Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Tuesday, April 28th. Our host is the president of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. How do we communicate the big ideas, the big truths of Scripture to our children. We'll give you some practical suggestions about that today. Stay tuned.
And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us on the Tuesday edition. Before we dive into what we want to talk about today, Dennis, I want to remind our listeners, today, tomorrow, and Thursday are the last three opportunities you have to register for one of our upcoming FamilyLife Weekend to Remember Marriage Conferences and take advantage of a special offer we're making for FamilyLife Today listeners.
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Now, we're going to talk today about how we communicate big theological concepts to children, and, you know, I think most of us, as parents, we want to communicate the truth about who God is to our children, and yet I think kind of the default way parents deal with this is to buy a Bible storybook and read Bible stories to their children. And there is nothing wrong with Bible stories to your children, but there is more to it than that, don't you think?
Dennis: I do. In fact, what you're talking about, Bob, is really, I think, what parents want an answer for. In fact, we surveyed more than 100,000 people in churches across America and asked them when it came to parenting what are the issues you'd like help with? And I was astounded that the issue we're going to talk about today was at the top, and if it wasn't number one, it was in the top three issues that parents today ask for and needed help on. They wanted to know how do I introduce my child to God? How can I teach them about who God is, what He is like, and how I should relate to them?
Bob: That's simple, you just teach them a big song – [sings] "My God is so BIG, so strong and so mighty there's nothing my God cannot do – for you." Right? That song? I mean, they got it right then, didn't they?
Dennis: Let's ask our resident theologian on the broadcast today, Dr. Bruce Ware. Is that all they need, Bruce?
Bruce: Well, that's a good start.
Bob: It is a good start, isn't it?
Dennis: I'm glad you …
Bruce: It's a very good song, you know?
Dennis: I'm glad you didn't discourage Bob in his singing. Bruce is a professor of Christian theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He's been married for 30 years to his wife, Jody, and they have two daughters, Bethany and Rachel, and he has dedicated this book to them – "Big Truths for Young Hearts," and it's all about teaching your children about God.
Now, where do we start? Do we start with a song? That's not a bad place to begin – or the storybooks that Bob mentioned. But there is more we need to do, isn't there?
Bruce: There is. I think it's what songs attempt to do is going in the right direction, and that's developing ideas. You know, the songs that really mean the most to us are ones where the richness of the truth is unpacked. And whether we do that through song, or whether we do it through discussion with our children, and, for that matter, as families together with wives and husbands as well. But to unpack the truths that are there in Scripture to try to convey a vision of how great and glorious God is.
You know, Dennis, I read A.W. Tozer's, "The Knowledge of the Holy," when I was a freshman in college and, honestly, my entire life has been marked by what the Lord did in my life when I read that book. And Tozer, you remember this very memorable line. He begins chapter one with the statement, "What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us." And that is not hyperbole. This is the truth.
Dennis: The reason I was chuckling at that, Bruce, is that is one of the most often-repeated quotes on this broadcast. I love that book, too, and I kind of boiled it down to what I felt like like Tozer was saying, which was the most important thing about you is what you think about God.
Because if we think wrongly about God, we're not going to think rightly about who we are.
Bob: Or anything else, for that matter, yeah, yeah.
Bruce: And, of course, nothing in our culture encourages us to think rightly about God or about ourselves. Our culture encourages a far too lofty view of ourselves and a belittled view of God, and we need to turn the tables on this with our own children and our own homes and our own churches. We need to revive the sense of how great God is. What a privilege it is to be a weak, needy creature who is in relationship with a great, glorious God.
I'm not the great one, I'm not the wise one, I'm not the strong one – He is. But, oh, my goodness, and my weakness and need, what an incredible thing that He would love me and give himself to me as He has.
Dennis: Where else is the hope? And I'm going to ask you to move off of the soapbox for a moment while I step up on it, because I couldn't agree more, and I think the place for that to happen is at home.
Bruce: Absolutely.
Dennis: Most of us, as parents, I think mistakenly believe that we should take them to church to teach them about God. And you know what? That needs to occur there.
