#28. Too Simple for Experts
Whatever situation a Christian mother is in, however hostile or complicated her circumstances, there is one duty which is not out of her reach. It’s the duty which brings rest to the heavy laden. Whatever else you can or can’t give your children, you can give them the gift of being a mother who abides in Jesus. We’ve spent a few articles looking at how abiding in Jesus happens as we respond to his word and love his people. Instead of children being a hindrance to abiding, they help us grow towards maturity.
Mums, this isn’t only about our own growth as Christians. It isn’t just us who are learning to abide in the Jesus vine. God formed people in such a way that children are highly dependent on their parents. The goal of this dependence is not merely the survival of the species. It is God’s provision for very young humans so they can learn the patterns of living as God’s people in God’s world as God’s image bearers. We are teaching our children, moment by moment, head to toe, waking or sleeping, interested or bored, sick or well, what it means to belong to Jesus. They are strapped onto us, brought into the reality of abiding in Jesus, long before they understand enough to love or reject Jesus for themselves. We’re keeping them close, making sure they get the vine’s sap. If you haven’t read it yet, article #14. About Fathers is an important background article for this one. ‘Children learning to abide in Jesus’ is just another way of saying, ‘raising godly offspring’.
Abiding in Jesus involves knowing and doing, so does teaching our children to abide in Jesus. This article is about the knowing: helping our kids form a relationship with Jesus’ words. In the future, we’ll look at the doing: helping them grow to obey Jesus.
The best way to end up with a child who can cook is not to buy them a play kitchen, to read them picture books about cooking, to stick them in front of a cooking show or sign them up to a culinary course. Kids learn to cook by helping in the home kitchen. Our society thinks we need to create artificial situations to teach disembodied knowledge and isolated skills. We rely on strange (expensive) simulations to transfer data and techniques to our children. The early childhood market is full of institutions and products specialising in scalable, quantifiable, documentable busy work. But the life is bleached right out of the very things we are hoping children will learn. The life is bleached out of the children too. They learn how to do the simulation, how to operate the plastic toy, but they do not come to have a relationship with the thing itself. Once again, my friend Charlotte Mason has a lot to say about these things.
In the presence of these hyper-researched quality-controlled systems, we are intimidated. This professionalisation of early childhood education has left the average parent feeling like they are not qualified to care for their own children (you only have to read the regular commentary about the difficulties of childcare in lockdown to hear the inadequacy many parents feel). Christian parents are often not exempt from this sense. This insecurity changes how we go about discipling our own children. It gets in the way of us taking hold of the very work God has trusted us with.
Most of us do not feel qualified to help our children come to know Jesus. We’re used to deferring to experts in other things, so we seek out the experts in this too. Sometimes we respect God’s word so much that we don’t want to mess it up. But we won’t protect the specialness of the gospel by staying silent until the kids are old enough to really appreciate it. In doing that, our silence would actually be teaching our kids that the gospel is not worth talking about. As G.K Chesterton famously wrote, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly”.
We’re often waiting until we are good at it—reading the Bible, being more consistent in our prayer life, having our own questions resolved—before we start helping our children know Jesus. When we’re paralysed by insecurity, our kids accidentally learn the opposite of what we hope. They learn that the Bible’s song has no place in our home. That following Jesus is for people who are good at it. The experts. That it’s something which can only be done somewhere else, in very particular circumstances. It’s true of learning in general, any good thing we hope our kids will grow into. If it doesn’t deserve a place in our own family culture, then, it’s likely our kids will learn that these things don’t deserve a place at all. If hearing and obeying Jesus’ word, if meeting with Jesus’ people, are not important to our family, then our children will come to think that Jesus himself doesn’t matter.
As we do clumsily start to bring our kids into a life joined to Jesus, we realise that we are not the teacher at all. We don’t need to be the expert because the Holy Spirit is. He is using his Words, the words of Scripture which he brought into being (2 Peter 1:21), to bring spiritual life to us and our children. God’s Word is robust and can withstand the sticky fingers we bring to them. We do it imperfectly, but the words are so alive and penetrating that, when read in a spirit of delight, our ordinariness can’t undermine its effect. We get better at it by doing it. We learn to read the Bible with our children by reading the Bible with our children.
