning, and we home schooled, so we had the time available to do that. but it really only took 15 or 20 minutes to read those three to five chapters, discuss them, and then we would have prayer time and that would vary depending on what was on their heart that day.

Clay Kraby: Yeah. It doesn’t have to be overly complicated. It’s not necessarily easy all the time, but it’s not complex either. It’s simple, even though it can be hard to do. And one of those things that can be hard is consistency. I think a lot of people have good intentions. They get in great seasons and spurts where this goes well and they see the benefit of it. It’s not that they don’t see the value, but consistency can be a real struggle. What advice would you have for those that have, they just want to move from struggling to maintain, they want to get out of sporadic Bible reading with their family and get into more consistent times of family worship and devotion.

Danika Cooley: Yeah, that is the second, really big concern that people have is I don’t think I can do this consistently, so I might as well not even start. and I don’t think that’s right, because we make sure our kids brush their teeth, we make sure our children eat breakfast. They do not let us forget that they need breakfast every morning. Right. They remember that they have these things. We like very organized lives for the most part. And it doesn’t mean that there are things that come up. There are days we go to the zoo, there’s days we go to the doctor because somebody’s sick. But we have pretty good rhythms to our lives, usually. So, I’m a big fan of habits. I’ve read a lot of books on habits. I believe in anchoring to something like, your kid is going to remember breakfast every morning. Now, you may have breakfast at six some mornings and nine some mornings, but you’re still going to have breakfast as a family. So I think choose times during the day that you always do the same thing and, anchor to that some part of your family discipleship, whether it’s prayer or reading a chapter of the Bible and discussion. after lunch, we would always go and do a fun Bible activity, like if we’d read about Noah’s ark. We went and measured Noah’s ark out in the street one day, just so the kids could see how big it was. And that took a little while, so we don’t do that kind of thing every day, but anchor to things that you’re already going to do. And then one whole chapter of my book is about planning, for the unplanned. Like, you’re going to have days where things are just going to go awry, or you don’t feel good or have a set up for those kind of things. My kids used to listen to, a children’s version of an audio Bible. It was read by children. I think it was the. I don’t know, it was a Reader’s Bible and they would just listen to it in the background while they were playing. we had videos about the Bible. We had books about the Bible. So you can have plans where if your day doesn’t go perfectly, you’re still focusing on God’s word in some way.

Clay Kraby: Yeah. And you want to redeem those, know, it’s great to have family time around the table and you can make it even sweeter, even deeper by bringing in Scripture, by bringing in spiritual conversations and trying to have that element. And I remember Don Whitney saying, a lot of times parents can feel frustrated. They’re like, I don’t know if this is worthwhile. I don’t know if they’re getting anything out of this or their kids are young and they wonder, is this something we need to start now? And he just gave the example of, if someone has a real young child, they might not fully understand what’s going on, but they recognize, well, this is important because we do it every day, and it just becomes part of family life, and what a sweet thing that is. So just no matter what age your kids are, encourage people to start. That.

Asking Good Questions that Encourage Conversation with Our Kids

Clay Kraby: One challenge I think people run into, particularly if they have a range of ages in the home, let’s just say five to 15 or something like that, can be getting good discussion going, conversation going, particularly if you have that range of understanding and experience and depth of questions. How can we get better at asking good questions that encourage conversation with our kids?

Danika Cooley: Yeah. So, I always tell parents to teach up, rather than teaching down. So we want to teach to our older kids. So we read the Scripture, and our little kids are going to pick up whatever they pick up. Like you said that it’s important. I remember my six- and seven-year-old asking me the difference between a, Christophany and a theophony. And I remember thinking, I don’t even know. And they told me that they heard that in church, and wasn’t I paying attention? And I would say, yeah, but I didn’t understand that you were, because you were underneath the pew.

Clay Kraby: Right.

