Family Bible Celebration

Bible study is important to our family, both individually and collectively. We each use our early morning quiet time for personal Bible reading, and then in the evenings we have family Bible time. Some years we’ve read through the Bible, taking a chapter a night to read and discuss (this takes a couple of years). Other years we’ve worked through a topical study together. We’ve done this since our girls were little, not perfectly, but somewhat consistently enough that we’ve read through the Old and New Testaments together a few times.

Sometimes when we’ve completed a particular study, or accomplished a big Bible memory goal as a family, we’ve had a small celebration with a special dessert or Bible-related token gifts for the kids (bookmark, key chain, $5 Lifeway card) to mark the accomplishment. So a while back, when we completed reading the New Testament, our son asked if we could have a little party to celebrate. Well, of course!

We settled on a Saturday night that would work for everyone. Since we usually have snacks and games on Saturday nights, we kept our regular routine but just gave the whole evening a Bible theme.

For our Bible meal, we had assorted foods from the Bible, in snack form: lamb meatballs, cucumber, toasted pita, feta olives, hummus, taziki dip, apples, and grapes.

I also made my sister’s lentil and brown rice casserole. This stuff is delicious! She served it to us once when we were staying at her house, and we’ve been making it ever since. It’s great served as a main dish with a salad, or as a side for beef, chicken, or pork. It’s also good just as a dip with tortilla chips, or as burrito filler.

For something sweet, we had fig preserves with soft, sweet pita wedges. And for our game, we played Bible Edition Apples to Apples.

I hope this is an encouragement to celebrate the spiritual accomplishments in our families. We make sure we get our children to their ball games, spelling bees, and science fairs to win their ribbons and trophies, all of which will remain on this earth. Are we making just as big of a deal out of their spiritual disciplines that will bring eternal rewards?

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I wrote this post, and a couple of others, before the holidays but stored them away to post Christmas topics during December. I’d almost forgotten about them, but now I have some January material, yay! Hope y’all have a great weekend!