Remember to model for them, but also give them opportunities to pray alongside you. James Dobson rightly concludes, “There is nothing more important than parents passing on a generational legacy of faith and values to their children.” When you teach your children to pray you are giving them a greater opportunity for a close relationship with God.     

When one thinks about the great men and women of faith they can visualize their strength of character, their personal holiness, and their exercise of the disciplines of the Christian faith.
Whether reading the Word of God, serving in a ministry capacity, or preaching to a multitude, nearly every hero is also marked by another characteristic.
They are men and women of prayer.
Modeling Prayer
Prayer is a critical part of the Christian life. We are told to “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17) and to “Devote yourselves to prayer” (Col 4:2). We must exercise our privilege to pray individually, but we must also teach this great discipline to our children.
Just as the disciples petitioned, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 13:1), our children are needy of us to teach them to pray. We must teach our children what we have learned about prayer.
When teaching children to pray, the most powerful method is modeling. You become the example of what prayer is like. You can show your children how to pray by the way you pray.
Invite your children to be part of your prayer life. When you allow them the privilege of praying with you as you commune with God, they will begin to replicate what you do.
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The disciples are in the first stage of spiritual sight, seeing but not fully. Jesus is indeed the Christ, but they don’t understand what the Christ has come to do: be rejected, suffer, and die. Peter’s rebuke confirms his partial sight. He thinks he’s seeing better than he actually is.

Stories have turning points, and Peter’s confession—“You are the Christ”—is a turning point in Mark’s Gospel. Many New Testament scholars divide Mark’s Gospel in a way that outlines sections before this confession and after it. Peter’s confession is a threshold.
In Mark’s Gospel, the confession, “You are the Christ” (Mark 8:29), occurs after Jesus healed a blind man at Bethsaida. Reading this miracle alongside Peter’s confession can be interpretively helpful, especially since Mark’s Gospel is the only book that records this miracle. What can we notice by reflecting on this miracle and then on Peter’s confession?
The Blind Man’s Partial Sight

The miracle didn’t seem complete, as if Jesus’s first attempt fell short of the mark. Jesus laid hands on the man’s eyes, and then his sight was restored: “he saw everything clearly” (Mark 8:25). Success!
We’re not used to seeing miracles take place in stages. We’re used to something more immediate. When Jesus tells the leper, “Be clean,” the leper is healed instantly (Mark 1:41–42). When he tells the paralytic, “Rise, pick up your bed, and go home,” the paralytic immediately rises (2:11–12). When he tells the man with the withered hand, “Stretch out your hand,” the man stretches out his now-restored hand (3:5).
Mark 8:22–26 reports a miracle in two stages. But this was not a record of dwindling power. The stages are the point.
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Consider setting aside the wrongful attitudes moderns bring against the Bible of Jesus. A place to start is taking on the attitude of Jesus toward his Bible. We should own it. Study it. Be humbled by it. Teach it. Tell others what it says about Yahweh’s mercy. I invite you to read it for yourself. There’s no wrong place to begin. Jesus stopped the tempter with three teachings in Deuteronomy 6‒11. This section tells the people to love Yahweh who loved them first. This is one place we can start to see the Bible of Jesus resurrected to its rightful place in our lives.

“It’s embarrassing.”
That is how I answered a question in a recent podcast interview about the Bible of Jesus—what we call the Old Testament.
They had asked: “In all of your experience in teaching at the university level, what would you say students find most difficult when it comes to engaging with the Old Testament?”
I answered the podcast hosts that students are embarrassed because of uninformed prejudice against the Old Testament in the different spheres of students’ lives. Their friends think it’s boring. Churches minimize and correct it. And especially modern culture ridicules it.1
These things are not new. They are not in doubt. These things should be troubling. They should alarm us. That many Christians have accepted the embarrassment of the Old Testament is part of the problem.
Unpacking the embarrassment about the Bible of Jesus is personal. I say this as a Christian and as a professor of Old Testament.
Jesus is not embarrassed about his Bible. He owns it. He studies it. He teaches it. He taunts his enemies with it. He claims it teaches us all we need to know about redemption (Luke 16:31). If this tells us anything, it says we are wrong for being ashamed of his Bible. This means it is not enough to shake our heads and sigh about what has become of the Old Testament in our day. We need to resurrect the Bible of Jesus to its proper place in our lives.
Embarrassment About the Old Testament Among Christians
Churches tend to love the New Testament and Jesus. The Old Testament, not so much. On any given Sunday many churchgoers are bound to hear the contrast between the Old and the New. Christian teachers and preachers speak about the New Testament Christ of love who is unlike the Old Testament God of wrath. The message also can be read in books by church-going scholars or evangelical ministers.
In 2023 a seasoned Old Testament scholar named James W. Watts crossed out all the so-called “immoral” verses in his commentary on Leviticus 11‒20. He goes on to call upon all scholars and Bible publishers to cross out all the “immoral” verses in the entire Bible—the vast majority are in Torah. He lists all of them. Watts’ list includes all commands about killing Canaanites, slavery, patriarchy, capital punishment, and more, as well as some sexual purity standards. He tells laity not to wait for Bible publishers but to cross out the immoral teachings in their own Bibles.2
The pastor of a large church in Georgia named Andy Stanley thinks that the Old Testament is ruining the gospel message. He is troubled by the sharp contrast between the wrathful God of Israel and the Christ of love.3 He tells his readers not to obey the Ten Commandments.4
This is incredibly bad advice. It is also directly opposed to the teachings of Jesus and the New Testament.
Again and again, Christians express their relief at not needing to bother with Old Testament teachings. Congregants shake their heads at what they see as God’s legalistic treatment of ancient Israel. They sometimes even comment on how much different Jesus is. Different than God? That’s not a Christian view. It’s also mistaken.
There are only 613 laws in the Torah. This only seems like a lot until we realize that there are more than 800 commands in the New Testament.5 People worry about the oddness of the laws of Torah. True, but commands in the New Testament are odd, too. Kiss one another (1 Cor 16:20). Women, cover your heads (11:5‒6). Be kind to strangers in case they are angelic beings in disguise (Heb 13:2). And many more.
Christians complain about the difficulty of obeying the laws of Torah. These Christians need to reread the commands of Christ placed at a much more demanding level. Torah says do not murder or commit adultery (Exod 20:13‒14). Jesus says do not act in anger or look with lust (Matt 5:21‒22, 27‒28).
Remember, we are saved by grace alone and nothing of ourselves in order to serve God by good works (Eph 2:8‒10).
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