TLP 99: Why Do Your Children Believe What They Believe? | The Merest Christianity, Part 5

Questions like this must be answered, and they must be answered biblically before we can hope to parent our children biblically.

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

What Faith Is and Why It Matters for Parenting

What is faith? What does it really mean to believe something? Questions like these must be answered, and they must be answered biblically before we can even hope to parent our children biblically. And I would highly recommend that you don't assume you know the answer.

You very well may, but if you're anything like I was so long ago, you may find that your working understanding of faith isn't biblically informed. Now if you're just joining us for this study, we're starting part five right now.

I'd really highly recommend you go back to part one and get caught up because it's really important. We've been working through this material more inductively and purposefully, and I believe you'll appreciate where we've come if you can just take this journey with us from the beginning.

But back to the topic at hand in just a minute. If you have a marriage, parenting, or general family question you'd like us to discuss in the show, please send us your questions at TeamTLP at TruthLoveParents .com.

We want so badly for our show to be practical, applicable, and relevant to your family's life. We want to apply God's truth to your family's experience. We've recently received some wonderful feedback about how much many of you enjoy Jessica Mayer's interview about tattling.

That's great. So what else would you like us to discuss? We look forward to working through your questions as soon as possible. Okay, so today we're dissecting what I believe is the merest Christianity.

This is a big deal. What we're going to discuss today may well completely upend how you parent your kids, so let's just go ahead and jump right in. Remember, your kids do what they do, and say what they say, and feel what they feel, because they want what they want, and they want what they want because they believe what they believe.

But what is belief? Well, Unger's concise Bible dictionary defines faith like this. In its simplest concept, faith is personal confidence in God. The same dictionary also says to believe in a biblical sense involves more than the mere intellectual assent to fact.

The New Testament concept of believing means to trust in, to have faith in, to repose upon, to commit oneself to. To truly believe, therefore, includes not only the passive assent of the mind, but also the action of the will.

Whoever believes in him, from John 3 16, means whoever trusts in God so as to become united to him in life and destiny. Unquote. And God defines faith in this way in Hebrews 11 1. Now, faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

If you get nothing else out of today's discussion, please get this. Belief is not knowledge. Faith is not agreement. Trust is not a collection of facts. One of the most damning lies in the world is that faith doesn't need an object.

I remember back in grad school. I had a hairstylist. Yes, that's right. I had a stylist. Laugh it up and move on. Anyway, one day I was talking to her about my classes at Bob Jones Seminary. My stylist chimes in and says, that's cool.

I have faith too. So my natural reaction was to ask, awesome, what do you have faith in? And I remember her looking at me like I just asked her how many scrambled eggs it would take to turn a triangle into a symphony.

She hesitated a moment and said, I have faith. This encounter has been repeated a number of times in my life because people think there's this plane of spirituality that is kind of mindless and emotional vacuum called faith.

But faith must be founded on something. Like Hebrews 11 says, faith is an assurance in a guaranteed future reality. It's a conviction in something we know even though it hasn't happened yet. Now, let me speak quickly to the word hope that we see in Hebrews 11 1 and then move on.

Some of you know this, but it's important to be reminded that when the Bible says the assurance of things hoped for, it's not using the word hope with the current cultural connotation. This word doesn't mean I hope it won't rain tomorrow.

Now, this word refers to a guaranteed reality that hasn't yet come to fruition. Now, this is an important point to make because we normally use sentences like faith is knowing something is going to happen or I believe it's going to happen because I know what God says.

And this leads us into the second most damning lie in the world today. If the first lies that faith doesn't require an object, the second is thinking that believing in something is the same as mentally accepting something.

Let me put it this way. I know that 2 plus 2 is 4. I've learned it and worked it out. I've seen it proven. Though there was an element of faith required early on in my learning process, since then basic addition is a fact to which I've mentally assented and it works for me.

