Bible Study: Teaching Obedience Through the Word

Ever wondered what a Bible word really means beneath the English translation? This post walks through the Hebrew word shama — hear, understand, obey — and shows a simple treasure-hunt method (plus step-by-step Blue Letter Bible instructions for ages 10+) for teaching children that true hearing always leads to obedience.

Mary Nyonda

8/28/20263 min temps de lecture

"It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter." — Proverbs 25:2

The words in the Bible often carry more weight and deeper revelation than what sits on the surface. Children are not too young to uncover this. Things have been made so much easier for us now — digital Bibles come with interlinear concordances that give the original Hebrew and Greek definitions right alongside the text.

A Word Worth Digging Into: Shama

Take the word "hear" in our everyday English. To hear the Word of God, we usually think, means simply to perceive it by ear. But the true meaning of this word goes further — to hear, to understand, to obey. Obedience is what's expected.

שָׁמַע (Shama) — H8085
Phonetic spelling: shaw-mah'

KJV usage: attentively, call (gather) together, carefully, certainly, consent, consider, be content, declare, diligently, discern, give ear, (cause to, let, make to) hear(-ken, tell), indeed, listen, make (a) noise, (be) obedient, obey, perceive, (make a) proclaim(-ation), publish, regard, report, shew (forth), (make a) sound, surely, tell, understand, whosoever (heareth), witness

How to look it up yourself on the Blue Letter Bible app:

Open the app and search for the verse (for example, Deuteronomy 6:4, "Hear, O Israel").
Tap on the word "Hear" in the verse text — this opens the Strong's Concordance tag.
Tap the Strong's number that appears (H8085) to open the full lexicon entry.
Scroll down to see the KJV usage list, the outline of meanings, and the other verses where the same word appears.

Teaching Children to Unravel It

So how do we teach our children to search this kind of thing out for themselves?

I use the treasure box trick. All kids love a good treasure hunt, and this is the example I use: we are going on a hunt to find deeper understanding of what God is telling us through Scripture.

👉 Get the free printable Shama Activity Pack here — treasure hunt cards, the Broken Telephone game, and an age-specific chore chart, ready to print and cut. Grab it at Covered Generations, get the link to this and more lessons below.

This same method isn't just for the younger ones. Kids 10 and older can move beyond the treasure hunt itself and use the Blue Letter Bible lookup directly in their own Bible study — searching out a word's full meaning for themselves, the way the Proverb calls it "the honour of kings to search out a matter."

Practical Ways to Do This

What You'll Need

Your Bible (or a digital Bible with an interlinear/concordance feature, such as Bible Hub's Interlinear Bible or Bible Gateway)
Blue Letter Bible (or similar app, for looking up the Hebrew/Greek word strings)
Pen
Strips of paper (for the treasure hunt clues)

1. An actual treasure hunt for the word's meanings (younger children). Write out the different definitions of shama on your strips of paper, then hide them around the house or yard. Let the children collect them one by one, piecing together the fuller picture of what "hear" really means.

1b. Independent word study (ages 10 and up). Instead of a hunt, hand older children the verse and the Blue Letter Bible steps above, and let them search out the word themselves. Have them write down what they find — the definitions, the other verses where the word appears, and what it changes about how they read the passage. Then discuss it together as a family.

2. Do it practically, through obedience itself. Give your child an instruction — say, to arrange their room. Did they do it the way you asked?

If not, dig deeper. Did they perceive what was said? Did they understand the command? Or was there an excuse? If the instruction wasn't followed, discern which part of the chain broke down, and help them there:

Was the instruction clear and simple enough?
Was there persuasion involved, or coercion?

Compare this to how God spoke to the earth:

"And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so." — Genesis 1:11

He commanded it to yield trees and herbs, and it did — in that exact sequence, without delay.

Abraham, too, heard and obeyed without reluctance:

"And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him." — Genesis 22:3

That's shama — hearing that becomes obedience. And it's a habit we can build in our children, one instruction at a time.

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