Answers · Marriage & Family
How do I teach my children about God at home?
God's own pattern puts the teaching in the ordinary hours of the house — not only at church, and not in a classroom, but sitting together, walking, lying down, and rising up. Moses' charge to Israel's parents was that the words of God be talked of in the course of the day:
"…thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up."
— Deuteronomy 6:7 (KJV)
"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it."
— Proverbs 22:6 (KJV)
Read together, the two texts describe a home where God is a subject of ordinary conversation — at the table, on the road, at bedtime — and where the training is diligent: steady, repeated, lived in front of the children and not only spoken at them. That is the shape the Apostolic home altar took in family after family: a few minutes of Scripture and prayer in the house itself, day after day. The teaching that sustains it — how ordinary families actually kept that altar, through lean years and busy ones — is preserved in the family teaching now published in this library — Gary Hodum's family classes, cited below.