Now, most of us don't get in too much trouble in these areas unless of course we refuse to accept that 2 plus 2 is 4, that gravity exists. Then obviously there are consequences. But there are some things that require a mix of knowledge and faith.

For example, I have scientific and experiential data that tells me that chairs are good things on which to sit. However, sitting in a chair also requires a little faith. How many of us know someone who's put their faith in a chair only to have it fail them?

Has that ever happened to you? Well, what I know about chairs doesn't always hold up. This chair may not submit to the scientific and experiential knowledge I've accepted about chairs. This category unfortunately causes more people trouble than the previous one.

We know the science and experience of drug abuse, but how many of your children have gotten involved in illicit substances because they didn't believe it would happen to them? The same reality goes for any sin.

There's plenty of evidence that your child's sin will find them out and yet your kids hide it anyway. Adultery hurts everyone involved and yet people choose to believe that it won't affect their family the same way.

And here we're starting to see the difference between knowing something and believing something. I can know the chair is safe and not believe it. I can know that sin is destructive, but not believe it.

And that leads us to the final category. There are things, eternally vital things, that require 100 faith. Knowledge really isn't a part of it. And this is where we really get into trouble. None of us know how the world came into existence.

None of us know that Jesus Christ died on the cross and resurrected on the third day. And none of us know that when we die, we will spend eternity in heaven. And all of a sudden a bunch of you are seriously questioning my understanding of the Bible.

But wait just a minute before you hit stop, okay? Or send me a nasty email. We can know what the Bible says about creation. We can know what other people say about what the Bible says about creation. I totally believe we need to be studying apologetics and teaching it to our children.

We need to be knowledgeable and wise, but we weren't there. We have to trust that what God says is accurate. We need to have faith that the person who taught us is being faithful to the scriptures. And we need to believe that the writer of the scriptures is telling the truth, because we do not know, experientially.

This is why people struggle with the Bible. It requires belief. God starts off Genesis 1 .1, in the beginning, God. He doesn't try to prove himself. He just says, I am. And it's very helpful that, you know, we can use apologetics to show people that the truth of the Bible is, in fact, viable.

That's valuable. I think we need to be doing that. We need to be doing it more. I love Natasha Crane's work, and I love the Mama Bear apologetics. I love these people who are trying to equip parents to help their children be able to apologize for the truths of scripture.

But listen, we can't argue anyone into salvation. They must come to a place where they choose to put their confidence in the truth. They need to believe it. And that's exactly how life is supposed to be.

Let me say that if this makes you uncomfortable, it should. We and our children are such control freaks. We want to know everything with all certainty. We want to have experiential evidence that everything will work out just the way we planned, but we aren't God.

The best we can do is trust him, and that requires faith. Habakkuk 2 .4 says the righteous shall live by his faith. In Romans 1 .17, Paul quotes the Habakkuk passage when he says, For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith.

Peter’s Faith on the Water and the Difference Between Knowing and Believing

Now, I love Matthew 14, 25 through 31. And in the fourth watch of the night, Jesus came to them walking on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified and said, It is a ghost, and they cried out in fear.

But immediately Jesus spoke to them, saying, Take heart, it is I. Do not be afraid. And Peter answered him, Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water. He said, Come. So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus.

But when he saw the wind, he was afraid. And beginning to sink, he cried out, Lord, save me. Jesus immediately reached out his hand and took hold of him, saying, O you of little faith, why did you doubt?

In that moment, Peter knew Jesus could walk on the water. He saw it, but he had to believe that Jesus could cause him to walk on the water. But once he was in the middle of the storm, even though he had successfully walked on the water for at least a little bit, so he could even say then he knew Jesus could cause him to walk on the water, Peter took his eyes off Christ and allowed the waves around him to convince him that despite all he knew and had just experienced, Jesus wasn't trustworthy to keep him afloat.

And he sank. And when Jesus got them both back to the boat, the first thing Jesus said was, O you of little faith, why did you doubt? It is so powerful. What you know is not the same as what you believe.

