Your Kids are Always Being Discipled

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge;
    because you have rejected knowledge,
    I reject you from being a priest to me.
And since you have forgotten the law of your God,
    I also will forget your children.

Hosea 4:6

Introduction

Children are always being catechized. Their minds are always learning, memorizing, observing the world around them, and the adults who talk to them and who talk around them are constantly shaping how they see that world.

Is this world mostly a joke to be laughed at? Is it unfair and arbitrary? Is it largely a threat, or a trap that we are caught in? Or is it a plush and harmless place filled with only delight and whimsy? Who runs it? And why does He run it the way He does? And who am I in it? Was I made, or did I come into being through chance and the ungoverned blips of proteins and cells?

These catechism questions and answers are constantly being shaped and crafted in your children’s hearts.

Believing the True Story

When our kids are young, they are always forming in their minds assumptions and beliefs about what kind of story they are in. This is an inescapable feature of the fact that we were made by the original Storyteller. Do our children believe they are characters in a story about the God who is Father, Son, and Spirit, a grand drama about His wisdom and holiness and mercy and justice? Or have their hearts been shaped to assume they are in a story about themselves, one in which everyone else merely plays a bit part? Perhaps they’re being fashioned to believe they are in an absurd story without fairness or a point to it all. These beliefs are significantly carved into the wood of our minds when we are young. It’s given shape and texture when we are still figuring out what this massive enterprise around us with all its voices and colors and rules and pains and jokes and delights really is. We are made to be worshipers and learners and believers, not merely to be information repositories, and so when the roots and the trunks of our souls are still young we exhibit that feature of our design by beginning to worship things and desire things and trust in things.

This is happening in our children all the time. And what stories we let our kids ingest, what teachers we let instruct them about the world’s components and what those components mean, what our own priorities and tones of voice and emotional states are, these things train our children in assuming and believing and feeling particular things about the world.

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

Ephesians 6:4

Christians: We have to be more deliberate about what our children are being trained to assume and believe about the world and themselves. No movie, no classroom teacher, no colorful board book, no app or friendship or funny show is neutral in this regard. Each of these things chisels, each leaves marks and impressions about what is true, good, and beautiful, what is worthwhile, what is friendly and what is an enemy, where the lines between good guys and bad guys are drawn, what the point of life is or whether life even has a point. Perhaps the most dangerous lie we presume in twenty-first century America is that there are morally, spiritually neutral squares on the chessboard of creation. Our children will never have morally neutral classrooms, teachers, favorite stories, favorite songs, or best friends. All of these things catechize, disciple, craft the hearts of children. We must account for that reality as we delegate and manage the training and raising of the children He has knit together and then entrusted to us.

What would a child be like if his assumptions about what the world was like and who he was in it was entirely shaped by twenty-first century Disney movies? Would he see the world as wrecked by human sin and accountable to a holy God? Would he see the magnificent Creator as worthy of all his heart, and see himself in desperate need of forgiveness so he could have peace with that Creator and worship Him forever? Hardly. This kid would see himself as inherently good and his dreams as inherently good and the realization of those dreams being the whole point of his life.

Children can certainly watch a movie without adopting all of its assumptions. But all movies contain underlying claims about the world that they must make for the story to be intelligible, and if false claims about the world are not challenged, if Disney is the only nutrient a child’s soul is receiving, his young, growing nature will increasingly be conformed to it. A child who watches Frozen in the afternoon and then has the story of Genesis 1-3 taught to her at night can likely account for the flawed story in light of the perfectly true one. But a child who spends hours a day becoming increasingly comfortable with the idea that she is inherently good and that the world can be made sense of and understood without reference to Yahweh is far less likely to be able to flip a switch and see herself as a sinner in need of a Savior because of a single hour of church instruction per week.

The training of young, eternal hearts is serious business.

Who Shaped Them?

It is worth asking why so many of our children, once they leave our Christian homes, feel more at ease living with the world’s assumptions and moralities than with the Bible’s. Why do so many young people raised in evangelical churches find living with their girlfriends acceptable? Why is it so commonplace to see people in their twenties and thirties who were raised by Christian parents rejecting basic Christian doctrine and church membership? We seem to be far more ready to blame the churches where they spent a couple of hours per week than to reevaluate the screens they watched each night and the schools where they spent hours a day. Which is likelier to be the more frequent cause of wayward hearts?

American Christians must accept the fact that there is a difference between having your heart shaped by the world as you live within arm’s reach of Christianity and having your heart actually shaped by Christ. There is a difference between being approximate to the Christian worldview and adopting the Christian worldview. We cannot allow our children to have their affections and assumptions trained by the world and then expect them to live and think as Christians. We have no right to be surprised when our children’s hearts are carved by unbelievers with the tools of unbelief and they soon no longer believe.

A Closing Call

While no one who is truly Christ’s can be plucked from His hands (John 10:27-28), an equally true feature of reality is that God uses means to make and keep genuine believers (Romans 10:13-15). God will get all the glory for every elect person presented to the Father blameless on the last day. At the same time God will have used His means to do this, including real flesh-and-blood folk speaking the Good News of Jesus and real brick-and-mortar churches with sermons and songs and real Christian mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers praying real prayers after dinner and before bed and in the middle of the night when they can’t sleep.

We should expect the all-sovereign God to use faithful, thoughtful, diligent Christian parenting to save and keep elect from the next generation.

And we should want to be those faithful Christian parents.

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”

Deuteronomy 6:4-9