Discipling Children Using Great Books

“Oh please, read one more chapter!” Every parent or grandparent who reads with children has heard this request. Some of our fondest memories as a family are around great books read aloud together. We read until 1 a.m. to learn if Janner and Tink would escape from the fangs in the Wingfeather Saga and found ourselves laughing in one moment and crying in the next. We snuggled under warm blankets on the couch as a blizzard raged outside while reading The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder. If the Ingalls could make it through that long winter, so could we! We cheered on Reepicheep for his courage in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and longed to be like him. Reading together bonds the family around a shared culture, builds shared values, creates lasting memories, and provides a great opportunity to communicate God’s truth to a child.

Great books are an incredible tool to disciple a child and should be part of your plan to help the next generation develop a biblical worldview. A great book is a doorway into a world of truth, goodness, delight, and adventure. It introduces us to people and places who would have remained unknown. Good books are extraordinary tools that help us to grow into a wise, mature, and godly person. There are few pleasures as wonderful as curling up with a child and a great book.

The Greatest Book

The Bible is the greatest book the world has ever known. It has sold billions of copies because it is the Word of God to man. JRR Tolkien, a believer, described to CS Lewis, a non-believer, the impact of the Bible on all other books, “The reason all the stories are the same is because there is a story underneath every story.” Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia, Frodo in The Lord of the Wings, and Janner in The Wingfeather Saga resonate powerfully because they are Christ figures whose story point us to the most wonderful story. The best stories resonate with the true gospel and the truth in books leads us to gaze toward heaven.

Before our children can glean from the wonderful riches of an excellent book, they need a deep and strong foundation from God’s Word. Utilize the Bible as your main source in discipleship. It leads a child to salvation, answers the big questions of life, teaches right and wrong, provides wisdom for life, and teaches sound doctrine that leads to right thinking on all other subjects. The Bible should be taught early and thoroughly so that it is impressed on the heart and mind of a child. The Bible is the strong foundation for providing a child with an excellent education. In previous times, no one would be considered literate without a basic knowledge of the Bible. Include the Bible in your family reading time. Make Scripture reading a routine. A children’s Bible is a great way to introduce the habit of Bible reading in an interactive way and when children are older, a transition can be made to a full text Bible.

We are people of the book. We are literary people. A book, the Bible, is the primary way that God has chosen for us to know Him. We want our children to be lovers of the book and lovers of books. We want them to be godly, know the Lord Jesus Christ, and love Him with their whole heart. If you read the right books alongside the great book, they can be building blocks to help our children be godly and wise for the price of a library card.

What Makes a Book Great?

John Piper once stated, “Read great books in light of the greatest book for the sake of the great commission.” Great books help us to set our affection on Christ and to accomplish God’s purpose in our life. Great books have substance, not just entertainment value. Books are tools to influence character, stir the imagination, to teach children to think, and to encourage integrity.

Great books expand our vision and alter our life. Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, states “The failure to read great books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency—the belief that the here and now is all there is.” Great books help us learn from those who have come before, to live in light of eternity, and to align our life with biblical morality.

The best books reflect real life. They contain heart-ache, sadness, death, sin, and problems. They also contain celebration, joy, life, salvation, and happy endings. They help us to savor life and understand pain. A great book is authentic to life and is able to captivate the imagination of a reader. Proverbs 25:11 states, “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.” The crafting of words to stir the heart, awaken emotion, and subtly communicate truth is a gift that the best books offer.

A great book has stood the test of time. Is there a reason a book is still in print one hundred years after being written? In addition, you can’t put a great book down. Is your child begging for another chapter? That’s the sign of a great book. A bad book is a big thief. While there are many wonderful, entertaining, or good books you could read to children or grandchildren, my encouragement is to only read the best of the best. Great books are the ones you will want to keep in your family library, provide as gifts to your children and grandchildren on their birthdays, read over and over, and will be cherished for years to come. The mark of a great book is when we catch our children reading it under the covers with a flashlight, after they were told to go to bed. It takes time and energy to find the best books, but it’s worth the effort.

