TLP 100: Truths Your Kids Need to Believe | The Merest Christianity, Part 6

What do your children really need to believe? Are the deep things of Scripture that important for their maturity?

Welcome to Truth. Love. Parents. Where we use God's Word to become intentional, premeditated parents. Here's your host, AM Brewster.

Faith, Love, and the Greatest Christian Virtue

Welcome back all you premeditated parents. Today is a momentous occasion because today is our 100th episode. That's cool, right? I think so. Yeah, perhaps maybe one day 100 will seem like a small number, but for now, I'm praising the Lord for letting us get this far and I really pray He'll allow us to continue serving your family by putting out even more and more episodes.

And if you're interested in becoming more intentional in your parenting, you should definitely subscribe to this show in iTunes and then also sign up for our Truth. Love. Parenting course called 25 Days to Becoming a Premeditated Parent.

I'll include a link in the description so you can learn more about that free resource. Now if you're just joining us, so you haven't heard every part of this series in order, I'm going to suggest you stop here and make sure you've heard all the other ones before listening today.

Now, last time we discussed that belief is not the same as knowledge. In fact, misunderstandings in three key areas have caused much confusion when it comes to the subject of faith in Christianity. One of those key areas is the fact that some things in life just require knowledge.

Some require knowledge and faith and some only require faith. Not understanding the unique mix and distinctions can get us into trouble. The second key area concerning belief is that it requires an object about which we know something and yet it is dissimilar from knowledge.

And the third key area is that there are three kinds of faith. There's dead faith, saving faith, and sanctifying faith. Understanding all these concepts will equip us to parent our children in truth and love.

So today I want to address one objection to faith being the merest Christianity and I want to discuss the importance of knowledge as it applies to our faith. That may kind of sound contradictory considering what I just said, but it's not, so here we go.

Here's an objection I've heard from time to time. After unfolding faith, belief, trust as the most seminal component of our relationship with God, some people have argued that love is actually the most basic of the Christian virtues.

They say this because 1 Corinthians 13, 13 reads,. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love. Let's talk about what this passage means. Paul has just finished unfolding the most beautiful and detailed picture of biblical love in 1 Corinthians 13 and he ends by telling us that faith, hope, and love are the three most important parts of the Christian life.

But then he tells us that love is the greatest of the three. So that kind of sounds like it might undo everything I've claimed over the past two episodes. Well, here's what's going on. First, it's important to note that all three of those character traits are dependent on the others.

You cannot possess one of them without the other two being present. You won't trust God if you don't love Him. You won't hope in something you don't believe will happen. You won't love God if you don't believe in Him, and our hope partially motivates our love in the first place.

So we need to see that faith is required to have genuine love and hope anyway. Second, the nature of faith and hope demand that they will cease to exist. In the future, when Christ returns, we'll no longer have any need for hope or faith.

Both of them will be done away with when we see God face to face. I will have received that for which I hoped, and my faith will become sight. I will experientially know it all to be true, and faith will become obsolete.

But my love for my great God will last for the rest of all eternity. So love is a choice, which we know is an action, that's motivated by desire that grows out of our faith in God. As I already mentioned, we won't love God if we don't believe He exists.

So the reason love is the greatest is that it will last forever even when faith is no longer necessary. But for now, faith is extremely important and foundational to everything we say and do, including love.

General Revelation, Special Revelation, and the Knowledge That Grounds Faith

Alright, now let's move on to our discussion about truths our kids need to believe by discussing the importance of knowledge. Knowledge is to believe what dirt is to tree roots. They're not the same thing, but the roots won't be able to soak up the nutrients or water without being in contact with the dirt.

In our tree metaphor, we said that the roots of our kids' trees are their belief, but the soil around those roots represents knowledge about God, His Word, and themselves. Now, unlike the roots of a real tree, which are programmed by God to soak up all the available nutrients and water, we choose how to respond to the truth we encounter.

Our roots can reject the nutrients of God's truth, or they can accept it. We can call them a liar, or believe we know best, and subsequently desire our own way and therefore act accordingly, or we can do the opposite.

It's a choice that's not dependent upon anything but the grace of God and our will. But what if our roots were not in contact with the soil at all? Well, we wouldn't be able to soak up the nutrients even if we wanted.

So, picture this. Romans 1 tells us God's invisible attributes, namely His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made.

So, we are without excuse when it comes to believing that there is a higher power. That last little part I added in for clarity. And Psalm 19, verse 1 says, "...the heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork.".

You see, God has worked into His creation something we call general revelation. Back in Romans 1, we're told a man has to fight his natural understanding in order to claim that God doesn't exist. But men do just that, and they receive the consequences of it.