And let me stop here to strongly encourage you to listen to the four children series, if you haven't already, because this is why a rocky-hearted child can know everything there is to know about the Bible and accept it and say, you know, this is how I'm going to live my life.

And they live this whole life then of kind of Christian religiosity, free of persecution because, you know, we live in America, and free of testing because I as a parent aren't really doing my job the way I should.

And they stand before Christ in the last times and Jesus will look at him in the eye and say, I don't know you. Depart from me. And that child will spend eternity in the lake of fire because he knew about God.

He mentally accepted things about the Bible, but he didn't.

Believe.

In God.

And.

Every year I have boys come to Victory Academy who say they're saved because they pray to prayer or because they have some biblical knowledge, but they're not saved because they don't really believe it.

To this point, I also encourage you to listen to episode 45, the second most important question to ask your kids. You can ask your child all day long if they're born again, a child of God, a Christian, saved, recipient of grace, justified, or whatever terminology you want to use, and anyone can say yes.

But when you ask them the second most important question, how do you know you're born again? What you're really getting at is whether or not they believe what God says. Listen to the episode. You'll better understand what I mean.

For now, let me share with you a really good illustration I heard while I was at the ACBC conference. Keith Palmer said something to this effect. He said, imagine you're on a plane and the pilot tells you that the plane's going to crash and no one will survive if they stay on the plane.

He then tells everyone to pull out the parachute from other seats, put it on, and jump out of the plane. Faith in your parachute is not knowing how a parachute works. Faith is not remembering all the statistics you've heard about the success rate of parachuting.

Faith is not telling yourself it'll be okay. Faith in your parachute is not putting the parachute on. Faith is not telling everyone else to put their chutes on. Faith is not pushing other people out of the plane.

Faith isn't praying that everything will be okay. Faith in your parachute is putting the chute on and jumping out of the plane. Remember what we learned last time? Faith without works is dead. If your behavior doesn't march in step with your belief, then you don't really believe.

It doesn't matter what you say or what you know. If your actions don't submit to your faith, then you may have every verse in the Bible memorized, but your faith is dead, and your dead faith doesn't save anyone.

Dead Faith, Saving Faith, and Sanctifying Faith

Now I really need to move on, but I just can't stress this point enough. You and your kids don't do what you do because you know what you know. You do what you do because you believe what you believe.

Now I don't want to complicate this issue, but there's an important point that needs to be made about how many kinds of faiths there are. There are actually three kinds of faith, and it's this complication I think that causes so much more confusion in Christianity.

If you were to tell your born-again child you're sinning because you don't believe God, your child might say, what are you talking about? Of course I believe God. Well, yes and no. The first kind of faith is a dead faith.

Basically, it's not faith. It's a kind of a delusional knowledge that masquerades as faith. Or it's a faith in some things that doesn't quite embrace everything God says about salvation. In the same passage that talks about dead faith with no works, James says, you believe that God is one, you do well.

Even the demons believe and shudder. The demons believe in God with a dead faith. Their choices don't submit to their belief. That means that if your faith doesn't produce a lifestyle that glorifies God, your faith is no better than the demons who will spend eternity in the lake of fire.

And actually, I believe the demons come out a little better than we do because at least the demons are shuddering. They may not submit to Christ fully, but they're afraid of Him because they believe He is who He says He is.

They at least have some actions in align with their faith. I will mention this, a born-again believer can have a dead faith. Now just hold on a minute and I'll explain how. The second kind of faith is saving faith.

Ephesians 2, 8 -9 says, for by grace are you saved through faith? And this is not your own doing. It is a gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. John 3, 16 tells us, for God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.

But my favorite passage on this subject is John 10, 28 -29. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father who has given them to me is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand.

The beautiful thing about saving faith is that once you've put your faith in Christ to save you, He does the miraculous work of sustaining and preserving your faith. No one, not even ourselves, can take us from the hand of God.

