TLP 65: The Best Devotionals for Children | Natasha Crain Interview, Part 1

Parents, where we use God's Word to become intentional, premeditated parents. Here's your host, AM Brewster.

Natasha Crain’s Blog, Apologetics, and the Origin of Christian Mom Thoughts

I don't know about you, but I've gone through plenty of devotionals in my time. There were keys for kids, books from Awana, pamphlets designed by various youth pastors, and the classic, actually, My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers.

I actually really liked that one. But which were the most beneficial? Did any of them truly help me grow closer to the Lord, or were they just spiritual busywork? Well, today, we have a special guest with us.

Her name is Natasha Crane, and among other things, we're going to share with you our top picks for children's devotionals. But more importantly, we hope to challenge your thinking about the place devotionals should have in the vibrant worship life of your family.

But first, I'd like to take some time introducing you to Natasha. I'm very excited about her ministry because she writes with a biblical focus and clarity many authors just don't have. I remember tripping upon her blog and just really being captivated by the very first article I read, and the steam didn't diminish as I worked my way down the list.

So Natasha, thank you so much for joining me today.

Oh, thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to talk to you.

All right. Will you please tell us some more about your blog and your speaking ministry, and specifically, how you found yourself sharing your Christian mom thoughts in the first place?

Sure.

Well, it was 2011 when I started the blog, and at the time that I decided to do this, I had three small children at home. I had two three-year-olds and a one-year-old. And honestly, I was just kind of feeling lonely, like I couldn't get out of the house because with three kids that little, it was very overwhelming.

And so I thought, you know, it's so hard to get out and be part of some kind of small group or something like that. I think I'm going to start on these blogs like everyone else is in 2011. And so I decided I'd start this blog.

I didn't think much about it. I called it Christian Mom Thoughts without, you know, another thought about that. And away we went. And it was really everything that I hoped it would be in terms of getting to know other Christian parents and sharing ideas.

And so I kind of had this online community. And when I set out to do this, I really had no thought of becoming a writer or speaker. So a lot of people say, you know, why did you decide to do this? Well, I didn't really decide.

I started this blog at the time for the reasons I just described, but it's interesting how God used that because as my blog grew and I got more and more readers and they were sharing my posts with their friends online, I started getting a lot of skeptics who were coming to my website and they were challenging all the things that I would say.

And I'm really convinced that God brought more skeptics to my website than most blogs actually get because I, you know, looking back at the kinds of posts I was writing, they really didn't warrant that kind of skepticism.

But here they came and it challenged me in this great way that I had never been challenged before. You know, I grew up in church and I had been a lifelong Christian, but it really was more of a nominal kind of Christianity and I hadn't thought very deeply about my faith.

And so as people started coming to my site and saying things like, you know, science has proven God and there's no evidence that Jesus even existed as a person in history and things like that, I realized, man, I've never heard anything like this before.

And I have no idea how to answer these kinds of questions. And so it really just set me off into this intense journey of reading and praying and learning about what's called apologetics, how we make a case for and defend the truth of Christianity.

And it was this whole new world that sort of opened up to me. And I just became so passionate about it because I realized that this world that our kids are growing up in is just so different than the one in which most of us as parents grew up.

In.

And so I used that as an opportunity as God was opening my eyes to what's going on. And as I was encountering these attacks, I used that as an opportunity to turn around and then focus on that on my blog.

And so I would write about the things that people were saying. And no longer was I shocked and saddened and scared when I was getting these attacks. I would think, well, great, thank God, this is an opportunity to learn and then to write about it and teach other parents.

And so to do my blogs focused on helping equip other parents with this understanding of what the challenges are today, how do we respond to them so that we can raise kids who are deeply rooted in Christian faith.

So it's interesting how God has taken something, you know, Christian mom thoughts, this very rant blog that I started in 2011 and brought me on a personal journey that's really been eye opening and then use that to then hopefully help other parents as well.

I kind of wonder if you got that negative feedback so quickly because you were, you know, talking through how, you know, talking through parenting and things like that. I found myself that when you start interacting with the atheist community, oftentimes there are kind of okay with you thinking what you want to think, but the moment that you start talking about indoctrinating, you know, the next generation, they really start to push back from that.

