When You Rise: Review of the Child Training Bible and Parenting With Scripture

Do you ever encounter a situation with your child that you want to address biblically, and your mind goes completely blank? You KNOW the Bible addresses it, and you've even memorized a verse about it at some point (or not) but in a frazzled state of mind, you can't recall it?

We've both found a resource that we like to help us with just that and we're excited to let you know what we like (and don't like) about both!

The first resource is called the Child Training Bible:

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Summary: There are 21 topics included in the Child Training Bible. One of the topics, The Gospel, is broken into four sub-topics; God, Man, Jesus, and What Now? These topics are very relevant to most issues our children (and ourselves!) will face and having everything color coded and already highlighted makes this resource very easy to use!

Positive: This resource is easily accessible. We (Jen) leave ours out on our fireplace mantle or kitchen table (or wherever it was used last) and it is easy to find and use immediately. This could become a family Bible (as I am designing ours to be) as well. I've thought about recording things in it as we work through different verses. The other thing I really like about it is that it gets children familiar with going to the Bible for every issue and need.

Negative: It's a little bit pricey when everything is said and done. You have to buy a pew Bible (or you can use one that you already have on hand but the papers they provide might not fit as well). You also need to be willing to invest in a quality set of highlighters. I had to buy the Sharpie highlighters because they had enough different colors. While I will use these again because I absolutely adore office supplies, they are expensive! You also have to buy tabs. I don't know what happened with mine, but buying one set of each of the colors (there is a neon set and then a primary set that you will have to have each of) I still ran out of some of the colors and need to go back and buy more! You need to be willing to invest a good $30 into this to make it work the way it is intended to. The only other thing I could say negative about it is that it is a little time consuming to put together...although I did find it very encouraging to be reminded of so many scriptures that pertained to different areas of life as I set it up. Desiré mentioned that it might be a storage issue for some people too since it can't sit upright on a bookshelf without the tabs getting all bent up. It's not been an issue for us, but I lie it flat on our mantle or kitchen island. :)

The second resource is a book called Parenting with Scripture: A Topical Guide for Teachable Moments:

Summary:  This book is full of 101 situations/topics/problems that many children will face such as anger, procrastination, forgiveness, etc. They are listed in alphabetical order and each topic has a list of verses related to that issue. There are discussion question you can use to talk with your child as well (though they are way over my kids' head and I've never used them). I (Desiré) have used this book on multiple occasions for myself and when encouraging friends dealing with a particular issue. I've also used it to help figure out what verse I'd like to memorize for myself or with the boys when a certain aspect of life needs to be addressed. It really is handy! Note: They've just come out this month with an revised and updated version of the book. The cover is way cuter, and it supposedly is the same material with some added resources for the parent.

Positive:  Doesn't have to be stored in a special way, doesn't have to be assembled and relatively inexpensive.

Negative:  I like the idea of showing kids that it's actually God's Word that says the words I'm telling them. You could just find the references in the book and then look it up in the Bible, but that's an extra step you have to think about.

We highly recommend both resources and think you will be happy with either tool.