Using The Book of Mormon To Draw Your Family Close To Christ And This Will Mean More To Them Than Anything Else

Book of Mormon Marriage And Family Study

“Come near unto me; I have not spoken in secret;”

Nothing is more important than seeking after Christ. Nothing else you could do for your family is more important. Everything depends on it!

Make coming unto Christ prime family time. This is the most important time of the day for your family when you gather to ponder the scriptures together and pray.

How do you deeply ponder the scriptures as a family? Effective scripture study is pondering. Pondering deeply requires slow reading and a lot of discussion together. Slow is more! Slow is powerful! Slow is a spiritual feast. Slow generates profound and life changing revelation. Fast on the other hand is weak because it is superficial thinking. Therefore, you don’t feel the spirit very much and you don’t receive much revelation.

One way you could do it is read the Book of Mormon cover to cover slowly pondering. Possibly, a better way is each study session pick a chapter by the spirit to discuss together.

Your goal is to go for quality not quantity. For example it is much more edifying to spend an hour discussing 10 verses together than reading two chapters with little to no conversing. I am confident your children will become converted to this and will value it more than anything else. They will treasure it more than watching TV and movies, playing video games, surfing the internet or building superficial relationships on social media.

Additionally, they will prefer this powerful scripture study over playing with friends or any other social activity with friends. Even church youth and young adult activities should not take precedence over family scripture time. Why will your children eagerly look forward to this special family time? Because the spirit an the love of God will penetrate their hearts and pierce their souls. Love is what everyone seeks, and doing it this way will fill them up with love of God and their family.

I recommend you pick a chapter according to the inspiration of the spirit. Then someone starts reading the first verse in the chapter and reads until something impresses him. He stops and shares his thoughts and feelings. Anyone in the group can share what they liked about what was read at any time. Then the next person reads until they find something they like and the family exchanges views, asking questions and sharing together. Do this for time not chapter. For example do this for an hour and if you only read five verses but it generates great conversation in an hour, this is MUCH better than mindlessly reading a whole chapter just to complete a task.

I am confident that if you do this when your children are young and engage them early on, this will be their most treasured time of the day because they will feel the spirit and it will bind and unite the entire family. Your children might have any number of other social or extracurricular activities such as practice, or young women’s/men’s or scouts.

Your children may choose to miss whatever else they have going to stay longer for family scripture study. For example, if your family decides you will study for one hour as a general rule, but what if you have a stimulating meeting? Why would you end it after one hour? Let it go on longer, a lot longer if the spirit is strong and people are eager to talk. If your family is feeling the love of God to the point it pierces their soul and causes their heart to burn why would they want to leave that especially for some practice or social activity.

The church is here to help the family. No church activity supersedes family bonding.

If you live in the Salt Lake City valley, I invite you to join us at church on Sunday's at 1 p.m. We are a mid-singles ward; however, if you have a family please don't let that stop you. Please, join us for for our first meeting which is Sacrament meeting, and make sure you ask someone to introduce you to our ward mission leader. Our address is 7155 South 540 East, Midvale Utah, 84047.