Our children don’t have to wait until they reach a certain age to hear from God. There is no prerequisite or requirement to hear God’s voice. All we need is to recognize He is speaking to us and listen to what He is saying. Do our children know that God wants to speak to them? If they know it, do they recognize His voice? Let’s talk about how to teach your kids God’s voice.
Teach Your Kids God’s Voice with Scripture
The most important thing you can do for your kids (besides praying for them – see a post on that here) is to teach your kids God’s voice in scripture. God will never speak something new that goes against what scripture teaches. We can discern God’s voice from any other voice by knowing His word and taking everything back to scripture.
Read the Bible together
Step 1: Pick a Bible
While Bible story books are great and often fun to read, nothing tops reading the Bible for itself. For the toddler years, we used the “my first hands-on Bible” pictured below. While this looks like a storybook Bible, each of the stories is directly quoted from scripture (New Living Translation). This Bible is great for toddlers and has activities and notes to help them understand each story/scripture as it’s read. However, a bible like this is not needed to read with your children. Any Bible will do as long as you are reading it together.
Step 2: Download a Reading Plan
Once you have your bible picked out you can download one of my free Bible Reading Plans. I suggest starting with the gospel of John. Set up a time each day where you will read the Bible with your kids.
Step 3: Help your kids understand what is being read
Get your kids involved in what you are reading. If you have older kids, have them read a passage or verse. If you have younger kids, make it exciting: use different voices for different people, read with emotion to fit the story, etc.
When you’re done reading the verse, passage, or story ask your children some questions. Depending on the age of your children or the questions you ask, you may need to help your children answer some of your questions. Let them think about the question for a few seconds (count to 10 before answering).
Feel free to use some of these questions as needed:
- What happened in the story we just read?
- What stood out to you in what we just read?
- Do you have any questions about what we just read? (do your best to answer these questions for and with your children, remember: “that’s a great question, let’s find out together” is a great response when you don’t know the answer).
- Did that verse/passage tell us something we should be doing?
- Did that verse/passage tell us something about God/Jesus/the Holy Spirit? What did it tell us?
- What can we learn from this verse/passage/story?
- What does this teach us to ask God about/thank God about?
Look for ways you can bring the Bible into your everyday life. An easy example: “do everything without grumbling or arguing.” (Philippians 2:14). If I read this verse with my kids, I might help us all apply it by saying something like this: “we don’t always like the things we’re asked to do (like cleaning), but let’s practice doing something without complaining. We’re going to take 10 minutes and see what we can clean up, I’ll put on some music so we can have fun while we clean.” When we are done, we will have a small celebration that we obeyed that bible verse and practiced doing a ‘not-so-fun’ thing without complaining.
Teach Your Kids to Hear God’s Voice in Prayer
Help them pray
I’ve written a whole blog post on how to teach your children to pray, so I won’t go into too much detail here. The important things to remember are that you need to model prayer for your children, and you need to invite them to pray with you.
In modeling prayer for your children, you show them how to pray, what things to say, and that prayer is important.
By inviting your children to pray with you, they learn that God wants to hear from them, that they can pray, and they can talk to God.
Record their prayers with them
Whether or not you personally use a prayer journal, it can be a great tool for teaching your kids God’s voice in prayer. There are a variety of ways to use a prayer journal from lists to writing out whole prayers. And the best thing is, it’s inexpensive – all you need is a notebook and pen.
The easiest way to use a prayer journal to teach your kids to hear God’s voice is by using it to make a prayer list. Every week or so ask your children what or who we should be praying for as a family. Write each of these things down in your family prayer journal and remember to pray for these things together. You can have a separate family prayer time, but ours often happens around our kitchen table before dinner.
Tell your children how God has answered prayers
This step is important, so don’t forget it! If our family has been praying for someone to be healed (even from a cold), we make sure to thank God when we hear that person is doing well again. Before we moved, we were praying for direction and specifically housing, when God came through and confirmed our call and provided a house for us we made sure to thank God for His answers and provision. This teaches our kids that God does answer prayer. It helps them understand the heart of God, that he cares for His children. God loves when we talk to Him and is blessed when we pray for each other.
This may all seem so simple. The reality is that it is simple. Get your kids into God’s word and help them pray and praise God for His answers. Once you begin to do this your kids will be well on their way to hearing and understanding the voice of God for themselves.
For more on hearing God’s voice, check out this blog post.
Have your kids experienced hearing and understanding the voice of God for themselves? I’d love to hear about it!