Maybe that had something to do with it.

Yeah.

You know, it's interesting because definitely over time as I started talking about atheism in particular and the challenges and speaking out about that, I definitely got to hear from a lot more atheists.

But as I was saying, like really early on, I was just writing about things like, you know, how to talk to your kids about Easter, for example, and that even talking about something in that kind of generality, I started just getting all these people coming to my site.

So it's interesting because I think that God used those interactions to really show me early on some of the needs that there are today. You know, just with people saying, well, I know Jesus didn't come back to life from the dead because science tells me that dead people stay dead.

You know, it comments like that that just struck me early on. Well, okay, yes, but, and I knew that that didn't sound logically right, but I couldn't put it into words why that was a problem, that kind of thinking was a problem.

And so that's what really got me started on this. And then the more that I wrote about the challenges today, that's when I started getting even.

More.

And so it was kind of like a snowball effect, if you will. I had a lot of challenges up front and that led to more writing, which led to more challenges. And then it kept going from there.

Spiritual Maturity, Purification, and the Goal of Parenting

Yeah.

And I love this story because this is really in many ways so much what we're all about.

Here.

Your story is what we want to reproduce in really everyone. We all come into this world, we're blind to spiritual realities, but by the grace of God, you know, He calls us and when we answer, but we don't always mature as quickly as we.

Should.

Sometimes, like you said, you know, we end up kind of being nominal in our faith. And sometimes it's because our hearts are just a little bit hard or they're stony or they're thorny, but sometimes we just get comfortable living a, you know, a quote unquote Christian life.

Right.

But, you know, God doesn't really want us comfortable. I think he showed you that there at the beginning. He didn't want you writing some, you know, cute little blog and having all the other Christian moms who think just like you kind of coming in and going, yeah, Natasha, yeah, good job.

He wanted us, he wanted to put you into a situation that was intended to purify you. And he wants to do it with us. He wants to, and the purification of gold is hot and it's time intensive. But the whole purpose is to transform us into the image of his son, which is really what we all need.

Absolutely.

Very well said.

Well, we want to equip everyone, our listeners today, Natasha and I want to even equip each other to be intentional, obviously premeditated disciple-making parents. And a huge part of that is teaching your children to be vibrant apologists.

And Natasha used that word and it's a great word we're gonna talk more about. And I'm so looking forward to hearing from you, Natasha, not just today, but also on our next two shows as well. Next time we're gonna be talking about your book, Keeping Your Kids on God's Side and what each of us can do to help our kids have really a confident faith.

And then next week, we're going to take a full episode to answer you, the listeners and your parenting questions. We have a good number to dig into, and I'm really looking forward to that episode. Some fantastic questions, a lot of parents really burying their hearts.

I'm really excited about that. Now, Natasha, I actually reached out to you in particular about this concept of devotionals because I had read one of your articles called 25 Family Devotional Time Ideas, and I thought it was fantastic.

But what I thought was also interesting is that you don't really write a lot about children's devotionals. In fact, in your article that I just cited, you pretty much, I think your second idea involved using a devotional book for kids, but that was really all you said about it at the time.

And that's pretty much, I think, all you've said about children's devotionals in total. So why haven't you written more on the subject?

Why Devotionals Should Supplement, Not Replace, Bible Teaching

Yeah, that's an interesting point. I've written over 200 articles on my blog, and I don't think I've ever done one just on devotionals, although I have thought about it. Maybe I will after our conversation here.

But you know, the thing with devotionals is that they can be really beneficial. They can be really useful. But I think that a lot of times parents use them as a crutch. And what I mean by that, and I don't mean it necessarily as a bad thing.

Like I said, it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. But I think that if parents are going to do anything outside of taking their kids to church on Sunday, God bless them for whatever they're doing outside of church on Sunday, but a lot of times they do go straight for the devotional.

And so they have, you know, bedtime, let's read a quick devotional. We tuck in and we wake up the next day and here we are again. And I think that given the kind of experience that I had through my blog and being challenged and having my eyes open to just how much we kind of need to be doing as Christian parents today, I think that with devotionals, it's easy to fall back on that as something simple that we're doing.