But then there's this third kind of faith. It's called sanctifying faith. In Matthew 17, 19 -21, we learn, Now, does having little faith mean we have little salvation? Are we teetering on the edge of losing our salvation or something?

In Mark 4, we read that Jesus was asleep in the bottom of a boat and a storm came up on the Sea of Galilee that was so powerful these seasoned fishermen thought they were going to die. Jesus is awoken, and with a word He calms the storm.

And then He turns to His disciples, many of which are genuine believers at this time, and says, Now, does that mean they somehow lost their salvation because they were afraid during the storm? No. Sanctifying faith is the daily trust we put in God and His commands for our life choices.

This is why not every Christian is perfect the moment they're saved. I have faith in God and it's perfect faith and that faith has worked out perfectly in all of my works. No, no, that's not how it works.

This is also why some bear fruit that's 30-fold and some 60-fold and some 100-fold. Our conformity to the image of Christ and our maturity is a result of the strength of our sanctifying faith, which can go up and can go down.

So again, earlier referring to that child who's born again, you say to that child, listen, you need to believe what God says about this specific action in your life. And the kid says, well, I do believe.

I praise God you believe and you trust Him for your salvation and be able to spend eternity with Him and have a relationship with Him in heaven. But when God says children obey your parents, you didn't believe that.

In that moment, you didn't really believe that's what you needed to do because you made a different choice. Now I've already taken a lot of time, but this is so important that I want to make it applicable even more to you and your family.

If your child is not born again, their faith is either non-existent or dead. Even if they believe there's a God, that's not sufficient to be born again and sealed by the Spirit. They do what they do because if God doesn't really exist or isn't knowable, there's really nothing worth living for except yourself.

God created all humans to be worshipers and your children either have to worship God or worship themselves. Even if they do wonderful things for other people, if they're not saved, the only motivation they have for being nice to other people is that they like being nice or that somehow benefits them.

Their every word and action is a direct result of what they believe about God, His word, and themselves. This is why being the evangelist parent we talked about in episode 63 is so important if your child isn't bearing fruit of repentance because nothing up until that point is really going to matter because they're not going to be doing it for the right reason.

As for your born-again child, though they may have put their faith and trust in the shed blood of Christ to save them from their sins and are sealed by the Spirit and preserved by the Father, their growth from glory to glory is a direct result of whether or not they believe what God says about the Christian life.

Now, I mentioned earlier that your born-again child can have a dead faith. In fact, all Christians can and do multiple times a day. Anytime we sin, the faith we claim to have in God is not working itself out in our actions.

It's like saying we have faith in our parachute, but then fashioning our own wings, leaving the chute on the plane, and trying to fly toward the sun like Icarus. Just like saving faith is the key element in our evangelism parenting, sanctifying faith must be the crux of our ambassador parenting.

Practical Parenting Applications and a Final Reminder About Faith

Now,.

I decided to add an additional closing episode to this series where I'm going to do nothing more than give you practical examples of how this works and how you can use this truth in your revolving priorities that we learned about in episode 39.

I want to make it super valuable and applicable for you and your family. I want you to be able to see how you can parent your children through this understanding of the mirror's Christianity. But for now, let me just give you one example.

Let's use the tattling illustration from episode 93. If your born-again child comes to you tattling because she loves herself more than she loves her sibling in that moment, or she wants to get him in trouble and hurt him like he hurt her, again because she loves herself, in that moment, then you can know that your daughter is doing what she's doing, saying what she's saying, and feeling what she's feeling because she wants something.

And you can also know that she wants what she wants because she's believing something about God, his word, and herself, or we could say not believing something. Your job as a parent is to help her submit to Christ in that situation and in every situation.

Now listen, conforming her mere actions and words will never address her heart. Even telling her to change her attitude is nearly impossible unless she understands the connection her emotions have with her beliefs.

The single best thing you can do in that situation is to help your daughter figure out what she's believing about the situation. And in a sinful scenario like this, there are two types of belief problems.