Danika Cooley: I had no idea that you guys were listening to this. So we want to teach up with making allowance for the attention span of our littles, like we used to teach. And then we’d have discussion and sometimes our littles would kind of peel off and go play. They could still listen while they’re playing, but there are discussions you want to have just with your older kids, but you have kids that are analytical thinkers, so they’re really focused on the details. Their brains are wired by God so that they care about the details of the story. They care about what’s going on, who said what, the geography of where people are at. And then you have global thinkers who care about the big, overarching story. Like, they want to know, where does this story fit into God’s grand plan? so you want to ask questions that are both open and closed. I always started out by asking closed questions about this story. Like, what happened in this story. Like the who, what, why, when? Questions like, let’s pretend we’re detectives, like, what happened in this story? And why did it happen, who was doing what. So really basic things that are going to make your global thinkers think that you’re just not paying attention. And then you ask more open questions like, okay, there were scribes in the story. We’ve talked about what scribes are. What do you know about scribes? Why was Jesus concerned about know, why do you think he talked to them this way? so you ask the bigger questions so that you’re helping kids, observe, interpret and apply God’s word. You want them to observe the facts of what happened in the passage you read. interpret it. Like, what does this mean? What does it mean in the bigger scope of Scripture? And then apply it to their lives. Like, is there a biblical principle in here? and I think it’s always helpful when you’re doing, the discussion to remember, that God’s story is written with grand, overarching themes. We want to help our kids look for who God is, who we are and why we need a savior, what God’s great plan of salvation is. And then, what Jesus’ commands for us are, or God’s commands in the Old Testament, how they apply to Jesus’s commands in the New Testament. So those are the themes that I always try to ask questions about when I see them running through a passage.

Clay Kraby: No, really helpful advice. I appreciate that. Thank you. So the whole goal here is to help our kids develop a love for God’s word. How can we help them see just the value of Scripture and get them to be more engaged with it?

Danika Cooley: I think, like you said, like what Donald Whitney said, when we are excited about God’s word and it’s something we look forward to doing, that, makes a big difference for our kids. Our children love whatever we love, especially when they’re young. If you are a baseball fan, your child is also going to love baseball because it’s important to you. So we want to convey to them that God’s word is exciting, it’s an adventure. another thing that we want to do is take it just from talking at the table, reading God’s words. I think those are the most important things. But there are ways we can help our kids understand the doctrine of Scripture. Things they’ve read, like measuring out Noah’s ark and marking it in the street with, chalk, because our kids are, when they’re young, they, have more trouble understanding abstract concepts. They’re very concrete. Anything we can do to make abstract things concrete for them, like crafts, copy work, like getting out in the street and drawing a whale and laying it, actually measuring out like a sperm whale. And I know that, in the story of Jonah, we know it was some kind of sea serpent, right? But you can fit in a sperm whale. And to measure that out for them and then to talk to them about what would it take for you to be so rebellious that you would want to sit in the stomach of a whale for three days? Like, how hard would your heart have to be and what would God have to do for you? So I think those kind of things make it really fun for kids.

Clay Kraby: Yeah, that’s really good. Helping them, relate and just see the reality of it. Like you said, it’s often abstract. We’re talking about things that happened in a different land, in a different culture, in a different time. And so you do want to make sure that they see the relevance for today, because the Bible is relevant, it is engaging. It is wonderful. It’s just really try not to get in the way of that and helping them, to see that that is the case.

Memorizing Scripture in the Home

So let’s talk about Bible memorization. What do you recommend? How should we go about memorizing Scripture in the home?

Danika Cooley: Some kids learn better. they’re auditory learners, which actually doesn’t mean that they hear it. It means that they are speaking, the verse. I had one child who would just say the verse over and over and over again, and then he would just know it. And he still, like, he knows all of Romans. When we would read through Romans, he would just read his part without looking.

Danika Cooley: That was how he learned. Some kids are kinesthetic, which means, movement. So they learn by moving, and so I think it helps to know what kind of learning modality our kids have. But I think one thing that most of us can learn from is. So, like, if you think about the ABCs, anytime I need to alphabetize things, I still run through the ABC song through my head. and I learned that when I was really little. Right. Song can be a really great way for us to learn verses. And there are all kinds of resources that have song and verses, but you can also make up your own songs. to give a verse rhyme and rhythm really helps. So I used to print out cards where I put the verse into beats so that the kids were memorizing phrases on each line. so that kind of thing can help. And I think when you choose verses, you want to choose verses along those grand themes of Scripture. So who God is, who we are why we need a savior. God’s great plan for salvation, then Jesus’s commands for us.

Clay Kraby: Yeah, that’s really good. And we can always start off small with young kids. I mean, we’ve got verses as small as Jesus wept. Or you can go all the way up to reading romans and trying to get them, really just acquainted with Bible memorization as a concept. Give them some wins early on and help them see. And obviously, you can do sticker charts and things like that with younger kids and get them excited for things, so a lot of good ways to get going in that regard.

Danika Cooley: Yeah. I used to teach four-year-olds in preschool, and every single one of them was incredibly capable of memorizing verses as long as I did it with them. When we did it together, kids, their brains, especially in the elementary years, are primed to memorize. That is their mode of brain development at that age.

Clay Kraby: I mean, they’re memorizing something anybody with young kids knows. They’re memorizing the theme song of the shows they like. They’re memorizing books. I mean, you’ll have a little kid who loves this picture book. He’s well below the age for reading, and he can go through every page. When our oldest now was very little, he read the very hungry caterpillar out loud. He couldn’t read, but he’d memorized it. They’re sponges at that age, so don’t be shy of giving them good things to memorize because they’re going to memorize something.

