Conversation Starters
A few ideas each week you can use at the table, in the car, or any time an opportunity comes along to talk with your kids about wisdom and God's Word.
Talk About Praise
You likely experience praising God together with your family regularly at church. But how often do you talk about that experience? Why do we do it? Why does God care? What does it do for us and for Him?
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Redefining Success
What are you some of our deepest hopes for our children? How do we define “success” for them? Are we rooting for them to gain financial security, career satisfaction, and universal respect and devotion from their peers—or to become success in the way that Jesus did as a persecuted servant on a dangerous mission from God? It’s a hard question and one worth talking about with our kids.
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What Are You Going to Be?
It’s the question of the week for some kids. The answer often reveals a child’s current hero or role model and their desire to be that person, at least for a day. All kids—all of us—find patterns to follow in others’ lives. How can we help our children to find and “put on” the best possible examples of what it means to live for Jesus?
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Self-Control
None of us like to say “no” to ourselves, and that might go double for teenagers. Facing the strongest appetites of their lives, a natural urge toward independence, and pressure from peers to go along with the crowd, the ability to exercise self-control may be one of the most difficult of the wisdom tasks to master.
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Eyewitness
What did Jesus’ disciples really see and what did it mean? So much of what we believe hangs on the answer to those questions. We’re talking to our kids this week not just about the facts of Jesus’ physical life and death and resurrection, but also to help notch up their understanding of the implications of the message delivered by those first witnesses.
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Faith and Feelings
All of us struggle some to line up our emotional responses to life with our stated beliefs about God’s greatness, power, goodness, forgiveness, and His absolute love for us. Teens, though—fueled by a cocktail of hormonal change and hyper-cultural connectivity—may find it even more baffling to allow their trust in God to lead them to peace of mind, freedom from anger and fear, and a general sense of joyfulness.
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One Way or the Other
Our kids live in a culture where many of them have the luxury of trying to do it all. Why choose between lifestyle options when you have the time, energy, and money to experiment with everything? That ability to compartmentalize and embrace all perspectives can become a liability, though, for any of us that refuse to choose between following God and living the lifestyle of those who reject Him. Making spiritual choices is what we’re talking about this week.
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