# Sharpened Words for Little Ones
Language: en
Author: \-\-The Editors
Original issue: The Heartbeat of The Remnant, November/December 2000, Number 5
Source pages: 21–22
Read article:
Original PDF: 2000\-11\-remnant\.pdf
[The Heartbeat of The Remnant, November/December 2000]()
![A young child looking upward\.]()
*Dear fathers and mothers,*
*This section of* The Remnant *is designed to be a help to you, a tool in your hand, to encourage you along the way of becoming a teacher of the word of God in your home\. Deut\. 6 instructs us as parents to become diligent teachers of our children\. Many parents feel completely unable to fulfill this biblical mandate\. We must get over our feelings of inadequacy\. **GOD**, in His infinite wisdom, would not tell us to do something that we were not able to do\. This would only torment us all our days, and a loving God wouldn’t do that\. We must rise up in faith, trusting God, and obey His word\. I believe He will meet us with divine help as we move ahead\. We have formatted this page so that you can cut it out of the magazine, study the suggestions privately, and then use them in family devotions\. Try it, step into the water, and see how God will guide you through some meaningful teaching times with the children\.*
*\-\-The Editors*
***Happy teaching\!***
## Blessed Solitude
The goal of this lesson is to lift up the joy and beauty of quiet and being alone\. Your children can be taught to enjoy an hour in silence and solitude, and oh, what a blessed habit to bring into their adult life\. You may need to ask your wife to help you with the preparations for this meditation\. Prepare several small places throughout the house, where each family member can go to be alone\. A closet works the best for this\. Turn to 1 Thess\. 4:11, and focus in on the portion of the verse that says “study to be quiet\.” After a short meditation about solitude and quiet, look at a couple of texts in the Gospels where Jesus went out away from the crowd to be alone\. You can talk about the reasons why He did this, and there are many\. Some of this discussion can wait until after the exercise in silence\. Tell the children, “We are going to practice this lesson today,” you will have their attention\. At this point send each one of them to a closet for 15 minutes\. You may need to take one of the smaller ones with you\. At the end of the time, call them all back together for an open discussion about their experience in the closet\. They will all have something to say\. We are all so used to noise that deep silence and stillness is a new thing to most\. Finish with Ps\. 46:10, “Be still, and know that I am God\.” This verse will have new meaning to them after their time in the closet\.
## Lay Aside the Weights
You need to bring two 5\-gallon buckets to the devotional time\. The one should be empty, and the other one can be filled with stones of various sizes\. Start by reading Heb\. 12:1, and follow with an explanation and description of the verse and a race\. It would be good at the beginning of the teaching to give a couple of practical examples of weights to make sure they are with you\. Then move into the activity\. Choose one of the children to run a race\. It will not be hard to secure a willing helper on this one\. Set the course for the race, it should be short, because the races will get very hard to finish at times\. Maybe you want to go from the living room to the bedroom and back, or out onto the porch and back\. Let the child start with the empty bucket and time him\. This should be a fast walk since it’s in the house\. Then put a few stones in the bucket and let him walk the course again with the timer on\. On the third run, you want to put enough stones in the bucket that he is slowed way down, and again time the race\. By now the point is clearly made in every mind, so you can spend some time teaching the principle\. There are many illustrations in the Bible that you can draw from\.
## Two Ways to Learn
Your children will never forget this one\. Pro\.17: 10 says, “A reproof \(a word of correction\) entereth more into a wise man than an hundred stripes into a fool\.” The aim of this lesson is to bring our children to the place where they are being directed by words and instructions received in their hearts, rather than by the use of the rod\. This is actually why we use the rod\. We use the rod in hopes of laying aside the rod and going on for years in words of instruction\. You will need a volunteer \(I’m not being funny\)\. I suggest one of your children that are beyond the spanking stage of their development\. Your volunteer will be receiving 100 stripes, so bring a pillow to family devotions, and whatever you use for discipline\. Divide the stripes into ten spankings right in a row, and give them with the use of the pillow\. It would be very helpful to choose a command that you want to be done and ask for it at the end of each spanking, with the child saying, “No\.” When you are finished with this exercise, give the command to another one of the children, and I guarantee the child will do it right away\. You now have at your fingers the teachable moment—start teaching\. Which way of learning would you choose? Much discussion will flow from this illustration and question\.
## Adding to God’s Creative Work
This lesson will take you two or three days to finish, but that is OK, because it will take a bit more preparation than other ones\. In the spring of the year when there are lots of flowers, gather a nice bouquet\. Have your wife go to the Goodwill store or some other place where used items are sold\. She should be looking for earrings, necklaces, and bracelets\. You can get them very cheap there\. Go to your workshop and find a couple of colors of spray paint\. Gather some ribbon from the gift\-wrapping drawer, and I think you are ready\. You say, “What on earth am I ready for?” I think you will enjoy this one\. Bring the beautiful flowers to family altar time and ask everyone how they like them\. You will get lots of positive comments from everyone, but lots more from the girls\. Then pull your paraphernalia out of a sack and start making statements about how the flowers might look better if they were a different color\. Spray one red, one black, and another one frosted red\. Continue to speak about improving on these flowers, as you start hanging earrings on them and other jewelry\. Finish your masterpiece off with a different color of ribbon, and add the last touches of new color with a bit more black and red\. As you exclaim how nice it looks now they will all be looking aghast at you and the flowers\. Now you are ready to teach for a few days\.
1. Teach the principle of creation, and the wisdom of the creator\. Gen\. 1 & 2\. God said it was good, can we think that we could add to what God made?
2. Go to Ps\. 139, where we are told that God has fearfully and wonderfully made each one of us\. Who are we, to think that we could improve on how God made us?
3. Make some practical applications about makeup and jewelry\. Take it a step further and discuss the latest heathen practices of rings in the nose, etc\.
4. Talk about the motivation for all of these things—pride\.
5. Finish with a meditation on self\-acceptance \(accepting the way God made me\), and get the children to open up about how they feel about certain physical features that God has given them\.