TLP 487: Your Children Don’t Understand the Gospel | Arthur C. Woods Interview

And it's never about changing the gospel, but it's how do we communicate that in light of their past. And it works very effectively with….

Parenting as Worship and the Need to Explain the Gospel

Parenting isn't about us. In fact, parenting isn't even about our kids. Parenting is just one way Christian dads and moms are to worship God. So welcome to the Truth Love Parent podcast, where we train dads and moms to give God the preeminence in their parenting.

I'm your host, AM Brewster, and the painful reality is that no one other than Jesus Christ was born perfect. And no one will be born perfect. We're all born ignorant and sinful and selfish. That means that none of us inherently and intrinsically understand the gospel.

In fact, we can't. The Bible says that the gospel is foolishness to mankind. We're not spiritual enough to be able to understand the gospel. We all need God's word to be opened and explained, clearly explained.

But there are certain people who have experienced exceptionally hard circumstances in life who are even more ill-prepared to understand the gospel. Their lived experiences tell them that the beauties of the gospel can't be true.

So yes, none of your kids came into this world understanding the gospel, and some of them may have gone through difficulties that will further veil their understanding of it. But God wants us to introduce our kids to Him, and so we must know the gospel, know our kids, and be wise enough to help them understand it by the power of the Holy Spirit.

My guest today is Arthur C. Woods. Arthur works primarily in the foster and adopted circles, but the information he has for us today can and will sharpen anyone's parenting, regardless of how their children enter the.

Family.

And at the end of the show, please check out TruthLoveParent .com for more resources about how you can share the gospel with anyone in your life. Welcome, Arthur. Thanks for coming on the show. Please take this moment to introduce us to you, your family, and your ministry.

Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks for having me on the show.

My pleasure.

Yeah, my name is Arthur, and as you indicated, I'm married to my wife, Elizabeth, for just over 20 years now. We live in Pennsylvania in the heart of Lancaster County, so a lot of horse and buggies and Amish, and a very, very cool place to live.

And Sight Sound. Sight Sound there.

Yes, yeah, exactly. Sight Sound Theaters is right there. In fact, you didn't know this. This is not a setup that you and I worked on before the show, but Sight Sound is where I asked Liz to marry me.

That's where we got engaged is at Sight Sound in one of the outdoor courtyards that they have there.

That is very awesome.

Yeah.

I'm glad you mentioned that.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's kind of a good memory there. And Liz and I have been foster parents on and off for the past several years. We've been on an adoption track for several years, had some failed adoptions, unfortunately, that fell through right before the adoption was going to happen, so that has been a struggle and certainly a test of faith, but one that God showed His grace to us in major ways.

And yeah, these days I go around and I speak and teach to audiences, adult and youth audiences, about issues related to adoption and foster care, spiritual formation, and really whatever God is calling me to talk to the audience about.

Now, some of you who are listening might say, okay, how relevant is this episode going to be for me? I don't foster, I haven't adopted, all my kids are biological, and maybe you're being tempted to go ahead and just hit that pause button or skip to the next one.

Well, listen, I want to grab you by the ankles, okay, and I want to keep you from leaving this conversation. Please keep listening, all right? Here's why. One of the things that makes trusting the God of the gospel such an amazing resource is the way Arthur and Elizabeth unveil our children's minds, okay, how they think about the gospel, and then they apply God's truth to that reality in super practical ways.

And yeah, okay, they're dealing specifically within the realm of working with foster and adopted kids, but what they have to say is excessively applicable to every child, okay? I cannot stress that enough.

Whether the child in your life is adopted or fostered or biological, or honestly they have no familial ties to you whatsoever. Maybe they're just a kid you teach in Sunday school or in your classroom.

You will want to hear this interview, and I'll tell you why. Your children don't understand the gospel. Think about that. Every child born into this world doesn't understand the gospel, and even if they've begun to understand the gospel, and maybe even if they've become a follower of Christ, they don't understand it all, just like you and I don't understand it all.

But God wants them to understand it. He wants them to grow in it, and he wants to use you to help them do just that, and that is the best part of Arthur and Elizabeth's ministry. So Arthur, how did trusting the God of the gospel come to be?

The ministry, the curriculum, the podcast, what was the genesis of all that?

Sure, well it originally started as a video curriculum for adopted and foster teenagers, and then it kind of built a little bit beyond that to not just teenagers and not necessarily just adopted and foster kids, but really anyone who kind of, any kid who comes from a hard place or is having trouble embracing the gospel message.

