How Do We Raise Up Our Children in the Knowledge of the Lord?

When it comes to raising children in the knowledge of the Lord the first thing we do is plan. “What are we going to do? What do we want to do?” Often, we don’t do what we think is the most important because we never take the time to plan how we want to get the scriptures into their lives, or what verses we want to memorize. Sometimes taking one hour to plan what we want to do with them can set us up for a lifetime of helping them to know the Lord.

The second thing I always encourage is to pray. Pray with all your might because the reality is that we can plan and do all these wonderful things with our children, but unless the Lord changes their hearts they can’t understand what we’re bringing them to. So, I encourage prayer.

The third thing is to participate in the life of the church. We need our children to not just see that we believe the gospel, but we need them to be part of this community that really embraces gospel teaching and lives it out in a beautiful way. We need to participate in the life of the church.

The fourth thing that is important is to purge from our schedules that which does not meet our ultimate goal. If my ultimate goal is to raise children who know about Christ and my greatest hope is that they would come to know him, I may have to not do certain things that other people in my community are doing. My greatest goal for them is not that they get a college sports scholarship, so I may purge certain activities from our lives so that I can make sure we’re concentrating on what is most important.

The last thing I would encourage is to persevere. It’s hard. I like to think of life in terms of the patterns of our home rather than what a typical day looks like. You will have those moments when you’re having family devotions, and everyone is looking every which way, and no one seems interested. You will think, “Is anything we are doing getting through?” I believe by God’s grace it is, so we persevere. We continue to do what God has called us to do in hopes that he will use our works and our words to our children to hopefully bring them to Christ. When it comes to our families I would encourage all of us to plan, to pray, to participate, to purge, and to persevere as we try to love them well.