But it should be something that's a supplement, something that can help us in how we're helping our kids rather than the foundation of what we're doing. So so much of what I talk about on my blog really gets more to those foundational levels of, you know, how do we know that there is good evidence that God exists?

And why do we need to believe that all religions cannot point to the same truth? And how do we know that Jesus actually was resurrected? What historical evidence is there for that? And how do we know the Bible is reliable?

Just on four big questions alone, there is so much to cover and so much work to do in just helping the body of Christ to understand these questions that are so important today. And most of the time, devotionals don't touch on those things so much.

Now there is a place for devotionals and I think we're going to get into that, but just to answer your specific question of why that hasn't been my focus is because I think there's a whole layer of groundwork that has to happen first and then devotionals can be an additional tool on top of that.

I just I just want to make sure that parents don't turn to devotionals as the core thing that they're doing because so many of them are fairly lightweight and I'm sure that you've encountered that as well.

Yeah, well, they're they're by no means, you know, the silver bullet here. They're not that thing that's going to come in here and fix the problem. Oh, my kid needs more God. So this devotional will take care of that.

And I don't have as a parent have to do anything. I totally understand what you're talking about. And I think it's so important. I want to just encourage our listeners really to share this episode on social media.

And I want to say that because I think Natasha and I have both encountered oftentimes this this concept among parents. She used the word crutch. I think that's a good word. I think in other words, it's almost kind of like a spiritual babysitter, too, where and again, not it's not intended to be offensive.

I actually did this myself. I saw the importance for my son to get into God's word instead of doing a lot of things that I could have done. I gave him a devotional, great devotional, fantastic devotional, but I found that I wasn't participating the way I should.

I hadn't laid that groundwork the way I should. So more Christian parents need to hear this because I think we are so often just do the same things. Not only that, but we personally in our devotions, you know, we read our daily bread with our three points and a poem and believe that we're more like Christ because of it.

So and that's rarely the case. So if you could find a really great devotional for your kids, how would you use it so that it doesn't become a crutch?

How to Use a Devotional Without Making It a Crutch

Well, I think that the most important thing and this is, you know, not just for devotionals, but in general, as parents are considering how do we best raise our kids to Jesus is we need to have a plan.

If we don't have a plan of what we need to teach our kids and what conversations we need to be having and what we're doing exactly, I think that's when things like devotionals can become a crutch because we start leaning back on them and just throwing out things and seeing what sticks.

And throwing stuff out and seeing what sticks is not going to do our kids a great service. We have to have something that we can be intentional about and say, okay, this is what I want to be working with my kids on right now.

You know, I want to be talking to them specifically about what does it mean that God is love, just as one example. And so there are lots of, there's not one specific plan that every parent should be.

Following.

I'm certainly not suggesting that. I'm suggesting though that when you know your kids well and you know what they need to learn, that you can bring those things together to determine, okay, this is what we're going to be studying right now.

And you use multiple resources toward teaching them about that and growing their heart toward Jesus in that way. So a devotional can be helpful in terms of being part of that plan, but the plan has to be there first.

And what I would suggest is that when you do have a plan of this is what we're going to work on, say, for the next four weeks, this is what I really want to focus on at this point in time, when you have that, the Bible comes first.

You mentioned making sure that we're turning to God's Word, and that's absolutely true. And I practice this in my own life too. I'm a voracious reader. I love reading books, but I have a tendency to read lots of books about the Bible and forget I need to be reading the Bible, right?

And so I've kind of like put myself on notice that I am not going to touch one of those books unless I have done my Bible reading for the day. And I think that that kind of approach can be helpful with kids as well, that we should be working with them and pointing back to the Word first and using a devotional maybe as a supplement on top of that.

So having the plan, I think, is the biggest first thing, and using devotionals as part of a learning tool within that with the Bible coming first is, I think, a better strategy.

Yep.

And I think that goes for so much. You can't just point your kids to the kitchen and say, hey, there's a refrigerator in there with food. You know, go be healthy.