And I remember being at an orphan care conference a few years ago, and I was looking around from a lot of the displays that they had there, different organizations and ministries working within orphan care, and there's so many incredible ministries, but one of the things I noticed is there wasn't a ton specifically on the discipleship of adopted and foster teenagers.

There was even some about adopted and foster children, but when it came to actually talking specifically about teenagers, and I come from a youth ministry background, I was a youth pastor for 10 years, so I kind of, it makes sense that I would hone in on that area.

I didn't see anything about discipleship of teenagers. How do you talk to adopted and foster teenagers about? And so that took me on about a year-long journey of writing this curriculum and getting someone to film it and to put it together and get it produced, and we put it out last year sometime, and it's really a good resource for parents or youth workers or Christian counselors, Sunday school teachers, anyone who works with adopted and foster teenagers to help them talk to those kids about the gospel.

So that's kind of how it got started with teenagers, and then my wife and I started the Trusting the God of the Gospel podcast and had a lot of fun doing that. That was a special 10-series episode that is still online, and you can listen to that, and I think it'd be helpful if that's of interest to you.

Yeah, and you have no excuse not to listen to the entire podcast, because like you said, it's only 10 episodes long. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, because I've gone through the DVD curriculum, and as far as I remember, the episodes complement the curriculum, correct?

Yeah, that's exactly right. So we wanted to do it that way intentionally. So if you were to get the curriculum, it's available as a DVD or a digital download. So you have the video and a PDF download workbook that goes with each lesson, but then the podcast we did is also going with each of the lessons in the curriculum.

So as a parent, you can listen to the podcast episode to maybe even help you prepare to go through the material with your adopted or foster teenager. And I'll tell you how this worked for me, okay? So.

I found the podcast. I listened to the podcast. I was like, this is fantastic. It did exactly what needed to do because it gave me the understanding of the breadth and the depth of this particular curriculum.

So then what I did was I purchased one, and I got it, and I went all the way through it, and it was confirmed to me, yes, this is solid. This is what we need. And then what I did after that was I purchased 10 more.

And I bought 10 more specifically because, you know, obviously, I work a lot with families. I thought to myself, this is a fantastic thing that I can use to hand out to various families who are struggling in this area.

And I've given out at least two or three of them since I purchased them. So that was my own, you know, I've listened to a ton of parenting podcasts, and yeah, I've picked up some books and things like that that I've heard.

This is actually the first parenting curriculum that I've purchased just because I heard the podcast. But the quality of the podcast was so good that, you know, I couldn't help it, all right? Now, what makes the DVD and the podcast so extremely valuable to me is that it helps parents, like I said earlier, kind of crawl inside their children's minds, see the gospel as the child potentially does.

And it helps the parents frame the glorious truth of the gospel in ways that the child can more easily understand. And though, as I mentioned before, orphans and children from the foster system have had unique experiences that often cause them to misunderstand the gospel in different ways—that is, until, obviously, the Holy Spirit illumines their minds—biological children are just as blind and confused about the gospel.

Now, they might not always have the same hurdles. Maybe they do, as Arthur alluded to earlier. Even a biological child can have life experiences that set up these same hurdles in their lives, all right?

So, Arthur, where do we start when it comes to helping our children, regardless of their background, understand the gospel, and then hopefully, Lord willing, eventually trust the God of the gospel?

Trauma-Informed Discipleship and Communicating the Gospel

Sure. We start with what we call trauma-informed discipleship. And I want to put up front, right at the beginning, I'm not a therapist. I'm not a counselor. I didn't go to school for that, so I'm not pretending to be something that I'm not.

This is not a counseling podcast or a counseling curriculum that I wrote. It really has to do with discipleship and parenting. And what we do is we try to understand the past of our children so that we can better communicate the gospel message to them.

And it's never about changing the gospel, but it's how do we communicate that in light of their past. And it works very effectively with children and teenagers who have been through trauma, and many, if not all, adopted and foster children and teenagers have been through trauma.

But like you said, it doesn't have to be specifically for adopted and foster kids. Really, all the experiences of a child help them come to understandings of life and faith and God and those kinds of things.

So we look back at that. We look back at their past. We look back at their history and say, understanding that is going to help us communicate as parents, Sunday school teachers, as youth workers, Christian counselors.

That's going to help us disciple or talk to these kids about God. Yeah. And in the curriculum, there are.

