About a year or so ago a dear friend shared a CD with me.  She said that a friend of hers put these CDs together and thought that we would enjoy them.  The children LOVED it so we decided to purchase the rest of the catechism cds and have been enjoying them ever since.

The other day a very well known blogger posted about these very cds.  Challies posted about Songs for Saplings along with other music for children.  Challies wrote:

Songs for Saplings is James and Dana Dirksen from Porland, Oregon. They have recorded four albums, one of which follows an A,B,C format while the other three are questions and answers, much like a catechism. I suppose these albums will largely appeal to younger children. They are quiet and acoustic.

He is correct in his assessment of the cds. They are geared toward younger children. But they are beneficial for the entire family.  The catechism cds do appeal to older children more and more in the second and third cds.  There is a great variety in the style of music on each cd. You can even listen to excerpts on their website.

What I love about them is that the children (and us parents) learn the great truths presented in the Westminster Catechism which is derived directly from scripture. Each question and answer also contains the scripture that teaches the truth. This way your children are not only learning the doctrinal truth but the scriptures that proclaim that truth.

Songs for Saplings is a ministry of the Dirksen family and this is what they state on their website.

We create lively, fun songs that attempt to deliver the deepest of Biblical truth in a format that your children will love to listen to. We want them to understand who God is and what He has done, as well as what He wants your children to do and to be. We hope that you will benefit from these CDs and use them to help teach your children about our God and his great love for us.

With Christmas time approaching, what better gift could you give than the gift of music which teaches and proclaims the greatness of our Lord Jesus Christ?!

I am pleased to announce that I can offer you a 20% discount off of your order when you buy CDs from their website. This includes the “12-pack bulk pack” which a lot of people order for gift-giving. This does however exclude the 24 and 48 CD bulk packs, which are already heavily discounted.

All you need to do is enter the following code as you go through the checkout: mamaarcher
It’s really simple.

Hopefully you will find this really helpful as you order CDs this Christmas!

As you seek to grow your little saplings……

into strong oaks of righteousness…

Songs for Saplings can be a musical and fun tool for you and your family to use and enjoy!

that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he may be glorified.
(Isaiah 61:3b)

Visit SONGS FOR SAPLINGS and order your CDs today! Order some for your friends and family too! Don’t forget to enter the discount code for your 20% off!

Please leave a comment and let me know if you plan on making a purchase and what you think of their music and ministry!

Regardless of whether you order, please tweet, email, and share on Facebook so that others can take advantage of the discount offer!

I am interrupting the series which I am blogging to share this with you.  Jennifer @ Quiverfull Family left me a comment the other day about catechism resources.

I’ve been feeling led towards catechizing lately (I don’t come from a Christian background, so this is really totally foreign to our family.)

Do you use the Westminster Shorter? Any specific resources that you can recommend?

I decided it would be good to share the information with all of you.  Thank you Jennifer for asking!!  These are resources that I love and am so excited to be able to share them!

First, yes, we do use the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

Second, here are a few resources that we use with our family! I am also listing a few others that are out there that we have not tried just in case you want to check them out!  I hope that these resources are helpful to you in training your children.

Big Truths for Little Kids

Training Hearts Teaching Minds

Vic Lockman’s Catechism in Cartoon form.

Songs for Saplings by Dana Dirksen

I know that Veritas Press also has a catechism songs collection and a song book but I have not heard them yet…they are on the order form for us to try out this school year.

We also have some of  THESE children’s catechism books…they were used along with their Sunday School curriculum a few years ago.

Covenant Home also has a catechism course which my hubby has used for youth group sessions.  It is designed for 5th grade and up.

Today, I will touch on the last two means of evangelizing our children mentioned in the booklet Bringing the Gospel to Covenant Children: In Dependency on the Spirit by Joel R. Beeke.

• Godly Conversation

Scripture teaches that we must take time each day to speak to our covenant children about God.  Serious, spiritual conversation should be done in regular times of family worship and teaching, but also spontaneously through the process of everyday life.

Deuteronomy 6:6-7 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.

The Hebrew word for instruction in Deuteronomy 6:7 says that we are to “sharpen” or “impress” upon our children the teachings of God’s Word. The idea is that we are to mark, brand, penetrate, and disciple our children in God’s ways. That is our daily calling. Remember, it takes time and diligence to make a lasting impression (Isaiah 28:9-10).

