Jesus v. the Old Testament

We starting trying to do family devotions a while back; grab a book or better yet the Bible, read, and discuss! Now our conversations on theology and such are limited by the workings of tired minds and distractions such as "Dancing with the Stars", but I am amazed at what our babies will pick up in the process of reading. Something else...I usually steer towards the New Testament. Now I have nothing against the OT; in fact, I've been digging on the whole 'God is big and you are not' motif in the OT. The leaning towards the NT, and the gospels in particular, comes from a discussion a while back. We were talking with someone about Bible stuff, what we teach our kids, etc; the conversation turned to the point that we all came to a conclusion -- we teach the little ones the great OT stories -- Noah, Moses, David, Daniel...and we give a glance at the Jesus stuff, like the birth, crucifixion, resurrection, but we (and a lot of the kid oriented devotion books, frankly) end at the resurrection. And when we started asking kids, they didn't have a working knowledge of much of the gospels -- teachings, miracle stories, etc. Uh oh. So, we started reading the gospels at home; picking a different section or story or teaching and then read and discuss as a family. The results have been mixed; Jesus was a DEEP cat. I am grateful, though, that last night's devotion sparked questions this morning on the way to school...just like us adults, the words of Jesus sink in and start stirring stuff up.

The best part -- this is not rocket science! Pick a gospel, pick a story, pick a passage, read it out loud, ask them what they think, and be ready. Give it a shot...