Six, if I remember correctly, six main characteristics about God that you discussed. There's God's fatherhood, his love, his presence, his trustworthiness, his forgiveness, and his control. And I want to just kind of give our audience an understanding of how a child, because of potentially some traumatic experiences in their past, may misunderstand some of these concepts concerning God.

God's Fatherhood and a Child's Experience of Earthly Fathers

And I think the first one you have really is a great way to describe this point. God's fatherhood. To us, we pray, our Father in which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. We refer to him as the Father.

That oftentimes for many of us and many of our listeners is a glorious and wonderful truth. But how can an experience a child had in the past actually take the idea of God's fatherhood and twist it in their mind so that that's a bad thing?

Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad.

You asked that. I think starting with fatherhood is a great way for us to kind of understand where this idea of trauma-informed discipleship goes. And I too had a really good father. I still have a really good father.

We have a great relationship. And for me to understand God as my father is really not that difficult. I have a positive idea of what fatherhood is. I had a good example of fatherhood. And so embracing God as my father has proven to be relatively easy for me.

But my story is not the story of millions of other children and teenagers all over the planet who maybe their father was abusive or absent or who knows what. Maybe their experience with an earthly father was less than great.

So then we as a parent or a youth worker, Sunday school teacher, whatever the case may be, when we talk to those kids about fatherhood and God being your father, they may say, yeah, you know what? I don't need another father.

I can't deal with the father I have or the father I did have. And suddenly it's this beautiful analogy that God has given in terms of the relationship we have to him seems tainted to a child or a teenager who had a horrible father.

And our role is not to change the gospel message. Our goal is not to say, well, if you don't like father, let's use another metaphor. But rather to understand that, okay, well, this is what you experienced with your earthly father.

Let's contrast that with what God is offering as your heavenly father. And that's really the idea of trauma-informed discipleship, looking at their past to be able to help talk to them about God in the present.

Contrasting Human Love with God's Agape Love

Yeah. And I want to just talk a little bit about this right now because this is super important. You know, our world is very polarized right now. Our country is polarized. And one of my cousins was saying something on Facebook recently about, you know, she's like, I can just see this group believes they're right.

And the other groups are fascist. And this group believes they're right. And the first group is the fascist and they both are in the exact same position. And she was talking about all this. And it's that understanding that I think sometimes we miss.

We get this weird echo chamber in our head where we honestly believe that everyone else sees the world the way we do. So let me kind of help you understand what some of these kids might be going through by using an interesting metaphor.

Okay. Imagine the color black in your mind. Okay. You got it. That's the color black. That's what you see your whole life. You've seen that and you've heard that referred to as black. Now, what if all of a sudden you found out that what you thought was black actually wasn't black.

It's orange. That color that you picture when you picture black is actually orange. Imagine somebody trying to convince you of that. Imagine how you would feel. Imagine how you might respond, you know, incredulity.

You're not going to believe them. It's like, is this a joke? You know, what are you talking about? I know this is clearly black. You don't, you're going to think they're crazy. Okay. That's the response we're going to have because we know for certain that black is black.

Right. Well, now take a child. Okay. Who's every single life experience with their father has been a terrible one. There's been abuse. There's been abandonment. All right. The only other experiences they have with fathers are what they've seen on TV.

Okay. Think about that. That's probably the best example of what they've seen about fathers. And that's a terrible example. You know what they see on TV. And now all of a sudden you, their Sunday school teacher, their mentor, their youth pastor, their, I guess I shouldn't use the word mentor.

Given that last episode that you had in the podcast, you're their discipler, right? You're their foster parent. You're coming to them and saying, no, God, the father, father is a good thing. It's a good concept.

Now, I love what Arthur said, you know, that just because they think see father as a bad way, that doesn't mean that we're going to just kind of just throw that word out. Okay. We, but we need to start by understanding that they don't get it.

They don't. And we need to help them. We need to walk a mile in their shoes, see it the way they do so that that makes us sensitive to the issue and intelligent to the issue so that we can speak in a way and use metaphors and examples and truths that help them really understand what fatherhood is.

And that's why I think Elizabeth and Arthur do such a great job because in the curriculum and in the podcast, they give examples of conversations to have metaphors and parables to use ways of illustrating this for a child in such a way that hopefully they start to get it.

And let's talk about that within the context of love. Love is obviously another one that people get a lot. I had a young man who stayed in my home at Victory Academy who was adopted and he was convinced that nobody could love him.

Not even necessarily that nobody did love him. I think that was a conclusion he came to, but he kept coming to the fact that it was impossible for anyone to love him. And he struggled with that. So Arthur, maybe off the top of your head or maybe you've got it already planned out.

