Treasuring God in our Traditions

I finally finished reading Noel Piper's Treasuring God in our Traditions. I thought I would have gotten through it much faster than I did. It is only 105 pages long and I started reading it in the beginning of the year. Nevertheless, I have finished it.

The basic premise is that our traditions can help the next generation (focusing on our children and family) treasure God and give them a taste of His amazing worth. Noel Piper goes about describing how we can do this in our family through everyday traditions in the family, such as mealtime prayers and reading to our children, and the "especially" traditions of birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, Easter, Christmas, and even funerals. There are many great ideas for making our traditions not only meaningful, but have an eternal significance.

The question in Treasuring God in our Traditions is, how do we demonstrate that God is at the heart of every celebration? Noel says, "Through him we have birth and life and every thing and every person in our lives. So God is the reason we have anything to celebrate. He is the ultimate source of any of our celebrations."

Ultimately, our traditions should have God at the center. Noel sums up the book with these points three points,

"Let's just remind ourselves of what we're after:

• Remembering what God did for his people, for us, and
• giving glory to God for what he's done,
• so our children and their children will know him."