A Children's Bible You Can Be Excited About!

I was asked this past Sunday after the service, what I would recommend to read to a five year old in terms of a children's devotional of bible. The book that Holly and I use for our evening family devotions with the girls is, The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name by Sally Lloyd-Jones.

Ben Patterson has an excellent reveiw of the book which you can read here. If you don't get around to reading the whole reveiw, I wanted to share just a couple of excerpts:

But Lloyd-Jones's writing isn't cutesy. She has a grasp of the profound. How does one explain to a child the agony of Jesus in Gethsemane, and his prayer of surrender to his Father? Lloyd-Jones does it as well as any biblical commentator:

"Papa! Father!" Jesus cried. And he fell to the ground. "Is there any other way to get your children back? To heal their hearts? To get rid of the poison?" … . Violent sobs shook Jesus' whole body. Then Jesus was quiet.Like a lamb. "I trust you, Papa," he said. "Whatever you say, I will do."

The title and subtitle are even better than the book's delightful illustrations and narrative — because they provide, in one deft stroke, the interpretive key that unlocks the meaning of the whole Bible.

The Jesus Storybook Bible says it all: The Scriptures are not merely a collection of stories designed to teach moral lessons. As Jesus explained to the men walking the road to Emmaus on Resurrection Sunday, the whole Bible is about Jesus. In the words of the subtitle, every story whispers his name.

This is the downfall of most Children's bibles and sometimes of most children's ministries and sometimes some churches: they see the Bible as solely our moral compass. It is nothing more than a collection of stories and rules that teach us how to act rightly. Now, it does do that, but that is not it's purpose. God has given us His Word to reveal His Word to us--His Son, Jesus Christ. Every passage is about Him and if we miss that then we have wasted our time reading the Bible to our children, to ourselves, and as we gather each week to hear the Word of God preached.