What are some ways, what are some examples and conversations we can have with a child who doesn't understand love and now we're telling them that God loves them and they just.

Don't get it? Yeah. Well, I think this is a general answer that applies to many of these gospel concepts. It applies to father, which we just talked about, and applies to love that we're talking about now and most of the others.

For many of us, the gospel is a comparative analogy that like in the example of father again, God is comparing himself as a father to us. And we can embrace that comparative analogy. But for a lot of these kids, these children, these teenagers, they need more of a contrasting analogy.

So for love example, for example, if a child has experienced love in its worst forms, whether that love was temporary or maybe love was connected with abuse or sex, or really they have a kind of just a negative experience with love.

And then we say, oh, God loves you. It's suddenly like, well, wait, I've experienced love. I don't know that I want God loving me. So where the contrast in comes in is when we say, all right. And again, this goes back to understanding what their, what their background is.

We say, okay, this is what you've experienced with love. This is what love has looked like for you. But I'm going to contrast that with what God says love is. And we open up to first Corinthians 13, everybody's favorite wedding passage, which wasn't written for weddings.

But we say, this is God's perfect agape love for us. Love is patient. Love is kind and on and on and on. And we say, what you experienced wasn't God's love. What you experienced wasn't perfect love, wasn't agape love.

This is how God loves you. And help them understand that contrast, the difference between the love they experienced and the love that God is offering for them. It needs to be a contrast instead of a comparison.

Helping Children Relinquish Control to God

Yeah. And so powerful. It's necessary to, to, to step into.

That with them and to, to really work through those nitty gritty details. I was once on a conversation with a gentleman from a different ethnic, cultural, national background than I, and I was talking to him about his son who was starting to get a little nervous about a, a stage production he was going to be in.

And I mentioned to the father that his son was experiencing cold feet. And we talked for a little bit and then the father just stopped me and, and he said, I'm sorry, what about my son's feet? There is just no connection there whatsoever.

And not knowing his native language and not knowing, I, I really, there was no way on earth for me to communicate to him what cold feet had to do with his son being nervous about this. I couldn't compare, you know, find an idiom from his language or his nationality and help him understand it.

I had to just, I had to pretty much, at that particular time, I pretty much had ditched the concept, which is not what we're doing with this. Right. But the idea of, of contrasting, you know, is so incredibly important in those moments when the person just really has absolutely zero functioning knowledge of what, what it means to love something or what it means to do anything.

You have to say, okay, what you've got is not it. Let's, let's contrast. That's so powerful. The last one I want to hit on real quick, again, because all of these are so fantastic, but the last one I want to hit on is, is one that is true of, again, all of our kids, God's control.

And there are so many issues associated with this. There's the issue of the fact that an authority figure in their life may have exhibited the wrong types of control. And so now there's fear or, or anxiety or depression associated with somebody else controlling them, being in control of their lives.

But there's also the child's own innate understanding of control. Children want to control things and to relinquish that control is scary for anybody. I don't care what your past experiences are. I counsel people all of the time and Christian adults who are affluent, intelligent individuals have a really hard time letting go of control.

Okay. So what might be something that you would, you would say is a valuable way of approaching that with a child, either from the standpoint of their own control or the fact that the control that they've experienced has just been a terrible example of.

Control. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you picked this one. This, this is a big one. I think for everyone, I think this is kind of what you were saying, but like most of these gospel concepts can be difficult for any of us, including control.

Control might be one of the biggest ones that are, are most difficult for us to embrace. But as I think specifically for a moment about a, say a foster care child, a foster child, I think back to some of the kids that we've had in our home, that they have been controlled their entire life by maybe it was birth parents.

Maybe they've had different foster parents. Maybe they have caseworkers or judges or lawyers or whoever that is constantly saying, this is what you're going to do next. This is where you're going to go.

This is what your life is going to look like. And they have very little say in that. And they have almost no control in that. And then we come along and we say something along the lines of, we want, we want you to give control of yourself over to God.

And again, they're saying, no, like I have played that game long enough. I have no interest in giving anyone else control of any part of my life. And so how do you get a child or a teenager to, to give control over to God?

And, and I don't have the magic wand for this, because if I did, I would have it all figured out how I constantly always control of my life to God. I fail at that all the time. So there's no perfect answer here.

But I think what might be, what might be helpful and maybe a practical way to, to talk to your child about it would be to say, God does want full control of your life. If you're not willing to do that now, what does it look like for you to give God control of one area of your life?

