Bible Study Helps and Ideas

      I love old books. I love stories written years ago. They have a great quality that many or most stories today lack. I search out the older books and stories to read to our children. (Character Building Stories like Tiger & Tom or King's Daughter or Paula the Waldensian and others).  But one thing I really feel burden for is the Bible. For Christmas, my mother gave my two older children each a wide margin Bible and we gave them each a nice Bible Cover with pockets to keep their special Bible marking pencils & pens and for a small pad of paper.

     We have felt impressed to give our children a love and a thirst (as far as possible) for the Bible. This year we will take these wide margin Bibles and mark Bible studies in them. I want to do Bible studies on character qualities, Christian living and Bible Doctrines. I thought what we'd do is work on marking one or two a week and then everyday the children go over it for just maybe 5 minutes or so and at the end of the week - give the Bible study back to us. This should help them put it more firmly in their minds.
CLICK HERE TO SEE A SAMPLE BIBLE MARKING STUDY.

      These Bible Studies can also go in their Bible Study Journals.  We do alot of Journaling around here. Check out our article on Journaling by going back to our home page to find the link.

     We also are memorizing scripture. Not just for memorizing sake but the Bible is a safe guard against the devil.  If our children have "hid the word in their hearts" then the Holy Spirit can bring it back to their minds at any time they are in danger in walking contrary to it.

     I feel it is just so important for all of our family to put the Bible in our hearts and minds so that we can walk in the way of the Lord and do His will.  The absolute best way to memorize scripture is to music. Hands down our favorite system is from "Thy Word Creations". These are whole chapters of the Bible put to music - word for word. They are so beautiful. They work too. And that is what I like. Our very little ones go around the house singing portions of what they have learned of Matthew 4 (The temptations of Jesus or the Beatitudes - I love that one too).

     One thing I thought neat, was that Noah Webster had committed to memory many many many Bible passages. I found this in an old magazine, The Youth Instructor, from April 1886:

      "While a mere lad he (Noah Webster) read (the Bible) with such power and expression that the passing teamsters, who stopped to water their horses, used to get "Webster's boy" to sit beneath the shade of the trees and read the Bible to them.
      Those who heard Mr. Webster, in latter life, recite passeges from the Hebrew prophets and the Psalms, say that he held them spell-bound, while each passage, even the most familiar, came home to them in a new meaning . One gentleman says that he never received such ideas of the majesty of God and the dignity of man as he did one clear night when Mr. Webster, standing in the open air, recited in eighth psalm.
      Webster's mother observed another old fashion of New England in training her son. She encouraged him to memorize such scriptural passages as impressed him. The boy's retentive memory, and his sensitiveness to Bible metaphors and to the rhythm of the English version, stored his mind with Scripture.
      On one occasion the teacher of the district school offered a jack-knife to the boy who would recite the greatest number of verses from the Bible. When Webster's turn came, he arose and reeled off so many verses that the master was forced to cry, "Enough!"   It was the mother's training, and the boy's delight in the idioms and music of King James' version, that made him the "Biblical Concordance of the Senate."
     But these two factors made him more than a "concordance." The Hebrew prophets inspired him to eloquent utterances. He listened to them, until their vocabulary and idioms, as expressed in King James's translations, became his mother-tongue. Of his lofty utterance it may be said, as Wordsworth said of Milton's poetry, they are "Hebrew in soul." Therefore they project themselves into the future." (The Youth Instructor  April 1886.)

      In reading Charlotte Mason's books she emphasized the importance of habit. And she also felt it was important that once you started to work on a habit that you "see it through". I think this is particularly true of Bible Memorization. We need to stick with it and see it to completion. Which takes patience on our part (I suppose this is good character building). And our children will one day be so thankful we took the time to help them do this so they in turn can be a "blessing" to God and those around them.

     From THE YOUTH INSTRUCTOR  of August 1884, I found this neat thought:

     "What is most needed is that the young mind, while the memory is still quick, strong, retentive and unoccupied as to other things, shall be filled with an accurate and extended knowledge of the very words of Scripture. To what better use can the mind of a child be put than to the task, which most children find easy and pleasant, of committing to memory selected portions of the Bible? In all literature there are no words so beautiful and so precious as the words of Jesus and His divinely inspired apostles. In all history and philosophy there are no truths so important for the young mind to learn, and so salutary in training it, as these sublime and beautiful lessons of the word of God. No theory of Christian education can ever be complete without them; nor can any young mind be properly developed in the absence of these divine lessons of love, of truth, of moral virtue, contained in the word of God.
     No young person is likely to know much about the doctrines and precepts of the Bible who does not commit its words to memory.  There may, indeed, be some desultory acquaintance with its facts, but as to anything more, the knowledge will be, at best, superficial, uncertain, and defective. . . . What all students of the Bible, whether old or young, need to do, is to store the mind, the memory, the heart, with the very words which  the Holy Ghost did inspire, and which God has accordingly spoken in the Scriptures.  The loss to the child for life by reason of this omission is incalculable. "

     Just knowing scripture as "something" accomplished is nothing. But to commit It to our memory for safekeeping and for the Glory of God is everything.  I can't imagine not having the Word of God. I can't imagine not being able to put It's treasures in my mind and to go to It for Truth and Comfort and Jesus.  We are so blessed to live in a time when we have the Scriptures.  While it does appear we have nothing to fear about not having the Scriptures always, we don't know. History is full of periods of Scriptural Darkness and I believe that whether the Bible is ever forbidden again or not is irrelevant (in part) because we have it now and we don't use it like we should. We have so much in this day and age and yet have little in the line of true Peace, true Godliness, true Christianity and Understanding. And maybe that is the devil's ploy now, to keep us so busy with other "important" things that we just completely lose sight of the most "IMPORTANT" thing of our lives - the Word of God - as it is in Jesus.

     I hope this encourages you to dig deeply in the word of God with your children and mark your Bibles and memorize scripture and draw near to God. It is a fact that whatever we spend time with or spend time in is what we become. For "beholding we become changed into the same image" and hopefully that is the image of God - from "glory to glory" - step by step.