Enflaming Our Children's Hearts for God

One of the great desires of my life is to enflame my children’s hearts for God. It is my daily prayer that my children would not only know about God, but that they would grow to be young women who know God intimately, walk with God deeply, serve God faithfully, pray to God joyfully, and Lord willing raise their own children (my grandchildren) to know and love God as well.

One of the deepest challenges in Christian parenting is measuring whether or not the duties we perform as parents to instruct our children in the Lord, are truly forming a heart for God, or are simply creating children that know how Christians ought to behave. Those are two very different things. The real hard work of discipling our children is always around heart formation. We want the Word of God to penetrate the heart and mold their entire outlook on life and attitude towards the God and towards the world.

In our Church we train every parent on simple tools that parents can use to disciple their children. We train families how to lead daily devotions with their entire family. A daily devotion consists of at least three parts: study of God’s Word together, singing a hymn together, and prayer together. And then we train families on how to catechize their children, to make sure they understand robustly the grand storyline of Scripture: creation, fall, redemption, restoration. We teach families how to use discipline in the home as a opportunity to instruct in Christ, and how to use our children’s concerns and worries and fears as opportunities to demonstrate experientially how to submit our worries to Christ. None of these are easy tasks. They are mammoth duties, that call Christian parents to reorient their home intentionally. As Ted Tripp has written

"God has called you to a more profound task than being only a care-provider. You shepherd your child in God’s behalf. The task God has given you is not one that can be conveniently scheduled. It is a pervasive task. Training and shepherding are going on whenever you are with your children. Whether waking, walking, talking or resting, you must be involved in helping your child to understand life, himself, and his needs from a biblical perspective."

And yet, even with the most diligent parenting, and intentional execution of these discipleship tools, it is easy to miss the mark. Often when I instruct new parents how to properly utilize a catechism to shape their children, I will receive the response from the parent that they don’t quite see the value in a catechism, because they were catechized as children and it all just seemed as rote memorization at the time. Or when I instruct on family devotions, I might receive the comment that they often participated in some kind of family devotion as a child, but it never really formed them into lovers of God. In fact, some parents are cautious to adopt such practices in their home because of a fear of turning their home into an incubator of legalism. A place where children feel consumed by duty.

Every Christian parent can heartily acknowledge that the last thing we want to incubate in our home is legalism. The last thing we want our children thinking about Christ and His Church is the list of annoying tasks that must be done each day as part of our “religious” life. So how do we avoid such a trap? Can these tools be used to enflame our children’s hearts for God? Can these tools be used to form our children’s whole being, so that they grow up to know and love the Lord. I believe they can.

The golden key to unlock each of these tool’s potential is your own enflamed heart for God. If you are fascinated by God’s Word, and bring your own children into your fascination with God’s Word, there is a strong likelihood that your children will develop a fascination for God’s Word. If in your time of catechizing your children, you engage your children, with real questions that meet them at their level, and stories that let your children in on your own faith and how it has played out in your life, they will more than likely develop the same sense as you. Too often we are trying to light a candle with a match that is not lit. We must burn with passion ourselves. Then, and only then, will our homes be engulfed in the flames of joyful worship.

Our children are expert hypocrite sniffers. They are watching us. Every day they are deciding whether or not we live by the standard we claim. Do we love our spouses the way the Scriptures teach us? Are we joyful in the home, filling the very air with a presence of zeal for God and therefore zeal for life? Do our families get the best of us, our presence, our attention, our passion? Do we hunger for God’s Word in a way that everyone in our house can see is real, and not pasted on? Are we quick to say “we’re sorry?” Are we quick to turn to prayer? Do we really love our Church? Do we open our homes and our hearts to those whom God places in our paths and in our communities in such a way that says, “the Holy Spirit lives in this home?”

The parenting tools we teach at our Church are wonderful. But for their full effect, they must be wielded by hands that know what it means to “taste and see that the Lord is good.” Our knowledge of God must be experiential, not just intellectual.