Teach Your Kids!

God’s word instructs us to be teachers to our children. For the past 5000 plus years, children would help with the family business. If they were carpenters, the children would help doing work that was appropriate for them. As they helped, they would become masters at the skill that they were being taught. In today’s world, we don’t teach them a trade like shoe-making or carpentry, but it is still very important to teach them life skills that they will need to survive their adult lives. Start them young, don’t wait until they are teenagers or it will be more difficult. Include them in your own daily tasks that they see you doing. Sure, they will not do it as well as you would, and you should not be demanding that they do it as well, but let them do it. Let them have the experience. In doing so, they will bond with you and they will be learning just how difficult many of the things we do every day are. Since this is a blog for men, I encourage you to teach your boys manly things like how to shine shoes, how to stack a pile of wood, how to clean the garage and keep it organized and of course, how to take care of a car. If you do, your wife will be really happy that they are exhausted at the end of the day.

I started to teach my boys how to shine shoes! They are almost ready to open shop to the public! My, how quickly my boys are growing up!

By the way.... when you teach something to your boys, try to find a spiritual truth behind that activity. God also instructs us men to teach Spiritual Truths to our children. It’s the man’s job to teach these things to the kids.

Shining shoes is an awesome way to teach your children a biblical principal. This is how I did it:

I took the dirtiest shoes I had, the ones I use for doing yard-work. If you have ever had shoes that were for yard-work only, you know that these shoes look like they are ready for the trash (al least that’s what the wife will say). I told my boys that our lives are like those shoes. Once perfectly good but sin got all over us and just about ruined us to the point that we had two options. Be thrown away as trash or let God clean us up! Then I explained to them that when we receive Jesus as our Lord and Savior and ask God to forgive us of our sin, God takes time to clean us up and to get rid of all that filth (sin). Just like we were doing with the shoes. Then he repairs us like we were repairing those shoes. I do a good old-fashioned military style spit shine. They really have fun with this!

We cleaned up the shoes. We got all the dried up mud off them, conditioned the leather with polish. We stained the scuff marks, melted the polish with a candle and then gave them a spit shine! (The shoes on the right are my yard shoes).

When they were all shiny, we looked at them again and gave thanks to God that he is "shining" us and "restoring" us like we did these shoes! The shoes look like new now when before they looked like they were ready for the trash! Thank you Lord!

So remember this men, it is your responsibility to teach them the skills that they will need to survive adult life. It is also your job to be the spiritual leader for your children. If you combine both of these jobs, you will make it fun for them and I bet your kids will never forget what you teach them. Every time they see a dirty shoe and every time they shine their shoes, they will remember this lesson. And so will you!