In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “You have heard… but I say to you,” and He applies that to many different truths. We have seen how the world brings up kids and the mess that produces. How should we, as the children of God, bring up our earthly children in a way that’s led by the Holy Spirit? I don’t want to produce religious churchgoers. I want to raise people who’ve had life-changing encounters with Jesus.
Let’s begin with a scripture you’ve heard many times. Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” This is a really tough thing to say, but if somebody grew up in a Christian family and departs from it when they’re older, either the Bible isn’t true, or we didn’t do the best job of training up that child. Children need to be loved, and we’ll get to that, but we have a role and a responsibility as parents to train them up in the ways of God.
Key One: Get a Vision
God has a vision of the life He wants your child to live. When a baby is born, most of the time there’s no history with that baby. We look at a baby through the eyes of hope. It’s like a wonderful blank piece of paper. Then parents live through experiences with their children, through what they consider faults and challenges, and they begin to shift from God’s vision to what’s actually happened.
I spoke to somebody in a different country recently who was telling me how difficult his town was, how he’d been rejected and how people were mean to him. I said to this chap, “Every single thing you say is true, but it’s not the truth.” The problem is you end up living in reaction to what’s actually happened, not in reaction to the plan of God.
Your child is the most amazing thing on planet Earth. There is nothing more valuable. Your child is fearfully and wonderfully made, and your child is not a mistake. God has a glorious, stupendous, amazing plan for your child, for the rest of their life and throughout eternity. He has put gifts, callings and anointings in that child.
As written in 2 Corinthians 5:16-17, “Therefore, from now on, we regard no one according to the flesh… Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.” What we often do with children is know them after the flesh: “That’s little Johnny, and he’s a little stinker,” or “She’s got a temper,” or “He’s rebellious.” We relate to them through the lens of our perception and our experience, rather than through God’s vision. If you will look at them through God’s vision, they will end up looking at themselves through God’s vision.
Sometimes we need to go to the Lord and repent of the vision we’ve allowed the world, our own experience or our parents’ failings to put in us. Whether your child is two days old, two years old or twenty years old, it’s never too late. Pray, “Lord, wipe away my second-hand, tawdry vision and give me Your vision for my child. Let me look at my child through the eyes of promise and potential, and not the eyes of experience.”
Key Two: Love Them
God is love. Love isn’t something He does; it’s who He is, His intrinsic nature. As written in 1 John 3:1, “Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God!”
Every single child who has ever been born needs love. You can never really love your children too much. Children are like starving birds, squawking; they long to be loved. They don’t need TVs, iPads or the latest gizmo. They don’t need a battery-powered, rocket-propelled baby stroller. They don’t need to go to the college somebody else tells you is best. They need love.
Let’s be honest about ourselves as parents. We are all broken. I love Jesus and I work on me, but all of us carry rejection, and at times that makes it a struggle to love others. We need to learn to love our children, and I would say love them in a tactile way. As babies, hold them, hug them and kiss them. Things change as kids get older, but your kids are never too old for a hug, and they’ve never heard “I love you” enough. Say it: “You are the most precious thing in the world to me.”
When a kid knows it’s loved, you’ve solved about 80% of its problems in life. If a child doesn’t know it’s loved by its parents, it will spend the rest of its life, even after the parents are dead, chasing after that love, that approval, that approbation. What does the Father say to Jesus on day one of His ministry? “You are My beloved Son; in You I am well pleased.” Jesus hadn’t preached one sermon. The Father says, “I love you and I’m pleased with you.” Kids need to be anchored in love.
Key Three: Set Clear Boundaries
This is countercultural to the way the world tries to get us to raise children. Every child, even a tiny baby, but especially as children grow, needs boundaries. The world will tell you you’re being mean and restrictive. At the appropriate age, your children need to know what time they go to bed. If you allow them to watch TV or look at a phone, they need to know how much and where that ends. If you put a meal in front of them, do they have to finish the plate and rinse it? Whatever it is, they need boundaries, and boundaries need to be defined.
Imagine I’m driving happily down a country lane in Ireland and a policeman pulls me over and says I’m going too fast. He’s the cop, I’m not, but I have a right to ask, “Where was the sign?” If I don’t know where the boundaries are, I’m going to cross them.
It’s our job to put good and correct boundaries around our children. Make them really, really clear. At the right age, it’s worth writing them down. Make them unemotional: “Here’s the boundary in this house. You will not smoke cigarettes in my house.” It doesn’t matter what the next-door neighbor does with their kids. With clear, defined boundaries, if somebody crosses one, they know they’ve crossed it. As written in Psalm 16:6, “The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places; yes, I have a good inheritance.”
