Discipling Your Children
Dr. Voddie Baucham, jr, is the pastor of Grace Family Baptist Church in Houston, Texas. Outside of pasturing a church, his emphasis is cultural apologetics and the development of the Christian family in general. On his blog, he’s been answering select questions from readers.
This recent article of his addresses the matter of family discipleship. He offers his own personal development in this area as encouragement that it can be done even with older children.
Are you a Christian with children? Are you discipling them yourself? Feel inadequate to the task? Then you must learn – and you must take your children along on your journey to grow in the knowledge of God and his wisdom.
And where children have started late, they may begin to realize their own sin. I’ve written about “cookie-jar Christians” before. My kids are cookie-jar Christians. John Piper wrote a recent article about the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son.
With regard to discipling children who obey at a younger age, I offered a two-pronged approach in the comments:
May you herewith be encouraged to disciple your children.
This recent article of his addresses the matter of family discipleship. He offers his own personal development in this area as encouragement that it can be done even with older children.Are you a Christian with children? Are you discipling them yourself? Feel inadequate to the task? Then you must learn – and you must take your children along on your journey to grow in the knowledge of God and his wisdom.
And where children have started late, they may begin to realize their own sin. I’ve written about “cookie-jar Christians” before. My kids are cookie-jar Christians. John Piper wrote a recent article about the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son.
With regard to discipling children who obey at a younger age, I offered a two-pronged approach in the comments:
First, when we read the Bible at home and discuss what it means, we have a method where we use simple hermeneutical principles to look for 1) what we learn about God, 2) what we can be thankful to God for, 3) what we must confess to God, and 4) what we need to pray for (and do). The confession is designed to help make them more sensitive to their own sin so that they have a sense of their own depravity before God despite a relative lack of obvious sins of commission.
The second thing is to involve them in ministry, typically evangelistic, to others who are deep in sin, not so that they can develop a sense of superiority, but because godly ministry requires love. I want my kids to learn to love people who are otherwise looked down upon by much of Christian society. In this way, they can identify through the object of love with the bearing of the sins of others in love and ministry after the pattern of Christ who bore our sins on the cross.
The second thing is to involve them in ministry, typically evangelistic, to others who are deep in sin, not so that they can develop a sense of superiority, but because godly ministry requires love. I want my kids to learn to love people who are otherwise looked down upon by much of Christian society. In this way, they can identify through the object of love with the bearing of the sins of others in love and ministry after the pattern of Christ who bore our sins on the cross.
May you herewith be encouraged to disciple your children.
Labels: children, Christian, discipleship, John Piper, Voddie Baucham
posted by Jim Pemberton at 11:10 PM
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