Flying By The Seat Of Your Pants Family Discipleship

photo by koyochi

What happens when you cross a flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach to time management with an unexpected crisis? You get what my week was last week. Nothing that I thought I would get done, got done and a whole lot of running around in circles was the extent of most of my activity.

Such is life sometimes, but it really should be the exception to the rule instead of the rule itself. If I don’t establish certain goals and parameters within which to work, I’m not going to accomplish what it is I’m trying to do. Whether it’s writing articles to my blog, planning school work for the kids, scheduling time for social media networking or researching business ideas, it’s all going to go to a very warm place in a hand basket if I’m not deliberate about doing it.

Same thing with family discipleship. It doesn’t happen if you’re not purposeful with it.

It’s one thing to say, I want my kids to learn how to pray so they can have a closer relationship with the Lord, but how and when will you do it?

You think to yourself, I hope my child makes the right choices about dating, but how can you teach him/her about what God wants in relationships? And when would you get around to teaching it?

You keep poking yourself to spend time in family devotion, but when and how will that happen?

Flying by the seat of our pants doesn’t work with family discipleship any more than it doesn’t work with getting through our work week. Throw in the inevitable emergency or family crisis, and making God a big deal in our homes just doesn’t seem to make it off the back burner.

So, here’s what we do with our family discipleship. We make it deliberate. We plan. We schedule. We set goals. We write them down and make a committed effort. Then when the inevitable happens, we reshuffle and reschedule, but our plan is still in place. We just get back on track as soon as we can.

No more flying by the seat of our pants family discipleship. From now on it’s purposeful, deliberate and focused. The links below will help get you started.

Recommended Resources:

Devotion Resources For Toddlers & Preschoolers

Bible Reading For The Early Elementary Child

Bible Reading For The Older Elementary Child

Bible Reading For Teenagers

Related Articles:

Family Devotion Ideas

Step By Step To Family Devotions - The Series

5 Ways To Create A Home Of Worship

Freeing Up Our Time, Part 3

If we’re going to treat our families as the mission field that they are, we must immerse ourselves in the family culture, just as we would if we were sent as missionaries to another country. We would never be effective witnesses for the Lord if we barely spent time interacting or speaking with the people we were sent to minister. We were given children to raise up godly believers for the Lord. How effective can we be in carrying out the Lord’s commandments if we spend so little time being a family?

It means actual physical presence in genuine discussion doing cooperative activities. Not cheering from the sidelines at the ball field, but throwing a Frisbee in the backyard together. Not dropping the children off at music lessons, but jointly tapping our toes at a concert. Not signing up for another activity, but enjoying mutual interests or exploring a new past time together.

Togetherness is a mindset, an attitude. We all have our individual friends and interests, but they should actually take a backseat to what we do as a family. Our well-roundedness, both individually and collectively, does not come at the sacrifice of being a family.

God ordained two institutions to carry out the generational discipleship of our children: the family and the church. If we're making sure we're acting like the family God wants us to be, we’ll have countless opportunities for witnessing and discipling our children in the truths of God. Which is what freeing up our time is all about.

Freeing Up Our Time, Part 2

It’s pretty easy to get confused about doing things for the Lord, thinking we’re following His will for our lives. We then wonder why we don’t have any peace about it. After all, people are affirming our good works and there’s plenty in the Bible about showing our faith through what we do (James 2:26 says that faith without deeds is dead). I know first hand how confusing it can be.

One year I was convinced that the Lord was calling me to a leadership and outreach position in the church. I was the chairperson for two committees, a member on a third, sang in the choir, taught the high school Sunday school class, organized the annual Christmas caroling outreach program, a liturgist, a greeter, involved in drama, baked for Sunday morning coffee hour, and consistently pitched in whenever I was asked. I just knew I was in the Lord’s will because everyone complimented me on how involved I was and what a difference I was making in certain areas.

And what I was doing was a good thing. I was serving the Lord by serving the church. I was reaching people. I was touching people. Only problem was, I was never home. I wasn’t spending time reaching or touching my own children. I had confused doing things for the Lord with letting Him use me for His purpose. I was doing things for Him instead of letting Him work through me.

The way we find spare time for teaching our children is to make sure we’re not confusing doing things for the Lord with walking in obedience in Him. One puts the focus on the activity, the other puts the focus on Him. If our church and community activities are depriving our children of time spent together in the Word, we need to evaluate this contradiction in terms.

To paraphrase Matthew 16:26: “What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his [child’s] soul?”

Freeing Up Our Time, Part 1

As mentioned in previous posts, we’re not required to build a theological seminary within the walls of our homes in order to hold family devotions. However, conducting these activities does require time, a short commodity in many of our lives. Sometimes finding a spare ten or fifteen minutes is asking a lot of us.

Many of us parents have been asked to buy into this notion that promoting simplicity in our lifestyle hurts our children and stagnates us. If we’re not chauffeuring our children to multiple extracurricular activities or engaging in our own committee work and self-improvement courses, we’re somehow falling short of the mark. It seems our well-roundedness is dependent upon the time spent away from home letting others guide our cosmic walk through life.

As Christians, we need to be ever observant of the eternal significance that any of our activities or behavior has. That doesn’t mean that each and every thing we do has to have deep spiritual impact. It does mean that it has to have godly purpose to it. This is part of developing a purposeful mindset for missions work with our children, and what we need to evaluate when trying to find time to fit God into our homes. For example, does the:

… fishing trip help us relax so we can be a better parent, spouse, employee, or is it a reason to get out of the house and our responsibilities?
… working on the evangelism committee pull us and our families closer to reaching others for Christ, or does it just feel good to be part of something bigger than ourselves?
… playing on the JV or varsity basketball team promote godly character, or does it just give the child something to keep him busy with and out of trouble?
… attending a play date teach the value of friendship, sharing and putting others first, or an excuse for dropping the child off while we engage in more grown up activities?

What we must first evaluate is where our focus is and how much of God is in it. Instead of trying to fit God into our busy schedules, we need to work our schedules around God. If the Lord was never in the decision to do the activity in the first place, the activity has to go. This is the first thing we do to free up time in order to hold family devotions.