Having family devotions that matter

Over the years I have always been struck by the well meaning people that set out to give us some tips or ideas on having family devotions. They end up talking about how to engage your kids or encourage you to get them involved in acting out the story or whatever it is that they do. There are two things that it seems to me are critically important about family devotions.

1. Have them!
2. Use the time to point your children to God

Often the reason that most people do not have them is because it seems so complicated and takes time to do it right. What happens is the well meaning folks who try to encourage us to engage our kids end up discouraging us from doing it because it seems to take too much time. There also seems to be a great deal of inertia to overcome. This is usually imposed by our favorite TV program. I am not going to sit here and tell you TV is evil. (It is a box with electrical components in it. It can't be good or evil.) The content you choose to watch may be good or bad but that is a different subject. The big issue I see with TV is that it consumes our time. I can promise you when you enter eternity if you never watched TV you will not be standing before the King of kings thinking I wish I wouldn't have missed that episode of (insert show here).  But I can guarantee you that if there are any regrets (I don't know if there will be) they will be about time not spent advancing the kingdom of God in the hearts of others including our children. So turn off the TV and keep it simple.
For our very young children we read them a story out of a Bible story book. Then after putting them in bed we look up the equivalent passage from the Bible story book in our Bibles. We read this together with our older children and teens and then I ask them what they see here about God or what are they reminded of about God. I want my children to know God and so I try to constantly put before them a picture of God in one form or another. We usually follow our scripture reading with a story of a great Christian from the past or a book written by a Christian pointing to the greatness of God in some way. I want to stress that I do NO preparation for this. We sit down together and read and end in prayer. Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” It seems to me that the way we want our children to go is to God and eternity in heaven. It then follows that I need to train them to orient their lives around God. We simply seek to help them to develop a God focused life.