Training Boys to Read Bible

By Andrew McChesney

What is the secret for teaching a child to spend personal time with God?

Image © Pacific Press

Christian Müller, an Argentine volunteer at a Seventh-day Adventist school in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan, surprised me with his answer as we spoke in his home. I was in town to collect mission stories for Adventist Mission.

Christian said his 6-year-old son, Thomas, had interrupted his personal devotions that morning.

“Normally, I would have asked him to wait,” Christian told me. “But he held up his Bible in his little hands and said, ‘Papa, I don’t understand what I am reading. Can you help me?’ What else could I do but help him?”

I expressed astonishment that such a small boy was reading his Bible in the morning. My incredulity grew as Christian explained that Thomas and his 7-year-old brother, Lukas, read their Bibles every morning.

“How did you teach them to have morning devotions?” I asked.

Christian thought for a moment. “Actually, I have never taught them to have morning devotions,” he said.

The boys began having personal devotions around the time that they were learning to walk. Christian and his wife, Romina, would sit at opposite sides of the kitchen table to read their Bibles for personal devotions every morning in their home in Argentina. The boys would wake up and, naturally, want to be with their parents. Crawling out of bed, they would find their father and mother in the kitchen. Christian told the boys from the beginning that it was very important for Daddy and Mommy to spend time with God in the morning and that the boys could not interrupt the morning devotions. If the boys wanted to remain in the kitchen, they needed to be quiet and have their own devotions. The boys chose to stay. Initially, they could not read, so they quietly leafed through Bible picture books. As they grew older, they began to read their Bibles. After moving to Kyrgyzstan, the parents and the boys had morning devotions in their own rooms.

This was the secret for teaching a child to spend personal time with God in the morning. “I never once told the boys that they needed to start having morning devotions,” Christian said. “They just saw that their mother and I had devotions and followed our example.”

Produced by the General Conference Office of Adventist Mission. Find more mission stories at adventistmission[dot]org

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