• Godly Models

If we would have godly children, they must see God’s character in our lives.  Though they may learn much from what we say and do, they will learn most from who we are.  Our praying, teaching, and living must be one; we must be and practice what we pray.  “God cannot resist a parent’s prayer when it is sufficiently backed up with a parent’s sanctification,” wrote Alexander Whyte.

We must not fail to act as our children’s spiritual mentors.

There is so much more on the subject of modeling to our children in the booklet. Too much good stuff to share it all. If you hadn’t figured it out by now, I highly recommend purchasing the booklet so you can reap more from its pages!  Follow the link above to get your own copy.

Remember, if this is an area in which you struggle, as I am sure it is for all of us, take it to the Lord, he will equip you.

Today’s focus is on catechizing.  I have met many who dislike the idea of using catechism to teach and train their children but it is a very effective way of teaching and training our children and even ourselves in the doctrines and truths of the Lord.  Catechism is not meant to be a substitute for the word of God by any means.  All catechism questions and answers are drawn from the scripture and point to the scriptures.  Anyone who uses them correctly would never seek to replace the word of God.  That being said let’s move on!

I will continue to reference the booklet Bringing the Gospel to Covenant Children: In Dependency on the Spirit by Joel R. Beeke.

In his booklet, Beeke takes the time to explain exactly what catechizing is and how and where it is mentioned in the New Testament.  He then goes on to say the following:

Parental catechizing is almost a lost art today, to the great loss of families and churches.  John J. Murray writes, “We believe it is the discontinuance of this practice [of catechizing] that we can trace much of the doctrinal ignorance, confusion, and instability so characteristic of modern Christianity.”

Some have said that using a catechism is focusing too much on the teachings of men rather than Christ. I would like to challenge that! That is so far from the truth. Beeke puts it this way.

Their goals were to explain the fundamental teachings of the Bible, to help young people commit the Bible to memory, to make sermons and the sacraments more understandable, to prepare covenant children for confession of faith, to teach them how to defend their faith against error, and to help parents teach their own children.

Who would not want to use such a tool? Especially one that has shown itself effective over the centuries?  Of course, it is a lot of work.  Anything worth value usually is a lot of work.

Puritan evangelism, carried on by preaching, pastoral admonition, and catechizing, took time and skill.  The Puritans were not looking for quick and easy conversions;  they were committed to building up lifelong believers whose hearts, minds, wills, and affections were won to the service of Christ.

Beeke also references a man named Baxter who was installed at Kidderminster at Worcestershire.  He tells of how it was rare for families in his area to honor God in family worship but by the end of his ministry there were streets where every family did so.  Beeke goes on to say…

He could say that of the six hundred converts that were brought to faith under his preaching he could not name one that had backslidden to the ways of the world.  How vastly different was that result compared to the results of today’s evangelists who press for mass conversions, then turn over the hard work of follow-up to others.

There are many resources for catechizing your children and ones that are easy to use. It is definitely a tool that God has used and blessed throughout many years. Let me end with one last quote from the book.

May God help us today to view the evangelizing of our covenant children as a task that involves both bringing the gospel to them and so presenting Christ and the doctrines of grace that believing children may grow in Him. We need to recover the vision of our forebears in our catechizing, such that we view evangelism as entailing both how to come to Christ and how to live out of Christ.

In the last post, I left you with a list of  things to ponder.  Ways in which we can bring the gospel of Christ to our children.  In the next couple of posts will touch on those.  I will continue to reference the booklet Bringing the Gospel to Covenant Children: In Dependency on the Spirit by Joel R. Beeke.

• Prayer

How should we pray for our children?  We should be praying for them in a habitual way.  Set a specific time aside to pray for them but also be spontaneous and pray for them whenever the need arises.  Pray also for them covenantally, specifically, and earnestly.

I would like to share a few quotes with you about praying for our children.

“A family without prayer is like a house without a roof, open and exposed to all the storms of heaven.  Thomas Brooks.