So, in a sense, all of us are born with our roots dipped into a certain amount of truth about God. We have everything we need to believe that God exists. However, there's not enough information within creation for man to have saving faith.

That takes what we call special revelation, and that revelation comes through God's Word. In the Bible, we learn about the specifics of God, sin, Christ's substitutionary atonement, salvation, sanctification, body life, and a million other things.

So, the more of God's truth we know, it's like our roots are coming into contact with more nutrient-rich and water-filled soil. Now, hopefully we can see that even though knowledge isn't the same as belief, or the thing that even creates the belief in the first place, it is a prerequisite to belief.

This is even true for false religions. Muhammad had to dream up Allah before he could believe he existed. The same goes for the false god of the Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Hindus, and even the Christians.

That's right, even the Christians. Anytime we believe something about God that's not true, we're creating a false god in our mind. Let me give you an example. I won't believe that God is okay with homosexuals if they quote-unquote truly love each other, unless I thought it up or had someone else tell me about it.

I had to have the knowledge before I could believe it. Now, imagine your child and picture the tips of their roots dipped into the general revelation of creation. You can also imagine that there's a little more soil thrown down there, and they have a solid layer of gospel.

They have the basic seven flannel graph Bible stories that get recirculated every year in Sunday school, and they have some token verses they memorized in Kids Club, and then they probably have the things that you told them about how the world works.

Now, if your kids believed all of that perfectly, what would they have? Well, based off of an adequate understanding of the gospel, if they believed it, they'd be saved. And of course, they'd truths about man and God in the accounts of Daniel and the lion's den, Noah, the Christmas story, Easter, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, Joseph, and some other important events in Moses' life.

And belief in these would substantiate some basic trust in God's power, love, and sovereignty. And if they believed everything you told them about how the world worked and everything you told them was biblical, then they'd have a pretty good handle on the value of work, respect, obedience, relationships, and the like.

And that's not too shabby, right? I mean, I'd agree that's a good start, but my friends, there is so much more. Based off that little bit of dirt scattered amongst your child's roots, he won't be able to believe what God says about human sexuality because it wasn't included.

What about evangelism? What about the reality that true obedience must be grounded in God's glory? How are your kids to navigate being sinned against, managing their money to the glory of God, or fear of the unknown?

They won't be able to believe the stunning intricacies of heaven or vibrant relationships within the church because they really don't know they exist. What about the importance of progressive sanctification?

You know, the reality that anything that's not growing is dead. How will your kids be able to believe what God has to say about Satan in his continual effort to eat them alive? You see where I'm going?

If we want our children to believe God, we need to teach them about God. Knowing his truth won't guarantee their belief, but they won't be able to believe it if they don't know it's true. So let's use the remainder of our time discussing the key categories of truth we need to teach our children.

And let's be honest, we need to know and believe this stuff first. Now, before we dive in, I just want you to know that today's episode notes will be very robust. I'm not only going to talk about the various categories of information in the Bible you should teach your kids, I'm going to provide you a bunch of verses for the first seven of those categories.

Listen, I can't be doing all the work. I mean, come on. But I'll also give you some awesome resources that should help you out with the remaining categories. And one last thing before I unveil these categories, we need to understand that the Bible wasn't written just for adults.

There's not a kid's version of the Bible. Like we discussed in episode 91, Christian Parenting 101, the entire Bible is not only free game, but an absolutely necessary part of your family talk. So with that said, I'm going to share a couple resources that make the info we're talking about a little more accessible to kids.

But honestly, I prefer to shoot pretty straight with my kiddos and call them up to a higher plane of maturity. I definitely spend a lot of time defining terms and giving a minivan full of illustrations, but I don't shelter them from the big concepts in Scripture.

And now, without any further ado, here are the things your kids need to know so they can believe. When you study the Bible, you'll find that it's not set up like a textbook with chapters dedicated to certain themes.

And though some of us may have liked that format, God in His infinite wisdom knew that wasn't best. However, many, many, many wise and godly men have taken the opportunity to collect the truths of Scripture into study aids designed to assist us in the study of certain commands, principles, and the like.

These books are no substitute for the Bible, but they help us out by showing us all the verses that deal with a specific subject. This is very beneficial because it would take a long time for us to scour the whole of Scriptures to come to a cohesive understanding of even one of these deep concepts in the Bible.

And though the practice would be awesomely valuable, you know, if we were to do that, there are a lot of other things in a day to which God has tasked the average parent. The study aids to which I'm referring are called systematic theologies.

