How To Disciple Your Children
Article featured in The Witness Magazine, Spring 2021
We invite you to use this article for personal enrichment, group study or discipleship.
Why disciple in the first place?
We may have been convicted, and even feel a little shame, about a failure to properly disciple our kids. But consistently discipling our children can be extremely difficult. Kids are resistant to it. Our lives are hectic. We tried it and failed, multiple times. Aren’t the paid professionals at church better qualified for the task?
All these things might be true to one degree or another, but that does not absolve parents of the great privilege and responsibility of discipling our children. Our motives for discipling are often amiss. Therefore, we often fail in our attempts. Doing it because we are supposed to (legalism), or because everyone else is doing it (comparison) will not sustain us. Here are three right motivators for discipling our children:
God commands it
God exhorts parents to train and teach their children in the faith (Deut 6:6–7, Prov 22:6, Eph. 6:4, Col 3:21, 2 Tim 3:15). To be obedient to these admonitions is not legalism, but rather it is trusting that God honors and blesses obedience to his Word in the life of his people.
Your child's salvation
We disciple our children with hope, with a prayer and with the promise that God blesses his Word to the salvation of souls. We disciple our children because we want them to live forever with Jesus and to live their lives now for Jesus.
Parental influence
There is normally no greater spiritual influence in a child’s life than his parents. The spiritual impact thousands of hours parents have with their children far outweigh the impact any pastor can have interacting with children two or three hours a week, at best.
Do's and Don'ts for discipling your kids
do
- Embrace how your family is uniquely made. You don’t have to do this like anyone else.
- Prepare your kids to live as strangers, aliens and outcasts in the world.
- Help guide your kids to become the people Jesus wants them to be.
- Let your children ask the hard questions. Be patient and honest, and look together for answers you don’t know.
- Teach your kids to filter everything through the lens of Scripture.
- Be flexible.
- Be intentional and have a clear plan.
- Remember God’s grace in the gospel, and just start again tomorrow when you fail today.
- Start small and simple. It may be just a verse or two, a question and a prayer.
- Drink deeply from the well of Christ.
don't
- Compare your family to other families.
- Use discipleship as a means to raise well-behaved and popular kids who thrive in the world.
- Use discipleship as means to manipulate your kids to become the kids you wish they were.
- Fear, ignore or shut down hard questions.
- Give pithy, clichéd or proverbial answers.
- Be rigid with your plans and methods.
- Fail to be intentional and plan how you are going to disciple your children.
- Quit because you’ve failed in recently or consistently.
- Create a plan that is too complicated.
- Neglect your own discipleship.
Modeling, time, moments and milestones
In their book “Family Discipleship: Leading Your Home through Time, Moments, and Milestones” Matt Chandler and Adam Griffin offer a helpful framework for discipling your children in the everyday and ordinary moments of life together.
Modeling
We teach our kids more by what we do than by what we say. If our faith and walk with Jesus is truly important to us, our kids will be able to see that in our lives. Do your kids see you maturing in grace and love? Do they see you humbly serving others? What are they learning from your prayer life and Bible reading habits? Parents with a lukewarm or immature faith tend to have children with a lukewarm or stone cold faith. Our daily lives and moment by moment interactions with our children are a major part of discipling them.
Time
Time represents those planned, appointed and structured times in our day or week where we are explicitly focused on the discipleship task. The goal is to ingrain these times in the normal fabric of daily life. One good way to start is to pair the discipleship time with a regular event in your family’s life. What do you do every day that you can build this habit into? Perhaps a meal, bedtime, bath time, etc.
Moments
Moments are the spontaneous opportunities we have throughout the day or week to put towards Christ. There are myriad opportunities for this in daily life if we are intentional about it and recognize the opportunities. One helpful suggestion is to do your best to always be present mentally. Instead of listening to the radio in the car, ask your kids questions and explain to them different ways God is working around them at that moment. Instead of looking at your cell phone in line, observe your surroundings with your children and talk about what you see. God is everywhere and constantly working. Moments are those times when we help our kids see that truth.
Milestones
Milestones are like a more significant version of both time and moments because some of them are going to be more spontaneous. Milestones are making a big deal out of what God is doing in the life of the family and child. Things like graduations or baptisms are going to be milestones for your family. It’s adding a level of intentionality to really make a memorable milestone out of what God has done in your family. Milestones aren’t always positive and celebratory things. We talk about commemorating, not just celebrating, because it might be something like the loss of a loved one. But those are significant moments to talk about who God is, and it’s a milestone in the life of the family and the child. It can be anything that we celebrate, or commemorate. We’re going to verbalize it or write it down or do some form of memorializing what’s happened, all with the intention of pointing our kids to Christ and the gospel.
Discipling when one parent is an unbeliever
Trying to disciple your children when your spouse is not onboard or even hostile to the task can be very difficult and discouraging. Here are a few suggestions if this is your situation:
Think of family discipleship as an opportunity to invite an unbelieving spouse into what you know to be true about your Savior.
Be gracious, understanding that this is not something where the Lord has grabbed a hold of their heart yet.
Be gentle in the way Peter tells us to be gentle, giving a reason for the hope that we have.
In some ways this is like being a spiritual single parent. Be sure to invite your pastor and your church into this with you so that you would not feel like every burden is on your shoulders in this moment.
Share your hope for the salvation of your spouse as well. Every marriage is different, but the Lord remains the same. And you want to point your spouse to Jesus as much as you want to point your kids to him.
“How to Disciple Your Children,” The Advent Christian Witness, Spring 2021