In our age of wanting to define and manufacture and replicate, it’s common to think there is a timeline, a fixed clinical order in which Christian formation invariably unfolds. We try and turn following Jesus—or helping our children follow Jesus—into a tidy mathematical equation. Dot points. A recipe. An IKEA assembly manual. One of the common lines suggesting some sort of scientific predictability is that, “behaviour follows belief”, that if we just teach people the right Things To Know, that behaviour will change along with it. Human beings are terribly skilful at living with inconsistencies, though. It takes a lifetime of God’s grace to grow us into the unity, the integrity, of beliefs and behaviour being in harmony. When someone is rather mature and well-ordered, it is more often true that belief guides behaviour. For the rest of us, it’s more complicated than that.

The problem is, that we often paste lines like this into our reasoning when we parent. Perhaps Christians who care a lot about careful Bible teaching are especially susceptible to this idea. We wait for our kids to catch beliefs before we start to address behaviour. But early childhood is not the time when that line is relevant. Rather, it is the time to set the foundation for that kind of wholeness, from which, decades later, our (grown) children’s behaviour will follow their beliefs.

Bringing about belief in Jesus is God’s, hidden, sovereign work. On the other hand, tending to behaviour (which can either help or hinder belief) is definitely on the rather visible parental job description. God starts and finishes the work of saving people, but he uses all manner of means in the middle. Christian parents are not meant to wait on belief before we get busy teaching our children to obey Jesus.

We’ve been considering some ideas that stop us teaching our children to obey. Previously, I wrote about how incomplete thinking about the doctrine of total depravity can lead us to conclude that it’s impossible for our children to learn to obey us. We hold off on teaching obedience while we wait for our kids to get older and show signs of taking Christianity seriously. We treat obedience to parents as an exclusive fruit of the Holy Spirit rather than a common grace. The whole time we’ve passively trained our children to not take Jesus seriously. The idea that belief precedes behaviour is connected. When appropriated into parenting, we hesitate to address behaviour, assuming that a child can’t grow in obedience if they don’t have the maturity to understand and believe the theology behind it. If these ideas were true, the Bible wouldn’t tell children to obey their parents. It’s time we learned to make the same assumptions that Scripture does.

We bring up our children in the training and instruction of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4), not by imparting an abstracted list of Things To Know, a summary of beliefs. We’re not running an 8 week discipleship class, expecting that our children cannot possibly be learning to obey until they get their certificate at the end of it. If we see discipling our children as only teaching them about the Bible, and we then neglect to correct behaviours, we are attending to only half our job. The half we do attend to (if it isn’t undermined by the part left undone), will lead to an abstracted Christianity which doesn’t prepare our children to be whole people living for Jesus in all of life. That is, we might have taught them a list of facts that are true, but we will not have taught them to obey everything Jesus commanded. We will not have taught them to walk in his ways, under his wonderful Lordship.

There is a messy connectedness between disobedience (behaviour) and the hardening of heart and unbelief (Hebrews 3). They feed and amplify each other, causing the drift from Jesus and his ways. Spend some time in Hebrews and Romans and you’ll see that. Drifting from Jesus happens when the heart is hardened by the deceitfulness of sin into unbelief. Disobedience is always in that mix. This hardness of heart feeds further unbelief and disobedience. It isn’t a neat equation of behaviour always following along behind belief. There are plenty of people whose beliefs adjust to accommodate the behaviours they prefer. Belief only leads the way when it is governed by a truth that is valued more than the appetites which are quicker to get our attention.

Childhood is the very time where parents are meant to order their children’s lives so that the children can learn to govern their appetites. Only when parents are taking the lead in this, can children slow down enough to value things outside their immediate desires. A young child who is growing to obey the good government of godly parents, is learning to govern themselves well. This orderliness is what creates space for unseen, slower things to be valued. Obedience is more than behaviour management, it is helping the child secure freedom from the tyranny of their appetites and impulses. Obedience isn’t meant for parental convenience, but for the child to gain space where belief can grow. When we ignore our responsibility to teach our children to obey Jesus, we’re nurturing the kind of appetite-slavery that crowds out belief and hardens the heart.

We’re to teach our children to walk in God’s ways long before they can understand and articulate his truth. If we hold off on teaching our kids to obey until they are old enough to understand their beliefs, then we will have missed the foundational time in a human life when behaviour holds great sway over the formation of belief. Worse than that, we will be approaching our work as parents in a completely different way from what the entirety of Scripture presumes we will.* The Bible especially commissions us to train the behaviour of our children. As I read through the Old Testament recently, it was startling how often the infidelity of God’s people was shown in their failure to teach their children to walk in God’s ways. Keep your eyes open for it as you read. The common verses cited from Proverbs are no less true for their cliche status:

Start children off on the way they should go,
and even when they are old they will not turn from it. (Prov 22:6)

Folly is bound up in the heart of a child,
but the rod of discipline will drive it far away. (Prov 22:15)

We’ve got plenty to do while we wait to see God bring belief into maturity in our children, further down the track. If we do nothing while we wait for Christian belief to solidify, other beliefs will have sprung up from the behaviours that have become normal. If we’re holding off from teaching our kids to obey Jesus, then the functional beliefs formed are likely to be the sort that happen when appetites of the fallen nature are unrestrained. The beliefs formed by the behaviours we permit are likely to hinder the very obedience we’re holding out for.

Is our work merely to wring our hands and say to our disobedient child, “look how dead in sin you are!”, and then do nothing while we wait for words about forgiveness—ie. beliefs—to sink in? No! We’re to train them in the habits of obedience, while they learn the ways of being and talking and relating that make sense for God’s saved people. By dealing with behaviour, we’re helping our children taste God’s goodness, with their whole person, in all parts of their existence, as we wait on God’s Spirit to bring about their new, spiritual birth.

My favourite educationalist, Charlotte Mason said some similar things,

“[T]he actual conformation of the child's brain depends upon the habits which the parents permit or encourage; and that the habits of the child produce the character of the man, because certain mental habitudes once set up, their nature is to go on for ever unless they should be displaced by other habits. Here is an end to the easy philosophy of, 'It doesn't matter,' 'Oh, he'll grow out of it,' 'He'll know better by-and-by,' 'He's so young, what can we expect?' and so on. Every day, every hour, the parents are either passively or actively forming those habits in their children upon which, more than upon anything else, future character and conduct depend.” Home Education p.118

Many people might be involved in teaching our children Bible truths—most commonly through resources, programs and activities (and if you’ve been with me for a while, you’ll know that I don’t think the barrage of kiddie content is the best way to nurture belief). Children receive a lot of attention from people other than parents when it comes to the task of funnelling Bible content into them. But tending to the content on which beliefs are formed is not the sum of raising kids to obey Jesus. Only parents are entrusted with the responsibility and authority to help children with behaviour, with the habits that eventually become character. The Bible tells children to obey their parents, not other delegated adults. When significant slabs of their life are spent in the care of other adults, kids are not learning the norm of obeying parents. Which means they are missing the most basic factor in living God’s ways in childhood. No one else is deputed by God to bring our children into the everyday, every hour behaviours of living in his ways. Someone else can’t do this delicate work for us. It’s worth being with our very young children as much as we can, to give ourselves time and space with them. It takes time to build a home-life where behaviour helps our children toward belief.

*For a tour of the whole Bible’s word on parenting, see Harriet Connor’s “Big Picture Parents: Ancient Wisdom For Modern Life” and her Bible study guide, “Families in God’s Plan”