Now, theology is the study of God, and whether you believe it or not, everyone is a theologian. We all believe something about God. The term systematic is exactly what it sounds like. These books categorize the biblical teachings on various subjects into chapters for ease of study.

The subjects you find in your average systematic theology are called doctrines. They're the foundation stones of God's revealed truth. Now again, please understand that it's extremely important for us to study and understand the grand unfolding of the Scriptures as it progresses from book to book.

However, when our children have questions, we need to be able to teach them the broader truth instead of the simple Sunday school lessons. Now, generally speaking, most systematic theology books contain ten major doctrines.

What I want to do is give you a big picture of the types of things we can learn from the Bible with the help of a systematic theology and explain why this information is so important to your kids. As you might have guessed, the Bible is a great place to learn about God.

Theologians refer to the study of God the Father as theology proper. Consider this. The Bible does not attempt to prove God exists. It assumes that He exists. In Acts, we see that the Bible teaches us that God is knowable.

The Father also has these things called incommunicable attributes like self-existence, infinity, perfection, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, immutability, and incomprehensibility. But He also has communicable attributes which include holiness, truth, love, righteousness, faithfulness, mercy, and grace.

And the Bible also teaches us that God's holiness governs His attributes. Our children need to believe that God is self-existent. He's the only being in the entire universe that doesn't need anything.

It's actually really important for your children to understand that God doesn't need them. Instead, it's because of His communicable attribute of love that He created us, sustains us, and desires to have a relationship with us.

Now, think about the other truths that we learned here. There are things that we can't do. We can't have His incommunicable attributes. But the fact that He has attributes that are communicable communicates an awful lot to us about the type of people that we're supposed to be.

The fact that this amazing God is even knowable is super important as well because He defines how we're going to know Him. We're not going to know Him by going out and looking at the trees. We're not going to find God's will by throwing dust up into the air.

We're going to go into God's Word where He reveals Himself to us. And the fact that holiness governs His attributes is really, really important too because so often that's not what governs our attributes.

And so, understanding these things and believing these things are going to help our children to mature. Now, we can't take this time to really discuss even one of these elements in any kind of depth. As Friedrich Lehmann wrote, could we with ink the ocean fill?

And were the skies of parchment made? Were every stalk on earth a quill and every man a scribe by trade? To write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry. Nor could the scroll contain the whole, though stretched from sky to sky.

But please note three things about every truth we're going to discuss. One, you and your children need to know about it. Two, we all need to believe it. And three, ignorance of and disbelief in these truths is at the foundation of every sin, heresy, act of rebellion, and form of immaturity.

Christology, Pneumatology, and Bibliology

Now, let's move on to the second doctrine called Christology, which you can guess is about Jesus. There are numerous scriptures that teach us He is fully God, but He's also fully human. Now, that may seem a hard concept to communicate to a child.

It's hard for us, but the Bible teaches it. So, if we are to be faithful stewards of God's Word and our children, we need to explain it to them. The Bible also teaches us that Christ appeased God's wrath against sinners who believe on Him by dying on the cross, and that He rose from the dead and conquered death and hell.

Now, as I mentioned before, today's episode notes are going to have a ton of passages referenced. I'll provide at least one passage for each truth about God that I mentioned today. Now, moving on, your children need to have a right understanding about the Holy Spirit, too.

The study of the Holy Spirit is called pneumatology. First, it's vital to acknowledge that He is fully God, and since the Holy Spirit is Himself God, He possesses all the essential characteristics of personality, such as life, intelligence, freedom, emotion, self-consciousness, and purpose.

And He must be a person and not a force, energy, or abstract power. It's also vital for your kids to know and believe that He operates in the world today by restraining sin and enabling the positive accomplishment of civic righteousness and good among all men, which we call common grace.

But He also is working to convict men of sin, judgment, and righteousness by the Word of God and regenerating those who believe in Him. Now, too often, I believe the ministry of the Holy Spirit is either completely ignored or overemphasized to the detriment of a balanced view of God.

If your children are saved, they are indwelled by the Holy Spirit Himself. Do they understand what that means for their life and godliness? Now, as we move past the ologies, which deal directly with God, we encounter another infinitely important study called bibliology.

Do your children know that every word of Scripture is perfectly inspired? Do they believe that inspiration is the supernatural influence of the Holy Spirit by which the writers were divinely supervised in their production of Scripture and were restrained from error, guided in their choice of words, and given divine trustworthiness while remaining consistent with the different personalities and styles?

Do they know the Bible is a clear, finished, and complete revelation entirely sufficient for its divinely intended purpose to instruct the believer in all matters regarding the faith, godliness, and spiritual welfare?