“You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you can’t do more than pray until after you have prayed.” John Bunyan

“O Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, give us a seed right with Thee!  Smite us and our house with everlasting barrenness rather than that our seed should not be right with Thee.  O God, give us our children.  Give us our children. A second time, and by a far better birth, give us our children to be beside us in Thy holy covenant.  For it had been better we had never been betrothed; it had been better we had sat all our days solitary unless our children are to be right with Thee…..But thou, O God, art Thyself a Father, and thus hast in Thyself a Father’s heart.  Hear us, then, for our children, O our Father…..In season and out of season, we shall not go up into our bed, we shall not give sleep to our eyes nor slumber to our eyelids till we and all our seed are right with Thee.”  Alexander Whyte

• Family Worship

Beeke mentions four aspects that should be included in family worship and also gives some very practical ideas on incorporating those four aspects.  They are as follows:

1. Scripture reading
2. Biblical instruction
3. Prayer
4. Singing

Let your family worship be regular and sincere.  As Richard Cecil said, “Let family worship be short, savory, simple, tender, heavenly.”  God requires such family worship, the Lord Jesus is worthy of it, Scripture demands it, conscience approves it, and children profit from it.

Over the last few days I have been sharing with you the things in which we as Christian parents need to be instructing our children.  Now how about some more practical ways in doing that.  I will continue to reference the booklet Bringing the Gospel to Covenant Children: In Dependency on the Spirit by Joel R. Beeke.

You must first realize as parents that you are primarily responsible for the evangelism of your children.  Practically speaking, that means making sure that any person, institution, or thing that has regular influence over your child for any length of time–be that a church and its office-bearers, a school and its teachers, a babysitter, or the high-tech world of computers–has the same Bible-centered, Christ-honoring worldlife view that you have.

Children need consistency, particularly in the three major sources of input in their lives: home, church, and school.  These three form a triangle, and we as parents are responsible for all three.  For now, let’s examine our responsibility in the home.

A godly home is the greatest context of evangelism for children.

Beeke goes on in depth to explain several very practical ideas for evangelizing our children.

I will list them here to get you pondering and will share a little more on each of them in upcoming posts.

• Prayer
• Family worship
• Catechizing
• Godly conversation
• Godly models

Continuing on from the two previous days’ post, referencing the booklet Bringing the Gospel to Covenant Children: In Dependency on the Spirit by Joel R. Beeke.

Seventh:

Teach them the necessity of Faith in Jesus Christ.

Teach them that the gospel is one thing and our response to it is another.  Tell them they must believe and yet can’t believe unless the Holy Spirit gives them the grace to believe.

In addition to explaining what faith is, explain to your children what saving faith does…

As Luther wrote, “Faith clasps Christ as a ring clasps its jewel.”  Faith wraps the soul in Christ’s righteousness, then lives out of Christ.  Faith commits the total person to the total Christ.

Eighth:

Teach them about Jesus Christ.

Strive to develop a biblical, Christ-centered worldview in your children.  Teach them that every thought must be brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. (2 Cor. 10:5)

Nineth:

Teach them about sanctification and holiness.

Show them from the Bible that holiness will become visible in such children through their gratitude, service, prayer, obedience, love, and self-denial.

Tenth:

Teach them about the joy of heaven.

I would like to end this section with one last quote from this chapter:

Do not joke with your children about any Bible truth, Bible character, or Bible instruction.  Do not make light of the things of God.  Life is too serious, death too final, judgment too certain, and eternity too long to indulge in humor about the sacred truths of Scripture.

If you read the quote from yesterday’s post you may be thinking,  “This is such a large and overwhelming task, how do I communicate these truths to my children?”. In his booklet  Bringing the Gospel to Covenant Children: In Dependency on the Spirit , Joel R. Beeke breaks down this task into specific doctrines.  I will share those with you over the next few days.

First:

Teach them who God is and what He is like.

–proclaim God’s majestic sovereignty, His triune personality, and His glorious attributes to your children.  Study Psalm 139, Isaiah 6, Isaiah 40, John 1, and Ephesians 1 with them.

Root the evangelizing of them in a robust biblical theism rather than that of modern evangelism, which treats God as if He were a next-door neighbor who can adjust His attributes to our needs and desires.

Ask them to pray for you so you may model the character of God in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Second:

Teach them the seriousness of sin.

Call sin, sin.

Aim to convict them of sin and to foster a due sense of the fear of God by addressing their consciences, even as you realize that the Holy Spirit alone, through irresistible grace, can bless your efforts by truly convicting them of sin and leading them to a childlike fear of God.

Third:

Teach them what the Bible says about unrepentant sin.

Teach them about hell to create within them, by the blessing of the Spirit, a sense of need for Jesus Christ.

But that knowledge is an important evangelistic tool in your arsenal of truth–a tool that the Holy Spirit has used throughout church history to show His children that they need to forsake sin and flee from the wrath of God to the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ.

