Recently I recommended a good music group for children, and today I’d like to recommend a couple of books for children. I have not read these books but am in the process of acquiring them for my kids. I trust the source of this recommendation and agree with the points made regarding why these are good ones:
On Wednesday’s edition of “Ask Anything Wednesday” on The Albert Mohler Program I was asked about good Bible story books for children. I appreciated the question because I am concerned that many Bible story books treat the stories as nothing more than disconnected morality tales.
Children need to be told about the “big story” of the Bible — of God’s purpose to save His people from their sins through the atonement of Christ. They need to learn to understand the individual stories of the Bible within the big picture and to know that these stories are not disconnected, but part of a pattern of promise and fulfillment.
Two good resources for parents are The Big Picture Story Bible by David Helm and The Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones. The Jesus Storybook Bible is subtitled, ‘Every Story Whispers His Name.” As Zondervan describes the book, “The Jesus Storybook Bible tells the Story beneath all the stories in the Bible. At the center of the Story is a baby, the child upon whom everything will depend. Every story whispers his name. From Noah to Moses to the great King David–every story points to him. He is like the missing piece in a puzzle–the piece that makes all the other pieces fit together. From the Old Testament through the New Testament, as the Story unfolds, children will pick up the clues and piece together the puzzle. A Bible like no other, The Jesus Storybook Bible invites children to join in the greatest of all adventures, to discover for themselves that Jesus is at the center of God’s great story of salvation–and at the center of their Story too.”
The Big Picture Story Bible also presents the Bible as a unified story — and this is so important, even when children are quite young. Children have keen narrative minds and active imaginations. They need to have those capacities respected and developed through hearing the stories of the Bible over and over again. At the same time, parents who read and tell these stories should help children to connect the dots and to learn of God’s love and saving purpose from one story to the next.
Children taught to see the big picture and to know the big story are in a good position to see that knowledge matured through deeper Bible study in years ahead. These books are great gifts for children and young families.
I also recommend the following children’s book for explaining the gospel to children. This one I have read:
The Way of the Master for Kids
Also this one is very good, but it is not a children’s book:
Filed under: Books, Church Life, Evangelism, Family
Our favorite Story Bible for children is The Child’s Story Bible by Catherine Vos. It’s not watered down, it’s very comprehensive, and it’s written in a conversational tone. It pulls in references from the New Testament in the Old Testament stories, pulls from the Psalms in certain stories of David, and points to Christ at appropriate times throughout. This book was first published in three volumes back in the 1930s. It doesn’t have many pictures, so if your little one needs to look at pictures while they’re being read it, then this book probably wouldn’t work for them. I would say it is appropriate at least by age 4 or 5, although we’ve been using it since our daughter was 2 yrs old.
The other book we like is Leading Little Ones to God by Marian Schoolland. This is an excellent book to start with your children at age 2 or 3. It covers all the major doctrines in the Bible. Each short lesson has a few questions, a memory verse, suggested Bible reading, a verse from a hymn (most of these are unfamiliar to me), and a prayer.
On the show, Mohler recommended your first one too.
I’d like to recommend The Animated Kids Bible if I may.
http://www.theanimatedkidsbible.com/blog/
Thanks for your recommendation Aki. Can you say why you like it and recommend it? Does it have the big picture of the overall Bible story presented to the kids as described above, or is it just story after story like Veggie Tales, but no big picture explanation?