Bruce: Right.
Dennis: But, you know where it needs to start? It needs to start with moms and dads who, in the middle of life – I used to call it "sandbox theology" – playing with your kid in the sandbox, you're relating to them on their level about who God is.
Bob: Deuteronomy 6 – "As you walk on the way, as you rise up, lie down, it's all day long."
Bruce: Right.
Bob: But kids start off life, Bruce, as I think fundamentally as empiricists, everything they are learning is through their senses.
Bruce: Yes, right, right.
Bob: And so you introduce a subject like God, and you take them outside of their senses, and you take them into their imagination, but now everything in their imagination is not really true, it's fiction, it's the Easter Bunny or it's fairies or it's goblins or whatever else you're reading to them as fiction. How do you help a child understand that God, who you can't see and you can't touch and you can't smell – He is real.
Bruce: Well, one thing you can do is use images in the Bible itself that speak of God that are visual. I have a very precious memory with our own two girls. When they were young – and this story only works because they were young. You'll see that in a moment – but I read one morning on our family vacation on the coast of Oregon, we were staying at a cottage that was right on the beach – beautiful area right near Cannon Beach, Oregon, and I had read to them that morning from Isaiah 40, verse 12, that says, "Who do you know who has measured the waters of this world in the hollow of His hand?"
So after we read that morning, I said to the girls, "Hey, how about if we do a little experiment down at the beach?" Of course, they're excited. Bethany was about six or seven, and Rachel was about three, and so we headed down to the beach, and when we got there, I said, "Okay, girls, now here is what we're going to do. Remember that verse about how God can hold the waters of the world in the hollow of his hand?" "Yeah, we remember that, Daddy." So I said, "Well, what we're going to do is I'm going to go out into the water, and I'm going to lean down and scoop up all the water I can out of this Pacific Ocean, and I want you to stay here and watch and see how far the level of the water dips when I do that."
"Okay, Daddy," they're excited. So you can see this only works because they were little, right?
Dennis: Yeah, sure.
Bruce: So I went out there and did that and scooped up the water. "Did it change?" "No, Daddy." I said, "Look again, come on, now, look real carefully." So I scooped up the water. "Did it change?" "No, Daddy." So I came back and got down on my knees, eye-level with my girls, and I said, "Now, girls, look at that ocean. I came out here, and I scoop up all the water I can in the hollow of my two hands, and you can't tell anything has changed. But can you imagine a hand so big that if it came down and scooped up water, that ocean bed would be dry? That's how big God is."
Dennis: Yeah.
Bob: Get the biggest bucket you can and say, "Okay, how much – we've got a gallon here, we've got two gallons. Let's see how much it takes to drain the ocean."
Dennis: The point you're doing is you're re-introducing or you are introducing your children to the wonder of God.
Bruce: Which they will not get in their culture, and, sadly, in many of our churches they won't get this.
Dennis: Well, not only will they not get the wonder of God, they'll even have certain concepts that attack the very nature of who God is. And I don't want to get off on a bunny trail, which I'm sure you, as a theology professor could run with us on. But the whole issue of Creation and evolution.
Bruce: Sure, yeah.
Dennis: I mean, the attack on the Creation of God, of Him creating the earth and the heavens and the stars as a representation of who He is. It's how we introduce, how we begin to introduce our children to who God is.
Bob: Bruce, on the concept of sin and helping our children understand their own nature as sinners and the whole nature of sin itself, most of the time, it seems to me, that parents address sin – I think we did when our kids were growing up, around the issue of obedience. Sin is when you do something wrong, and you know you've done wrong things.
For me, when I grew up with that idea of sin, I think it gave me the wrong picture as a young adult because I began to see my sin as maybe my bad habits or – I didn't really see it as a fundamental rebellion against the God of the Universe. How do you help a 7-year-old or an 8-year-old get past thinking that sin is just that you told a fib yesterday and really understand that it's a rebellious act against God?