Your task is to teach your children the whole gospel and counsel of God, as Paul said he did for the Ephesians (Acts 20:17-27).  Fathers, you especially are to be ministers in your own houses.  Your home is a little church, a little seminary, in which together with your wife, you are to serve as an instructing prophet, an interceding priest, and a guiding king.  As a prophet, you must teach your children God’s truth, addressing the mind, the conscience, the heart, and the will.  That means you must teach your children Bible stories and Bible doctrines, and you must apply those stories and doctrines to their daily lives for their proper development–spiritually, morally, socially, emotionally, and physically.

You must also explain how God’s truth is experienced by His people–that is, how matters should and do go in the lives of those who know God in Jesus Christ.  Aim to apply divine truth to the whole range of your children’s experience.  Teach them how God’s people repeatedly experience the depths of their sin and misery, the fullness of deliverance in Jesus Christ, and the magnitude of gratitude to God for such deliverance.  All of this is to be done in the context of Biblical piety.

Quotes from: Bringing the Gospel to Covenant Children: In Dependency on the Spirit byJoel R. Beeke.

I just love it when I come across a book that is so good that I feel the need to underline almost everything in it.  Some people can write with such clarity and pointedness!  I came across this little booklet a while back that sounded like something I would like to read.  It was only $2 brand spankin new and I thought, “Hey, it is only $2, I’m gonna buy it and check it out!”  It wasn’t like I would have wasted a lot of money if it turned out to be a not so great book.

This little booklet is SO good!  It is a book on how Christian parents need to be bringing the Gospel of Christ to their children.  The author doesn’t just approach the subject of evangelizing our children as something that is needed but gives practical ways to do so!  It is more than worth the two measly dollars I spent!  For the next few days I will be sharing little excerpts from the booklet for you.  There is so much to glean from it! (All excerpts will be in blockquotes.)

It is entitled Bringing the Gospel to Covenant Children: In Dependency on the Spirit byJoel R. Beeke.

Often times we do not fully comprehend scripture or the fine balance contained within it.  I think we are often people of extremes.  It is true that believing in the Gospel is somewhat extreme and the Lord calls us to live in a somewhat extreme way in comparison with the world.  The call of following Christ can seem extreme at times but we must always make sure that we are considering the whole counsel of God in matters and not blowing things out of proportion.  I am chuckling as I write this because I have been told on more than one occasion by other believers that I am extreme in my beliefs.  Maybe I just need a better way of articulating what I mean.  Maybe what it is that I am trying to say is that a belief, conviction, or teaching from the scripture may seem extreme to the world but is the standard that we are called to pursue.  We need to live in obedience but but not to exaggerate the truth to a point where it no longer resembles the truth.  Does that make sense?  A good example is Calvinism verses Hyper-Calvinism.

All of that to say that there needs to be a balance in how we look at teaching and training our children with the Gospel message.  It is our Christian duty to teach and train our children to love the Lord.  It is not our duty to save them, we are unable.  We must not rely to much on our training yet we must not neglect it either.  We must not presume upon the Lord to save our children yet we must not underestimate him in his sovereignty and saving power.

Andrew Bonar said, “If conversion be God’s work, in which the Holy Spirit reveals Christ to the soul, surely his work can take place in children as really as in the old.”

Professor Beeke describes two unbalanced views parents often have concerning evangelizing our children.

A biblical view of our covenant children would greatly enhance our attempts to evangelize them properly. Before explaining that, let us first examine two errors that many evangelical parents make today in viewing their covenant children.

He goes on to explain that parents tend to either overestimate or underestimate the covenant relationship in regards to our children.
To overestimate:

The fruits of presumptive regeneration are tragic. Parents who presume that their children are regenerate by virtue of the covenant see no need to tell their children that they must be born again. William Young calls this view “hyper-covenantism,” because the relation of children to the covenant is exaggerated to the point that the covenant relation replaces the need for personal conversion.

For those in non-covenantal churches I have also seen the same destructive results when parents assume that it is the church’s responsibility alone to teach and train their children.  Or where parents see the church as the PRIMARY place of educating their children in the Gospel.

To underestimate:

Many Baptist and some Reformed people reduce the covenant to insignificance. They do this by failing to recognize the importance of the covenantal relationship of children with God. From the New Testament era on, they believe, children of believers have no promise extended to them, and thus by implication have lost their special place of belonging to the covenant of Jehovah.

Beeke says that we must properly estimate the covenant.

The covenant must be viewed neither as a substitute for regeneration and conversion nor as a matter of secondary importance.