Right.

You know, you have to guide them through that process. You have to have a plan. You have to have goals for what you want to accomplish. That's awesome. Now, a minute ago, I asked if you could find a real great devotional for your kids.

What constitutes a real great devotional for your kids, I mean, in your mind? You know, you've used the word, you know, a lot of fluff, and I agree with you. There's a lot of lightweight, fluffy type of devotional type things out there.

So if you had a plan, you were intentional, we're going to grab this devotional, we're going to use it in the right way. What would you be looking for? What should we as parents be looking for as we pick out those tools?

Criteria for a Good Children's Devotional

That's a really, really good question. I have been at Christian Bookstore literally for hours, going through every single devotional I could find. And I didn't necessarily have any kind of criteria, you know, explicitly in my mind at that point as to, you know, it needs to check off these things.

I kind of knew subconsciously, but as I was going through them, I just kept saying, you know, no, no, no, no, no. By the time I got to the end of it, and I was really having trouble finding something, some of these criteria start to come to mind.

So the ones that I would share with you, first and foremost, is that it's accurate. It's theologically accurate.

So true.

And that sounds like, you know, a big term like, okay, parent, we're now going to the Christian Bookstore to find a theologically accurate devotional for your six-year-old. But what I mean by that is, when you look through it, don't just look at how it's designed and don't just look at, you know, how fun and frilly it looks, but actually take the time to read several, and I really mean several, of the pages in it.

And I have found a surprising number that, because they are so theologically shallow, they actually teach something that is theologically inaccurate. And to give you a really common example that I see in lots of devotionals, especially for little kids, I have two eight-year-olds and a six-year-old, so I'm kind of looking in that age range.

A lot of times they'll have devotionals on, well, when you're really scared, you can trust in God that nothing bad will happen. Well, that's just, you know, when you pray to God, you know, he will answer your prayers and nothing bad will happen to you.

That is just setting kids up for spiritual failure later. So what happens when a child who has learned this through their nice nightly devotional then goes to school and a bully is bothering them, they pray and the bully still hurts.

Them.

Well, then they say, well, what happened? Did I mess up with the way that I prayed? Did God mess up? Is God not there? So we have to be really careful because so many of these messages that are put out there for smaller children are just not correct.

They're not biblical.

And it's not just the small kids either. It's the teens too, I found. I found that oftentimes, as I work with teens, that they're giving them these concepts and these ideas that, I mean, I had a teacher once who said, you need to go get a white t-shirt and a black magic marker, and you need to write, I don't read my Bible on the t-shirt.

And that's how I feel like some of the covers of these devotionals are, this has nothing to do with the Bible because how they're leading these teens to think.

Absolutely. And it's with adults too. It's not just teens. There are plenty of problems with that as well, but it's less obvious, I think, with small kids because we look at it and we're like, oh, well, it's making them feel more comfortable and they're learning about these basic things, but that's not basically correct.

So we have to be really careful about making sure it's accurate. And that can also go for just the focus as well. A lot of them are very much focused on you as opposed to being focused on Jesus. And this is probably my biggest problem with a lot of devotionals, honestly, that they're very character-based.

Obviously, we want good character, right? As Christians, we want to be more Christ-like, absolutely, but if we are not basing our character and the decisions we make and our morality on the Bible and it's a result of that, then we can easily be raising kids who will become secular humanists.

They'll become people who really love others and want to do great things in the world and believe in all the Judeo-Christian values, if you will, but they don't believe in Jesus. And a lot of these devotionals teach kids to be good people, but they so loosely tie it back to Jesus and why we even have morality in the first place that it loses all meaning in the whole point.

And so the character-based devotionals really concern me for that reason because it's just not getting deep enough to really make some of the connections that especially today are so important given the kinds of challenges that there are.

So that's a long answer to the first point that I was trying to make, but accuracy is just a huge thing. The second thing is, I would say, make sure they're not shallow. And the reason I use the word not shallow instead of just saying deep is that you're not necessarily always using a devotional to get super deep.

