Our Weekly Freebie Friday: #299

My friends over at Youth Ministry 360 think it’s really important for teenagers to spend personal time in the Word on a daily basis. So they teamed up with On Track Devotions to create a digital resource that helps students do just that!

The daily youth devotions for the month of October focus on loving your enemies and doing good to those who hate you. Right now you can download it for free after creating a login for their site.

A couple thoughts I have about these devotions, and they both rest on your involvement in this process as a youth worker, or, even better, getting their parents involved.

• This devotional easily lends itself to a private Facebook group that you and a few students join to discuss each day’s devotional together. Not only does that help provide some accountability, but these devotionals naturally lend themselves to discussion that could take place online.
• These devos are typical in that they help students make a commitment to something that, in my opinion, mostly resides in the realm of, “I just need to try harder to actually have meaningful time with the Lord.” This ultimately just leads to greater frustration. However, if coupled with a youth leader or parent who can help them see this as something more than just a rote exercise, developing the spiritual discipline of time with the Lord becomes extremely valuable.
• The devotionals encourage students to study the passages using the observation, interpretation, application bible study method, which is great! This is the method I always use myself. However, to be effective, each of these steps takes some skill that’s usually developed through training. Otherwise it becomes more of a “fill in the blank” thing than a Bible study method. Work through each of these steps with your students. Teach them how to observe things beyond the surface level, how that leads to accurate interpretations, and thus application from the text that’s lead by the Holy Spirit.

An excellent book to learn how to student God’s Word through observation, interpretation, and observation is Howard Hendrick’s, “Living By The Book: The Art and Science of Reading the Bible.” (Amazon affiliate) I turned this book into an 8 week “How To Study The Bible” series for my high school students a few years ago and they loved it! There’s something totally invaluable about teaching teenagers how to study God’s Word for themselves. The confidence alone does wonders for their Bible study habits!

All that said, here ya go. Getcha self some student devos to use with your group for October, completely free.

Go download, October’s On Track Devotions for Students from YM360

Posted on September 21, 2012