We need to read a little bit of Bible, daily, long before our kids can understand what it means. If your family doesn’t already have a routine time each day where you all gather to read the Bible and pray, then it’s most natural to create one around a meal, or every meal where you end up sitting together. If you don’t sit with your kids to eat, then work out how you can start. There is no other activity in human life which is as inevitable as eating, so its a great place to pin your family Bible consumption.
When I was home alone during the day with my first toddlers, the routine of Morning Tea and Bible Time became a staple. At 10am, we sat at the table, I laid out their food and read to them while their hands and mouths were occupied. If the food disappeared too soon, I had blank paper and crayons for them to draw, or playdough to model with. The eldest would draw something we were reading about. It took less than ten minutes, maybe 15 if the kids were invested in what they were making. Here’s the method—not because it needs one, but to show how very basic it is:
Bring good cheer to the table (I always found this easier at 10am than the evening meal when we were all worn out).
Open the Bible and pray for God’s help to understand God’s words.
While we did occasionally read a children’s retelling of Scripture, we mostly just read narrative and poetic sections from the NIV: the gospels, Genesis, parts of Exodus and the other historical books; pivotal points from salvation history. Proverbs and Psalms. We worked our way through one scene at a time, in order.
Read a section long enough to make sense, but brief enough to stay attentive to.
Make it brief and simple enough to do cheerfully and often.
As children grow, gently remind them to listen with respectful attention.
By the time they are school aged, ask the kids to retell what they heard (they will probably do it voluntarily before then).
If they are not old enough, you retell the passage—not to distill it for them, but to cement the words in your own mind. It just so happens they will probably start to contribute to the retelling without you prodding them.
Pray about something from the passage and anything else that is relevant for that day.
God teaches each member of the family what they need, as they need it, without our digesting and regurgitating every lesson, drawing the conclusions for them. Questions will come as the kids are ready to ask them. If we try to prise open their minds with questions they aren’t yet asking for themselves, the answers won’t mean much. There is a big difference between a two year old who can repeat a gospel rhyme and what happens down the track when a living idea from the Bible plants itself in her mind. In our earnestness (anxiety even), we want to get our kids relaying the facts, and then we feel more confident that they are on the right track. But mere fact memorisation bypasses the power of story and ideas to form our thinking and affections. Be confident that they will take hold of the ideas in God’s word which they are ready for, if you keep it in their ears. If you keep reading and thinking out loud, they’ll join in eventually.*
The most precious thing we have is also to be the most common and well worn. This is a work of decades, so stick with something you can do ten thousand times over. Don’t be impatient for them to get to the ideas which have taken you years and years to come to terms with. Our kids’ understanding will grow imperceptibly and no less miraculously than the adult who hears about Jesus for the first time and repents, but it is a very different process, using very different tools.
It’s God’s job to do the hidden work of regenerating our children and when it happens, it will probably at a time when neither the kids, nor parents know. We won’t know exactly when, but it will become evident that he has. It’s plain wonderful. And it’s possible that even with a childhood of being close to the sap of the Jesus vine, some children will not persevere to fruitful adulthood. Faithful abiding, the kind of abiding which includes our kids, is not a guarantee. But to not do it, for fear that it mightn’t ‘work’ is to give up on the very means which God often graciously uses.
There’s nothing like the hard hitting words from someone too long dead to be offended by. A pastor named Henry Venn wrote in his book, The Whole Duty of Man (published 1811, possibly also known as The Complete Duty of Man),
“For children very soon and justly conclude that whatever their parents inculcate with seriousness and frequency must be worthy of their remembrance; and, on the contrary, that the things in which they have never or very seldom been instructed, must be of little or no advantage to their happiness. Hence, young people who have never been taught at home the excellent majesty of the Lord our God, our absolute dependence upon Him, and His unwearied mercy towards us, attend public worship of His name with most offensive levity and profaneness of carriage…What an invincible obstacle, humanly speaking, to the success of the preacher of the gospel must be found in the hearts of young people whose natural ignorance, pride, and unbelief, like poisonous plants have been nourished by their parents’ principles, or suffered to strengthen by their criminal neglect…”
(in The Godly Family: Essays on the Duties of Parents and Children, Soli Deo Gloria, p.98
*That paragraph draws on Charlotte Mason’s principles. Down the track I will have more to write about her. There are some parallel projects I have going which help parents consider her method, you can have a look here. Or sign up to the newsletter below to hear when any CM events are happening.