First, she's not believing truth, and second, she's believing a lie. You need to help her understand the lie she's chosen to accept and help her see how believing that lie is an attack on the God of the universe.

And I'll give you some more assistance in that responsibility next time and the time after that because I really want to equip you as much as possible. Okay, wow, I really feel like I just blew through that.

This is so important. This is it. I mean if we ask ourselves, why do I believe what I believe? The answer really is because I choose to. Belief is that though. It's simply that. It's just a choice. No amount of knowledge or experience or facts or examples are necessary to believe.

We've all met people who've heard the tiniest piece of truth in a salvation tract and they believed it with all their heart. While others choose to reject God despite all they've been taught and all they've experienced and all they know.

It's just a choice. You either choose to believe God or not. There's really no foundation for it. In fact, the whole concept of faith is in fact foundationless. You're having a conviction. You're having faith and trust in something that is yet unseen.

Ken Collier puts it this way. Just two choices on the shelf. Pleasing God or pleasing self. That's it my friends. Now what we need to do in our own lives is understand the reality of everything that I'm doing boils down to the fact that I'm choosing to believe or disbelieve God.

And the same goes for our kids and that is the root of the problem. If we're using our tree metaphor again, if we want to change the fruit, we need to address the root. Pulling off the old fruit, taping new fruit up in its place is never going to actually change the tree.

If the tree is bad, it's going to continue bearing bad fruit. So we need to address the root. The best thing I can do as a parent is to get down to the root of the issue, which is going to be dealing with what they believe.

Now again, I just want to clarify. Somebody mentioned in the TLP family Facebook group, you know, why do we believe what we believe? Again, belief is the merest Christianity. There is nothing more seminal.

There is nothing required for belief in order, you know, without that first thing belief can't happen. Belief is simply a choice. It's not based off of knowledge. It's not based off of experiences. I mean it can be influenced by that, but belief in and of itself is not knowledge.

It's simply a choice to have confidence on something that I really.

Don't.

Know. And we need to understand this for ourselves and we need to help our kids understand it. Now, please don't underestimate the importance and the difficulty of this truth. I don't want to make it sound like it's a super easy thing to get or to do in your parenting.

But the concepts are in fact simple enough. Now remember, I want to equip you to actually use this truth in your own life and then let it overflow into your kids lives, which is why we're going to have the discussion that we're going to have next time and the time after that.

For now though, I want to make you aware of a special opportunity. I've encouraged you to go to our Patreon page if you believe the Lord would be glorified by you supporting TLP on a monthly basis, but we now have a new way you can be a blessing to this ministry and the families it serves.

If you go to TruthLoveParent .com, you will learn that there are five different ways you can support TLP. One of those ways, a new way, is to sponsor an episode. For a one-time gift of $10, you can sponsor any upcoming episode.

There's no commitment beyond that. Now there's plenty more I could say about that, but from now on the Support TLP link in the description is going to link you right to that TruthLoveParent .com tab where you'll see all the information about the five ways that you can support us.

So you can click on that at any point in any of our future episodes by clicking on the Support TLP link. You'll also be able to find while you're there today's episode notes posted in Taking Back the Family, which is our TLP blog.

Of course, if you join the TLP family, you'll just receive that in email every time that we post something new in our blog. You just click on that and it'll take you right to the page. Okay, so if faith is Amir's Christianity, then we need to ask a very important question.

Faith in what? See, our next episode is called Truths Your Kids Need to Believe. We'll discuss the nature of faith, belief, and trust a little more, and we'll talk about the fact that even though belief and knowledge aren't the same thing, you can't believe in something you don't know exists, and I'll explain more about that next time.

Lastly, I want to reiterate that we'd love to answer your questions on a future show, so please send us those questions to TeamTLP at TruthLoveParent .com. You may not be as excited as I am about today's talk, but I believe you will be if you study it more.

This is the key that unlocked a deeper understanding of my God and my relationship with Him. This changed me on a spiritually molecular level, and I pray it will be an important part of your family's maturity.

I'll 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.