Bruce: Well, of course, sin is those things, and you didn't say that it isn't, Bob, but they are those things. But it's what gives rise to them. It really is where the heart of sin is. Out of a heart that wants to go its own way. I mean, at the root of our natures as sinners is this autonomy, this sense that I have the right to define for myself what happiness is; what I should be able to do and not do; what I should be able to have and not have. I have the right to that.
So, I mean, what this does is set the stage, then, for the Gospel, for the opportunity to help train our children that the thing they need most is to have this sinful rebellious independent spirit broken as Christ and His work on the cross comes and forgives their sin and remakes them as people who now, with hearts that long more and more – of course, never, in this life, can we do this perfectly, but that long more and more to do what pleases God.
Dennis: One of the things about Bob's illustration of a 6-year-old is that they are going to give you plenty of illustrations to teach them what we're talking about.
Bruce: Absolutely.
Dennis: All the way through elementary school, they're going to make choices, clearly, to disobey you as parents. And we wouldn't do it every time, but on more than one occasion, when there was sibling rivalry and they started hitting on each other or stealing each other's toys or tattling and different things they would do to get back at each other, we would sit the child down and say, "You know what our assignment is as parents is to help you understand that when you disobey me, there is a penalty. There is a price to be paid. There's discipline that occurs. And if we do a good job, when you grow up, you're going to understand that when you disobey God, there are penalties for disobeying Him.
And then, as they grow through those elementary years, you begin to introduce the Gospel, which is the solution for the penalty. It's the answer for how they can be forgiven and how they can know that they have a relationship with Jesus Christ.
Bob: Okay, so maybe kids can get this idea that, "Yes, I'm fundamentally selfish," but explaining the Gospel to a child seems a little complex. In fact, Bruce, I remember, I was a high school student riding to a choir trip one weekend, and I was reading on the bus, "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," and I remember coming to the point where Aslan makes the exchange for Edmond. You know, Edmund has been captured by the White Witch, he is sentenced to die. Aslan takes the White Witch aside, he talks to her, and then he comes back and says, "It's all settled," and the kids don't know what happened, but Edmund's free, and they're all happy until they learn that Aslan has to die.
I remember closing that book, as a senior in high school, and going, "Oh, I understand what people mean when they say Jesus died for your sins." I'd heard that for years but really didn't understand it. How do you help a 7-year-old understand that the solution to their rebellion, the solution to their independence, is in Jesus?
Bruce: You know, part of it, Bob, goes back to the foundation late – earlier, hopefully – in how great God is, which helps us understand why sin is so significant. If God is not great, sin is not great. If God is weighty and significant, then what it means to violate our allegiance to Him and our obedience to Him is itself a weighty thing.
And we cannot, as finite human beings, provide what is needed to correct that breach of relationship. And so here we then present children with this glorious truth that the very offended God is the one who devised the plan by which He would offer His own Son – can you believe it? To be the means by which the offense I have done is rectified through what Christ does in my place as He bears my sin and pays the penalty for my sin on the cross.
But that only makes sense, I think, when you understand how great God is, and it helps us understand the significance, then, of the sin that we have committed.
Dennis: And in your book, I find it interesting the way you've gone about this. You have a whole section that basically answers the question, who is Jesus? And then you have the following section that is entitled, "The Work That Jesus Has Done." And there are concepts, Bruce, that I think within the Christian community we're not certain of. There are a number of parents who are listening to our broadcast right now who, if they died, they don't know where they'd go. They don't know where they'd spend eternity. They aren't sure of their own eternal salvation. So how can they introduce their son or daughter to a relationship with Christ and know with certainty, on the basis of God's Word, where they're going to spend eternity.
How would you address a parent right now, then, who is listening, who isn't sure where they would spend eternity?
Bruce: Oh, my. Well, the single most important thing is to understand the teaching of God's Word that this God who made us, who we rebelled against, who has every right to condemn us, is the very same God who has offered His Son to pay the penalty for our own sin through His death on the cross. And all that is required of us is not works, not some kind of payback for what God has done, but simply accepting, by faith, what God has done for us in Christ.