What's something that you feel like you can really give God control over right now and try to start small. Let them kind of process that with you. The goal is, is to be able to give God full control of your life.

He's not asking for partial control. God doesn't want just this little bit of control or control of this part. He wants, he wants it all and he deserves it all. And, and that's our goal, but understanding a child or a teenager may not quite be at a point where they're able to, or willing to do that.

What does it look like if they can give control over to God in one area and then intentionally try to expand that and really give God control of everything? That's a fantastic idea. When I have that completely figured out, I'll let you know.

Good. Please do share it with me. We can, we can do a whole set of interviews about that. Now for the listeners, all people, we have to understand this. Okay. All people are born into this world blind to spiritual truth.

Okay. And many, many people have experiences that convince them that the gospel makes no sense. Okay. But God has put us into our children's lives to help them better know, better understand, and better accept the truth.

For that reason, we need to do this. Number one, understand that our children don't understand the gospel. It's really important. It's just too easy for us. It's like, oh yeah, they got it. They went to Sunday school.

They heard it that one time. They prayed a prayer. They got it. No, they don't. They don't. Just like I don't. Arthur doesn't. Not completely. We won't understand it. We'll probably spend all of eternity understanding it and never really come to a full, complete grasp of it.

Number two, we need to understand why our children don't understand the gospel. The first one is that they don't understand it. The second one is why they don't understand it. Get into their shoes. Okay.

Try to think the way they think. See life the way they see it. This is helpful in every conversation, every situation. Marriages, this is fantastic. Work situations, the political divide we're experiencing right now.

Really being able to understand why a person does what they does is so incredibly valuable. Number three, be daily growing in our own knowledge and understanding of the gospel. We can't lead someone where we're not going.

We can't explain something that we don't understand. Number four, challenge ourselves to come up with metaphors, word pictures, illustrations, and the like to help our children start to grasp the awesomeness of God that stands in contrast to the experiences of this life.

And lastly, number five, even after they are born again, daily help them to mature as their knowledge and understanding of God deepens. This is never something that we as a parent can just set aside. Okay.

Well, we got the gospel thing done. Okay. Now we can move on to something else. No, we don't. Gospel touches everything, and we always need to be helping our children continue to mature and grow in that.

Because it's too easy to feel like our kids are safe now that they've made a profession of faith, but that may very well be untrue. In fact, it's often through the consistent presentation of the way that it continues to change us and mature us and sanctify us.

It's through that process that our children actually oftentimes discover that their profession of faith wasn't genuine because they can see that they're not growing and being conformed to Christ's image.

That was my experience growing up. That's exactly what the Lord used to help lead me to him for real. And even the children who genuinely are born again, like I said, Satan wants them to stay immature.

Okay. He knows that more they know and understand about the gospel, the more they're going to mature and be perfected, and then the more dangerous they'll become to his plans. Satan can't steal a person's salvation, but he can play a part in dimming their lights and making their salt taste bitter.

That's why the gospel should be the very motivation and foundational principles out of which our parenting grows. So to that end, I would encourage all of you, please listen to the Trusting the God of the Gospel podcast and strongly consider buying a copy of their family curriculum.

It's really very good. It's also not something that's super so and completely robust. You're going to have to dedicate six months to working through it. I mean, it's just, it's really, it's got brevity, but it has precision.

It's so well done. And then especially if you're fostering or you have adopted children, this thing has been made and packaged specifically for you. I guess I would.

Say two things. If you're interested in the curriculum or the podcast or materials related to what we're talking about today, you can simply go to trustingthegodofthegospel .com and that'll send you where you need to go.

And then if you're just interested in more information about me, connecting with me, you have a follow-up question or want to know a little bit more about me or want to book me to come speak at a live event or a virtual event, you can go to arthurcwoods .com.

The C is a middle initial C, arthurcwoods .com.

I'm so thankful for Arthur's work and his DVD curriculum. You should definitely follow the link in the description of this episode so you can purchase a copy for yourself or for a friend. It's also a great resource to have on hand in a church office or counseling library.

Please share this episode on your favorite social media outlets and I hope you'll join us next time as we once again open God's word to discover how to best worship God with our parenting. To that end, we'll be discussing how to help your daughters define themselves the way God does.

Truth. Love. Parent is part of the Evermind Ministries family and is dedicated to helping you worship God through your parenting. So join us next time as we study God's word to learn how to parent our children for life and godliness.

And remember that TLP is a listener-supported ministry. You can visit truthloveparent .com forward slash donate to learn more.