I mean, there are lots of other tools for that. When you make your plan of what you're teaching your kids, you can come up with all kinds of things that you're going to use for that. It doesn't have to be the role of a devotional, but sometimes they're so shallow that I was just saying they become meaningless.

And so it doesn't have to be deep, but it should be deep enough so that there's some kind of small piece of meat that kids are getting out of it. The third thing I would say, finally, is making sure that it's developmentally appropriate.

So this is more about you as the parent having the wisdom and insight to match the right devotional to your child. I find the age ranges that they give on the back of devotional books to be very not helpful.

And that's for a couple of reasons. One is that a lot of times the expectations that people have for younger kids are very.

Low.

The bar is so low and they assume that even when you're 10 years old, you're still learning about some very, very, very basic things when they should be learning about so much more. So one thing is just the expectations that publishers have and that they put on the books.

But the other thing, our own children have different needs or different places spiritually, intellectually, along their maturity levels. All of those things have to be taken into consideration. My eight-year-old daughter, she's just an old soul.

She was born the old soul. And we use books that are written for early teen years for her. And those are perfect. When we first got her book that was supposed to be for her age range, she was like, oh my gosh, this is like for a preschooler.

And she didn't say that trying to be arrogant about it. She honestly saw that as something like that would be for her little sister. So the one caveat with that, if you're looking for something older than your kid because of where they are at a given time, you have to make sure that the topics are still appropriate.

And so I found a good one that their topics are still appropriate even though they're an older one. And I can give you some of those recommendations later. But then on the other hand, my younger daughter, she's not an old soul.

She's actually a very young soul. And so some of the devotionals that hit on some of the deeper topics I would talk about with eight-year-olds, I wouldn't talk about so much with her. And so it's really, as parents, we have to know our kids well.

We have to be the experts on our kids. And we have to match the devotional to where they are, their spiritual needs at a given time, and what they're capable of understanding. Sometimes that's way more than what the publisher says.

And sometimes it's less. And that's okay. It's just we have to be the ones to be careful about that and not just go on Amazon and hit click because, oh, this is a good one by someone I know for a six to ten-year-old.

Yeah. Oh, wow.

You just hit on so many valuable things there. I love we need to be experts on our kids. That is so true. And, you know, you talked about accuracy. I think it's important to say here, too, that oftentimes inaccurate devotionals and books and so on and so forth don't always happen because someone's maliciously trying to lead our kids astray.

I think it was the creator of VeggieTales who later in his life said, man, you know, I just realized I've been I've been teaching kids to be very moral without teaching them.

Why.

And he had that revelation because he was growing and maturing and he realized that, man, he produced all of these videos that really weren't pointing kids toward Jesus the way they should. So it's just super important.

So I guess the question is, have you ever found any devotionals that fit those criteria?

Recommended Devotionals for Different Ages

Well, yeah. And like I said, you know, this will this will vary by parent. I can definitely share with you some of the ones that we have used in the six to ten. And I think you'll probably put this up on your site afterwards.

So for people to, you know, link to right now in the elementary range, broadly speaking, Max Lucado's Devotional Grace for the Moment is one that I have liked and my son has used that one. It's a good one in terms of it could be for boys or girls.

And they're just small pieces of meat, but they are accurate and they're not shallow. And so I really appreciate that about that particular one. And one that I found recently that I'm using with my younger daughter, my six year old daughter, who I said is the younger soul, is called Hope for Each Day.

And it's a Billy Graham. And and I like it because it's not shallow, again, but it's something that can be it's just enough meat for a young child to to get their head around. But it's not it's not too much and they're and they're short.

And so she really enjoys reading that. And even for a young reader, it's something that they that they can latch on to for more of the tween age group, the Case for Christ for Kids 90 day devotional. Of course, I love apologetics.

And so I really appreciate that. This is an unusual find that it's an apologetics based devotional 90 day devotional. And so my older son, he he's really enjoying that. The one the one devotional that I mentioned for my eight year old daughter, who's the old soul, that she's doing a tween one, but that it doesn't go into a lot of the topics that sometimes you might get into there.

It's called the One Year Every Day Devotionals. And I really like it. It's it's hard to find something also that's not too girly for her because she's not a super girly girl. And so she doesn't want one that has all the butterflies and stuff.