What About Screens?

Great books can replace screens. The famous author Roald Dahl eloquently states, “So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install a lovely bookshelf on the wall. Then fill the shelves with lots of books.” Reading is an act of resistance and worldview shaping. You get to decide what you read. The screen decides what you see and watch.

How do you get a child to read books? According to Gladys Hunt, author Honey for a Child’s Heart, child will gravitate to the passions of parents, whether that is books or screens. She states, “If television is more important to parents than books, the children will likely choose the same….The allurement of the screen is no small thing, but television, for the most part, has betrayed its potential. It is responsible for dumbing-down and coarsening the fabric of our society. It keeps pushing at the edge of questionable behavior, and in many homes is a monster in the living room, all chairs facing the screen awaiting the next available amusement.” If we are never excited about books, why would our children get excited about them?

If screens dominate your home, make books a replacement. If you put out grapes alone, your children will eat it and love it. If you provide grapes and ice cream, children will choose ice cream. The same is true with books and screens. You have to remove screens so children love books.

Read Aloud

The best way to experience a great book is to read it aloud. Whether a child is five or fifteen, great books will capture a child’s attention. For those who think that I need a “boy’s book” for my boy or a “girl’s book” for my girl, consider the words of C.S. Lewis, “A children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last.” The great books transcend age, time, sex and can be read to an entire family.

A parent is a child’s best teacher and books read aloud are a parent’s best tool. There are few things more significant that you can do for your child or grandchild than read to them. No parent knows everything, so invite Francis and Edith Schaefer, CS Lewis, and George McDonald into your living room to help you shape the hearts of your family. Reading aloud books from these authors will create a rich learning environment in your home. Research has found that reading a story gives the brain similar network connections as actually living through an experience yourself. Reading aloud provides your children with what they long for most, time with you.

Your children already love stories. Harness that love. There is no such thing as a child who doesn’t like stories, so find the best ones. If they don’t love reading, it just means you haven’t found the right books yet. Children rarely stumble upon great books by themselves, they must be introduced to them, and you can do this through a read aloud.

What About Fantasy and Fairy Tales?

Read children fantasy and fairy tales. It will not create the false impression of the world they live in or deceive them to believe lies. Instead, it will do the opposite. CS Lewis states, “fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his lifelong enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth.” GK Chesterton adds a compelling reason, “Fairy tales do not tell children dragons exist. Children already know the dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children dragons can be defeated.”

What a tragedy to never experience the worlds of Narnia, the Hundred Acre Woods, Wonderland, the Wild Wood, or Beatrix Potter. Give your children large doses of Roald Dahl, Marguerite de Angeli, and E.B. White. Read them stories with talking animals like The Green Ember and The Wind in the Willows. Enjoy epic hero tales of adventure like 100 Cupboards, Homer Price, and Henry Huggins. Fairy tales plant seeds of truth that find a way into the minds and hearts of children in unexpected ways.

CS Lewis received many questions about whether or not it was appropriate for children to read fantasy and believed, “Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage” and he added, “Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book. Nothing will persuade me that this causes an ordinary child any kind or degree of fear beyond what it wants, and needs, to feel.” The person who disagrees cannot read the greatest book, the Bible, to a child for it is filled with death, blood, sex, and evil. This tells the reader, I am reading something that is authentic and true, for my knowledge of the world is one of death, violence, pain, adventure, courage and cowards, good and evil. To withhold that is to give our children a false impression of a world that does not exist and prepares a child for the battles he or she will face in the real world.

Reading is the doorway into all learning. Reading great books is an incredible tool parents and grandparents can utilize to help a child develop a biblical worldview. Give great books as gifts. Fill your home with the best books. Leave them all around the house. Children will see one, pick it up, and start reading. Let children read easy books and ditch books they don’t like. Make reading enjoyable! Let children see you reading. If you don’t know how to read aloud, start with a great audio book. Pay attention to authors and publishers you love. If you like one of their books, chances are that you will enjoy more. Chose a great book and begin to read it aloud to your family today!