Questions - Answered?

Do your kids ask questions?  Duh.  How do you respond to them?  Do you feel compelled to answer?  In some cases that is the appropriate response.  Thinking through the notion of talking from Deuteronomy 6:6 – 7, as we have for the past couple of days, really throughout this whole exercise, questions are really important to the task that we have been given by the Lord.  How we respond to questions asked by our kids or others with whom we have been engaged by the Lord is determinative in not only their but our development in intimacy with the Lord.

You have heard and have probably quoted the old adage, “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you have fed him for a lifetime.”  Read fish as “answer” and “how to find and answer” respectively and you get the sense of where this is going.  When you kids are younger or if you are engaged with a new believer, when you are asked a question, you need to give an answer.  Your answer needs to be anchored in the Bible, that is, it should be easy for the person that is receiving the answer to connect what you are saying to the Scripture.

As your kids grow older and as those whom you are helping grow in their relationship with the Lord you need to wean them off of coming to you for answers.  You transition from answers to using the questions as an opportunity to show them how to get the answers for themselves.  If you have my book, “Your Walk, their walk,” there is an example of this on page 131 – 135.  If you have not got the book, you can read this excerpt on answering your kid’s questions.

As with all of the other elements of this assignment we have been given by our Lord, there is a base assumption that we know the answers through personal interaction with the Bible.  It is admittedly a hard assignment, but it is greatly worth the effort.