Key Four: Establish Authority
Keys three, four and five are all linked. A parent needs to have authority. This word has been maligned and misused. People hear “parental authority” and think of some angry dad shouting at kids, and that is actually a lack of authority. Authority simply means there is a person in charge and a person under their authority. It doesn’t mean the person in charge is always right.
When a cop flashes his lights and pulls me over, it doesn’t matter how young or old he is, male or female; he’s a cop and he’s in authority, and I should be respectful. If somebody stands up while I’m preaching and starts screaming in tongues, I’m going to tell them to sit down. God’s in charge of the church, but at a practical level, I am.
With all children, this is best done at a very young age. We can usually establish authority with a certain tone of voice. If a young child hits a sibling or a friend, I wouldn’t try to reason with them. I would put on a certain voice, like the policeman putting on the uniform, and say, “No. Stop.” The child immediately recognizes, “This is Dad and Mom saying no.” It’s not about shouting. You are not called primarily to reason with your kids; you’re called to have authority. Authority isn’t there to squash and destroy people. Authority keeps the boundaries.
When a parent draws a boundary, the child will usually push back and exert its own will. That parent doesn’t need to get angry or lash out; the parent simply needs to say, “No, you will not do this.” If you don’t teach your kids authority at age one, two, three, four or five, the policeman will teach them, or the prison cell will teach them. The goal is to raise children who will one day stand in their own authority, but while they’re under our roof, they submit to ours. As written in Ephesians 6:1, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.”
I tell my kids, “You will be in church every Sunday.” Once in a blue moon there may be a vacation, but staying at home on Sunday is not an option. When you leave home, you get to make your own rules.
Key Five: Guard the Environment
So much of what molds a child is the environment in which it grows up. If it grows up in love, it tends to be loving. If it grows up in strife, it drinks from that. Most of us think carefully about what the nursery will look like, but we don’t think about the environment that child will grow up in: church, school, friends, and media, social media, TV, movies and phones.
You can be living as a child of promise in the promised land, but if you send your kids to an Egyptian church and an Egyptian school, let them hang out with idol-worshipping Egyptian kids, and put the Egyptian app on their phone to doom-scroll Egyptian TikTok every day, Egypt is raising your kids.
This will upset some people, but I mean it from the bottom of my heart: parents should not choose a church for their kids. Parents should choose a church for themselves, and the kids should come with them. The best thing you can ever do for the whole life and the eternal life of your children is that pretty much every Sunday, your children see you in a born-again, spiritual church worshipping God. I say this particularly to dads. “They’re bored.” So what? Let them sit in the front row and see you worship the living God.
Every Sunday I’m at the front with my kids. I fall to my knees, raise my hands and praise Him in tongues. Often when I’m leading worship, I’ll look down and my wife will be unashamedly dancing before the Lord, even if nobody else is. That will mark kids. Again and again I’ve seen parents choose a cool church with a bouncy castle and two hundred kids, and everybody backslides. The parents grow lukewarm, and the kids wander away from God.
The same principle is true for education. I’m not giving you a law that says you must homeschool, but don’t hand your kids over to somebody else to raise or indoctrinate. Know who their friends are. As written in Proverbs 13:20, “He who walks with wise men will be wise, but the companion of fools will be destroyed.” Know what they’re looking at online. Whatever environment you put your kid in, they will end up looking like it.
Scriptures for Study
Proverbs 22:6, Matthew 5:21-22, Psalm 139:13-14, Jeremiah 29:11, Jeremiah 1:5, Mark 8:36, 2 Corinthians 5:16-17, Ephesians 2:10, 1 John 3:1, 1 John 4:8, 1 John 4:19, Mark 1:11, Matthew 3:17, Romans 8:38-39, Psalm 16:6, Proverbs 29:15, Ephesians 6:1-4, Colossians 3:20-21, Romans 13:1, Luke 7:8, Hebrews 10:25, Psalm 122:1, Proverbs 13:20, 1 Corinthians 15:33, Deuteronomy 6:6-9
10 Questions for Reflection
- Am I seeing my child through God’s vision or through my experience?
- What labels have I put on my child “according to the flesh”?
- What is God’s dream for each of my children?
- Do my children know, without doubt, that they are loved?
- When did I last hug my child and say, “I love you”?
- Are the boundaries in my home clear, defined and unemotional?
- Do I try to reason with my children when I should be exercising authority?
- Who chose our church, and why?
- Do my children regularly see me worshipping God?
- Who are my children’s friends, and what are they watching online?
