Christmas Day after opening presents, gather together and read the story of Jesus Christ’s birth in Luke 2:1-20 from the Bible. Afterwards serve others by volunteering at a soup kitchen or evangelizing to the homeless with hot chocolate and the Gospel.

All throughout our kids’ growing up years, we had a special Christmas morning tradition. After eating breakfast, we got ready to leave the house for what my wife and I felt was one of our most important holiday traditions before opening gifts: We would serve the meal at the local Salvation Army. We did this to send a message to our children that Christmas is about serving, not just indulging ourselves. Inevitably, we would end up having some conversations with people who were really hurting, listening to them and praying for them. Look for various ways to plant seeds in your kids about being others-centered.

One of the greatest things you can do is help your kids want to serve and impact other people. You can provoke this by giving them experiences that are way out of the box. Sending them to summer camp is great, but finding a camp that doesn’t indulge them makes a bigger impact. Look for something that teaches them to be closer to God or gain a skill. Some examples would be leadership camp like Student Leadership University, basketball camp, acting camp or anything that will give them a skill they can use even in their high school years to serve others and become excellent at something.

One of the greatest things you can do is help your kids go on a missions trip to another part of the world. There they can see how other people live who are far less fortunate than we are in America. Start doing this at a young age. (We started taking kids on Global Expedition trips with Teen Mania at just 11 years old.) In 2 days, nearly 300 teens will leave to go on a missions trip with us. Please pray for them.

If MTV is targeting kids at younger and younger ages, then so must we. We must plant in our kids a desire to really make a difference and change the world. Give them opportunities to reach out in a very practical way. This may mean digging a well in India, reaching out to orphans’ in Africa whose parents have died of AIDS on missions, or feeding the homeless, and ringing the Salvation Army bell with you this Christmas to help the community. Whether it’s a two week mission trip or a day of service, they realize that life is more than the stuff they accumulate. Even though they may not become a missionary later in their life, at least this experience gives them a taste of doing something that is definitely not self-centered.

Letting our children have this experience is a test for us as parents, a test of our trust that God will take care of our kids. Allowing them to go out of the country sends our children a message while they are young that they were born for greatness and destined to impact the world.