Why didn't God make it so that we have to do something to earn our salvation? Because then we'd get the credit for it, wouldn't we? But in this way, is not by works, therefore, no one can boast, and all the glory is given to God. So, my goodness, if there is a parent out there who doesn't know for himself or herself the future destiny that you have, the only hope we have, as sinners, is to put our trust in what Christ has done for us in paying the penalty for our sin. Put your faith in a God who has provided for you what you cannot do yourself, and that is give to you eternal life through the forgiveness of your sins in Christ.
Dennis: And there are two things I want to say to every person who is listening. First of all, if you've never done that, either pull off to the side of the road, stop what you're doing, and just bow your head and it's not even the posture of your head or the eyes closed, it's the attitude of the heart of crying out to God in faith of saying, "I receive you as my Savior, Lord Jesus, my Master, my Lord, and thank You for forgiving my sins and for giving me eternal life."
And I'd just encourage you right now, if you are not sure where you would spend eternity, don't let another 60 seconds pass without securing where you are going to spend eternity, because what Bruce has just described, you have God's Word on it. It's His promise to you. It's not Bruce's promise or mine. He is the One who said that person who comes to Him, He will, in no way, cast out. He has promised eternal life. Just do that right now, and then if you do that, if you make that commitment, in a moment, Bob's going to talk to you about a free book we'd like to send you that will talk about that new relationship with Christ and how you can grow.
But then listen to me – your responsibility is to introduce them to the Savior. That's what Bruce is talking about here – is take these curious little minds and begin to think about how you could explain this great God, this great Son that He sent to planet earth to die on the cross for their sins and then be raised on the third day to offer eternal life. You need to take these same simple truths that we've talked about here and introduce that child to that kind of forgiveness and that kind of hope for the future.
Bob: And Bruce's book helps us do that, as parents, in a very simple way. The book is called "Big Truths for Young Hearts," and I might just add here – it doesn't matter how old you are biologically. If you are new in your understanding of Christianity, this would be a great book for someone to go through as a new Christian. You have a young heart because you're a new creature in Christ.
And, again, we've got copies of the book in our FamilyLife Resource Center. You can go to our website, FamilyLifeToday.com, and the information you need about the book is available there. Again, it's FamilyLifeToday.com. We have other resources listed there that are designed to help parents communicate biblical truth to their children. The website, again, is FamilyLifeToday.com.
And for those of you who have sensed that God is stirring in your heart today, and maybe for the first time you have understood the reality of your own sin, you've seen your need for Christ, and you have done as Dennis encouraged you to do – just talk to God and said, "I want Jesus to be my Lord, my Savior, my Master." Call us toll-free at 1-800-358-6329 – 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY, and let us send you a book called "Pursuing God." We'll send it to you absolutely free. We want to put this in your hands because we believe this book is going to help you understand better what it means to be a follower of Jesus and to walk with him.
Call 1-800-FLTODAY and say, "I want that book that they were talking about on the radio for new Christians," and we'll know what you're talking about. It's called "Pursuing God," and we'll be happy to send it to you at no cost.
And, quickly, I need to remind our regular listeners that today and tomorrow and Thursday are the last opportunities you have to contact us to take advantage of the special offer we are making to FamilyLife Today listeners this week. If you sign up to attend one of our Weekend to Remember Marriage Conferences, and you register at the regular rate, we'll give you a second registration absolutely free.
So what I'm saying is if you sign up and pay for your registration, your spouse comes free, and we want to encourage everybody listening. We've got probably three-dozen conferences still to go this spring. We want to encourage you to get away for a fun, romantic weekend getaway at one of our Weekend to Remember Marriage Conferences. There is no better time to register than today, tomorrow, or Thursday.
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Now, tomorrow we're going to continue to talk with Bruce Ware about how, as parents, we can communicate big truths to young hearts, and I hope you can be back with us for that.
I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, and our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We'll see you back tomorrow for another edition of FamilyLife Today.
FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas – help for today; hope for tomorrow.