Danika Cooley: Absolutely. And we weren’t a big candy family. We didn’t do a lot of sugar, but I did give candy for memorization. That was the only time my kids got candy, was they’d get a piece of chocolate, like an M&M, something small. Every time they memorized a verse. My goodness, could they memorize verses!

Clay Kraby: Right.

Danika Cooley: They were very excited.

Clay Kraby: Yeah. It doesn’t take much. If someone’s watching this conversation, they see the value of guarding some time in the home for Scripture reading, for Bible memorization, for spiritual conversations. They just need a little extra push to get started. What advice would you have for them?

Danika Cooley: I think the most important thing we can do is to read the Bible with our kids and discuss it with, them and pray. And if you only have five or ten minutes to start, that’s where I would start. but the Bible is not, written in code. It’s not too hard, it’s not too big is a library of books. I think it’s important that we not get overwhelmed and that we just start working Scripture into our day. and another thing I decided early on with my kids is I’m going to buy books anyway.

Danika Cooley: I’m going to have them watch videos anyway. I want, what I teach them here at home because they’re going to get plenty of the world everywhere else. I want it to be about God’s word. And so we just started incorporating, God’s word into everything we did. and it just became a part of the fabric of our lives, the foundation that our home was built on. And I would just encourage people to start looking around and, making decisions about how they use their time and the resource that they have and just replace something today with the study of God’s word.

Clay Kraby: It’s a lot about intentionality, right? You need to do this on purpose. You’re not going to fall into wonderful times of family worship with your family. you’re not going to just happen upon it one day. Just start, start small and go from there. You can always add in Bible memorization, you can always read more. You could always bring in a catechism or something like that. Just start right.

Danika Cooley: Exactly.

You have developed different curriculum sets to help kids learn about the Bible

Clay Kraby: Now, in addition to the book that we’re having a conversation about, “Help Your Kids Learn And Love The Bible” you’ve done other books, you have developed different curriculum sets. Could you share a little bit about some of your other work and resources that you have?

Danika Cooley: Yeah, sure. So Bible road trip is again a three year Bible survey curriculum. And then a lot of the books I’ve written are for eight- to twelve-year-olds. So, I have a “Who What, Why” Christian history series. And so far done the reformation abolition, and, exodus is coming out in September. And then, Bible Investigators. Creation is brand new and it’s a pretty big book. It’s all about the doctrine of creation and it’s actually puzzle based, which I think helps kids with memorization and understanding, theological terms. But it is a Bible study and it has 90 puzzles and 30, truths about God’s word that they’re going to learn. Kids are going to come out understanding the creation mandate, creation ordinances, like some ex nihilo, some hard stuff, but it’s written in a fun way that they’re going to really enjoy, and they’re going to learn how to do inductive Bible study. So, I think it’s just a tool to help teach them how to study the Bible on their own. So that’s fun. And then I’ve written a historical fiction for teens about Martin Luther. I’m just continuing to write for kids now about the Bible and Christian history.

Clay Kraby: That’s wonderful. And for those different curriculum sets, is that designed for use in the home for, family, worship setting or maybe a home school setting? Where do you see parents making use of that the most?

Danika Cooley: Yeah, so a lot of the people who use Bible Road Trip, they use it in their home school. It does get really pretty in depth by the time you get to be in high school. But we do have a lot of parents that use it in a family discipleship setting, like in the evenings with their younger kids, or they have their high schoolers do it on their own and then they talk to them about it later. I have had people use it in smaller Christian schools and churches. but that takes a little bit of an adaptation because it is a five day a week, Bible curriculum.

Clay Kraby: No, it sounds like some very thorough stuff available, that you have there on your site. So where can people go to learn more about your work? To check out these other books and maybe even pick up one of these, different curriculum, whether it’s Bible Road Trip or one of the other ones you have.

Danika Cooley: Sure. So, ah, my store is at ThinkingKidsPress.com and then ThinkingKidsBlog.org is the blog, and I have tips for teaching the Bible, some parenting resources, and then I write a lot about, Christian books and resources that are available for your family. That’s kind of my thing. I love Christian books. So you can find all kinds of stuff on there that you might want to use for your family.

Clay Kraby: Excellent. Well, I will be sure to include the links to all of the resources that we’ve mentioned in this conversation. Our guest on this episode of the podcast has been Danica Cooley. Danica, thanks so much for having this conversation about helping our kids learn and love the Bible.

Danika Cooley: Thank you for having me on, Clay.