Ignorance or disbelief in the doctrine of the Bible will completely undermine your child's ability to believe anything else about God. In fact, if your children believe that even one word in the Bible is inaccurate or imperfect, there is absolutely no reason to trust any.

Of it.

Anthropology, Hamartiology, and Soteriology

And then there are three doctrines that apply to mankind specifically. Anthropology teaches us about ourselves. Man's composition consists of a unity of both a material and an immaterial part. This is important to know and believe when it comes to death and eternity.

Adam's disobedience in the garden brought spiritual, physical, and subsequently eternal death upon himself and the entire human race. Because of that, all men are sinners by state, disposition, and choice.

Therefore, men are alienated from God, spiritually dead and under the penalty of eternal condemnation. We call this study of sin hamartiology, and as we study it with our children, and we must study it with them, we learn that sin is any lack of conformity to the moral law and character of God, either in act, disposition, or state.

Sin is any being, action, or disposition that is unlike God, and the commission of sin deserves eternal death in hell. Let me pause here to say that children can understand this, and they must understand it.

If they do not know about sin and hell and judgment, they won't be able to believe God's truth about it. Of course, a study of man and sin must inexorably lead to the study of soteriology, which is the doctrine of salvation.

Do your children understand that salvation is holy of grace, a gift of God, and cannot be merited by any virtue or work of man? They must believe that the gift of salvation must be personally accepted through repentant faith, which is also a gift from God, and that it's the only way a human can have a relationship with God, both temporal and eternal.

And though time has already failed us, I must mention the glorious truths of ecclesiology, the study of the church, eschatology, the doctrine of the future events, and angelology, the study of angelic beings.

To be able to believe these truths, your children must start by knowing them, and to know them, your children must study God's Word. Every word we read in the Bible tells us something new about our God.

From the historical account of creation through the genealogies into the church letters and all the way to the new heaven and earth, the entire scriptures is the revelation of God. And if you want your children to know and believe Him better, you need to guide them in reading and understanding the Bible.

No one can believe what they do not know. To this point, Romans 10 .14 asks these probing questions. How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard?

And how are they to hear without someone preaching? This is not an admonition for you to task your pastor with the sole responsibility of instructing your children in spiritual things. This is a call for us all to preach the truth of God's beautiful Word to our families.

Resources for Teaching Systematic Theology to Children

Now before I finish, I'd like to point you to some resources that will help you in the task of exposing your children to the study of God. I can totally understand if you're feeling very overwhelmed at the moment.

You're like, wow, I didn't even know these words existed and I don't even know that I know them myself. How am I supposed to pass them on to our kids? Well, yes, you can, and I think you should pick up a systematic theology textbook and start there.

Obviously, it may be a little heady for your kids, but it'd be awesome for you. In episode 17, one of the most important things I could say to any parent is that we need to be constant students of the Word of God.

So that end, I recommend the theology books written by John MacArthur, Louis Burkhoff, John Frame, Millard Erickson, Charles Ryrie, and Paul Enns. I'll go ahead and include this list in today's episode notes so you don't have to write all that down.

But I also want to make you aware of some amazing resources designed to teach the deep truths of God to little minds. If you haven't gotten Natasha Crane's Keeping Your Kids on God's Side, 40 Conversations to Help Them Build a Lasting Faith, I suggest you start there.

There's so much fodder for amazing conversations with your kids just in that one book. You can hear more about that whole book in episode 77. Of course, it's not exhaustive on any one topic, which is why she wrote Talking With Your Kids About God, which has already released this month.

Now, she and I will be chatting about that book soon, and I plan for that episode to be number 105 if you want to hear that before you get it. But there's also this great book called Theology. My kids and I are currently working through it, and there are plenty of others.

Now, I've taken a lot of your time, and I need to wrap up, so let me direct you to a link in the description. It's called Apologetic Parenting, and it will take you to TruthLoveParent .com's Parenting Book Resource page.

There, you'll be able to see all of the children's systematic theology books that we endorse. And please know that TLP receives absolutely nothing if you were to buy any of the books we promote on this show.

We promote them because they're valuable resources for you and no other reason. As always, our episode notes are also available at TruthLoveParent .com on our blog, Taking Back the Family. These will probably be the longest and most comprehensive notes we've published to date, and I really pray they help you.

And please join us next time for our bonus episode entitled, Applying the Mearest Christianity to Your Parenting. The study of God is an infinite study. Your kids can't get too early of a start. And remember, they can't believe what they don't know.

See you.

Next time.

Truth. Love. Parent. is part of the Evermind Ministries family and is dedicated to helping you become an intentional premeditated parent. Join us next time as we search God's Word for the truth your family needs today.