She wants to learn. She's you know, she's she's got this she's kind of a mini me in that way. She wants to learn all this stuff. So that's that's a really good one to look into. And then finally, there's there's one and this one is a little bit lighter.

It's called For Girls Like You by Winter Pits. And this one is it is one that is kind of it's definitely accurate, but it's got enough meat in it. But it's it's friendly for girls. And so I think I think it's well done and it's short in terms of you can actually get through them.

One of the things I found about devotionals, you get like a 365 day devotional book. You're probably never going to do all 365 days. So there's this for for those of us who are very type A, it's hard to see that and know that I have not done every devotional in the book.

So if that's you, the For Girls Like You devotional book is good because I think it has I don't know how many ads in it, but you know, there might be 30 devotionals, for example. And so it's a book that you can actually finish.

Now, that one Case for Christ, is that Lee Strobel?

Right. So he has all the books, the Case for Faith, the Case for Christ, the Case for Hope, Case for Grace. There are many case fours. And so he also has the kids version of several of those books. And this one, the Case for Christ for Kids, he turned into an actual devotional kind of book.

So it's kind of 90 day snippets that kids can get into and kind of get exposed to apologetics that way.

And it might be interesting, I ask that because there's that new movie either coming out or it has come out where they did a basically a story on Lee Strobel's life and his coming to Christ. So that might be interesting to kind of dovetail those, you know, watch the video or vice versa and then go through that.

I'm not familiar with all of those books, but I am familiar with many of the authors and I look forward to checking those out. My daughter is seven and she's very much the young soul in our family, whereas my son who's 10 is very much the old soul.

And I'm looking forward to finding something that's really good for them. My son, the boys and also the boys who live in my home, you know, we spend a lot of time working through devotionals and I have a couple of suggestions I like to make, too.

At some point down the line, I want to introduce all of my listeners to the Wilds Christian Camp and Conference Center. For now, though, I'll just tell you that they are my favorite Christian camp in the world.

They're in North Carolina and they run an amazing Christ honoring camp programs all year long for children and families and adults. And they also publish music and curriculum and, you know, all the things that amazing camps should be doing.

But they publish children's devotionals as well. I highly recommend that you check out the junior age books that are written by Matt Herbster. He has two in particular that I've gone through with my son, one on the life of Joseph and one the life of Daniel.

And then there's a whole slew of devotionals written by Rand Hummel. And the reason I like Rand's stuff in particular is he does well what so many other devotionals struggle to do, I think, and that's good application.

You know, it's nice to say love God. It's better to say love God and then define what that means. But it's best to say love God, define what that means, and then give the kids things that they can actually sink their teeth into that they can use today.

Okay. You want to love God today? Do this. And man, there's just so many things that Rand packs into his devotionals. And those are obviously for older kids, but they they're very good that I think they're very accessible even to my 10 year old.

And they just resonate. I mean, I've actually gone through them with my son thinking, man, this is so good. This is helping me out. And that's that's how it should be. But my my favorite devotional program of all time, I don't know if you've heard it before.

It's written by Marty Collier and it's called What Do I Know About My God? Are you familiar with that? I want to do a whole episode on it later. It is so powerful. Now, it is clearly written for women, the book itself, but the book itself is not the devotional.

The book itself is basically teaching a Bible study program that you utilize in your devotions. And I use it every year with the teenage boys in my home. We're going through it right now. We start to get them from, you know, feeding them the word to teaching them how to self feed.

And it's an amazing Bible study program that truly does all the things that we're talking about here and avoids all the pitfalls that we've also discussed. So I hope to do a show on that. I want to encourage everyone to check out that book, What Do I Know About My God?

And of course, like you said, I will link all of these books in the description and check out today's description, too. For our episode notes, I want to include some of the points that Natasha made specifically for finding good devotionals in there.

And then remember, next time Natasha and I will be discussing an amazing resource you can use to help your kids, regardless of their age or their spiritual maturity, to not only understand and believe the vital truths of God, but also be able to articulate those beliefs to a dark and dying world.