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.

Talk 2

Yesterday, in looking back at Deuteronomy 6:7 we kicked around what drives our talk and what our kids learn from what we talk about.  Looking at that word, “talk,” a little closer may give us some direction.  It is an interesting exercise to look up the definitions for word you already know.  For “talk” the first definition I found was, to communicate or exchange ideas, information, etc., by speaking: to talk about poetry.”

The synonym, communicate, here and the notion of exchange of ideas was interesting.  It seems to indicate a dialog rather than a monolog.  That is we engage in a conversation rather than a lecture.  It seems like rather than talking to, or talking down to, we are talking with our children, at their level of understanding.  The challenge for anyone is that knows something well, is to talk at the appropriate level to the one to whom they are conversing.  That requires two things, a great grasp of the subject, and a great love for the individual with whom one is talking.

The love for the individual drives one to listen carefully in order to appropriately share what one knows in a way that draws them closer to the Lord.  It is a tough assignment.  It is one we as dads have been given not by the Christian community but by the Lord.

Talk

What does one talk about?  Matthew 12:34 gives us a clue, what comes out is what fills the heart.  We talk about that which we are excited or passionate.  I live in Oklahoma.  I will be really surprised if there is not conversation this morning at the church I attend about last night’s football game and its implications on the national championship.  Nothing wrong with that, it is exciting for folks (rather ‘pokes) here.

Deuteronomy 6:7 tells us that our conversation, what we talk about, should be saturated with the Word of God.  We watch football games with passion, intensity, great desire hoping our teams will prevail, analyzing and criticizing each element of the game.  That passion spills over into our conversations for the next several days, and in some cases weeks and months.

When is the last time someone came up to you and excitedly shared what they had found in the Word of God?  Does not happen much.  We do not generally come to the Word with the same intensity we invest in football games.  What we find there does not drive our conversation most of the time.  Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 9:25 that the games are for perishable wreaths – quick who won the national championship in 2006?  What we are doing in and with the Word persists in eternity.

Our kids listen to our talk.  They pick up from us what is important.