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Raising joyful children in an angry world, a podcast dedicated to faithful parents navigating their families through a stormy culture

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How do we help our kids discover themselves in the reality of the kingdom of God? One of the challenges of teaching children about Christianity is that our faith is not linear. It's not a series of steps that we take to realize our potential. Instead, the Christian faith is about God coming for us, offering us his promise, Declaring us to be the children of God as we trust the promise of his redemption. Faith in the gift and the giver. So I think if we try to teach our kids that faith, at least if we only do it in the same way of teaching a foreign language, mathematics, it becomes this set of knowledge. But instead, the Christian faith has to involve the heart. The body, the excitement of discovery, the Holy Spirit opening the eyes, being fathered by the Father, fellowship with Jesus, our friendship with Jesus. It's this three dimensional movement of trusting God and God working in us. And this is a difficult concept to grasp, particularly in a Christianity that too often looks to itself before it looks to God, especially in the sacraments. And we'll leave that discussion for another day. But I believe what our kids need in teaching the faith involves story, activity, and declaration. I've come to this conclusion, I feel God has shared it with me. but I've also seen it sometimes when in teaching a class at Sunday school or something, it just gets too lectionary. And I think about Jesus. He did not merely teach the disciples through his stories. They were taught in stories but they were in the midst of his ministry. They were given identity. They were given an ability to discover. who Jesus was as they were with him. This was experiential as well as cerebral, maybe we could call it. It was both scholastic and, active. I wanted to try to attempt to do this with my, my grandson. And I hope this is worth sharing. I trust it is what God revealed. And I tried it. And I want to share the experience because I found it to be kind of amazing. I called this becoming a knight in the kingdom of God. And my purpose was, I really wanted my grandson to have an opportunity for some initiation into what it means to become a man and a man in the kingdom of God. And so I decorated the backyard with these, with this big night flag and I set up this little training course and I took stories that I had read or studied from the scriptures as well as from nights. And I put together some activities. I wanted him to, you know, become into this sort of initiation. I wanted there to be an identity. Yes, he is five. But I rely on that Frederick Douglass statement. It's easier to train a boy than to fix a man. You really only have somewhere between four and 14, maybe even less than that, to lay some foundations for kids to discover who they are, to see how he's made and what his, some of his strengths are. I wanted him to learn humility. I wanted him to learn something about trust, resilience, and something about fight. There was a lot more to learn, but I want to share a few of these. so this is about a day and a half. Step one is I gave him this t shirt. I wore one as well. And it was a, this big giant cross like the Knights used to wear on there. And then we started with the first lesson. Before he came for his visit, I asked him or his mother to send me what his favorite snacks were, his favorite cereal was. And before he arrived, I went out and I bought them. And when he got here, one day before we got started, I said, Oh, these are your favorites, right? And he said, Yes. I said, The first lesson in the kingdom of God, to be a knight in the kingdom of God, that we're not the king. And so we're going to take your favorite foods and we're going to drive them over to the food bank and we're going to give them away because our king cares about the poor. He cares about the widow and the orphan. And, and he was able to give something that was important to himself, To someone less fortunate. And then there was a story about, I call it the, the king without a robe. And there's this whole sort of story that goes with these nights. And they came to this King and he took the food and created sort of the first food bank. there was a story. There was something about the King and there was an action. And then I wanted him to get into the understanding of trust, as well as discover something called strength. So I put this pulley system together. I tied this pulley up on a high on a tree, and it has a rope, and at the bottom it's tied to a log. I believed he could lift it, but I knew it would not be easy. And he would only be able to lift it if he listened on how to use his body and angle it, the strength of his upper body and his legs, and to pull the rope at a certain angle using the pulley. He struggled at first. And then as I gave him those instructions and he listened and he trusted it, he was able to lift it. Ah, he said, I passed my strength test. He said to his cousin, and he calls me Gov and he didn't help me. I did it by myself. That strength test. then allowed us to take a compound bow. They sell them at Walmart. They're for children his age. They're not easy. They have about a 13 to 20 pound draw. So the strength test said, if you're strong and you proved it and you learned it, now you can learn another pulley system and we can take our bow to the shooting range. I took him there and I had one of the young men that works there come out and instruct him and set up the target. This was a young masculine looking man, you know, the beard and the kind of the trucker hat. And he very kindly, but forthrightly explained how to use the bow and how to be safe while we were doing it. And he was so kind and he congratulated him as he, he missed the target, but he hit the, the greater target, the, the thing you pin the target to. And then he got better and better. He started hitting the target and getting it onto the paper target, getting it into the outer ring and then the next ring and the next one. And as he was getting better, I said, let's ask God, this was a risky moment. Let's, let's ask God to let you get a bullseye. It is this white circle in the middle of that target. And, and he was getting tired and we kept shooting. And, and, uh, he says to me, you know what, you're going to have to ask God a little louder, man, that's great theology. And so I agreed. He still kept missing it. And we got down to the point, I said, there's four, let's take four more shots. And on the second arrow of the last four, he hits the bullseye. I gotta tell you, the face that lit up, it was, it was somewhat lit up and excited when he was just hitting the target. But now that he hit the bullseye, He said, Oh, man, I'm like a real archer. I said, No, you are an archer. Big piece of Christianity. It's not realizing your potential. It's an understanding that God said, If we trust him, he gives us the power to become the children of God. And such we are. Man, that's, that was an action and a lesson and a story. And then we moved on to the third story about courage. And we talked about the knights and they have this prayer. It goes like this. Do not ask God for an easy life, but rather ask him for a hard one and the wisdom and the courage to live it. And then we went over to a, what's called stone climbing wall in town. And when we got there, there's this little toddler wall that a two or three year old can climb up and then go down the slide. And then there are all sorts of walls that are greater and greater difficulty. And as he could see some of the more skilled, older young men climbing up, he was able to climb and climb a little higher and then tried longer and longer. And he got to see that what's easy only gets you to that little toddler glory. But what's hard? What's hard is when you're able to climb something that's higher, the harder it is, the greater the achievement and the more meaningful it is. And of course, we tie that into the story of David and Goliath. Once again, biblical story. action that we were able to participate in and a principle of courage and asking God for the courage. Finally, we got down and there were, there were several other, there were stories that went into these, there were nightly stories, but there was this last one that I wanted him to get and it was called the fight through deception. And so I had these practice swords, these little 4 wooden swords. And in the backyard I had set up a little bunch of targets that he was able to go and he was supposed to hit the targets. They were like water bottles and water balloons and things that he was supposed to hit with the sword. But before he could get to those targets, I had strung a piece of masking paper was on a roll and I pulled the roll down like a blind. And it, and it was blinding before he could get to the targets. And we, and he had to cut through it. And we described that masking paper as deception. The scriptures tell us about deception, that growing up is, is understanding that the enemy is trying to deceive us. It's also in the art of war. All war is based on deception. The original fall of man is in deception. And so he was able to cut through all of that paper. And eventually we did it two or three times. And then he got to the point where he could just take the sword and just cut that just like a, like a piece of scissors, just rapidly cut it off. And in each of these exercises, you could see this initiation into. Manhood in the kingdom with this role playing of nights that were actionable and, and real, you could see that, that there was, there was something happening both in the heart and in the mind and in the soul. And so for a day and a half, he went from a squire to at least entering into that first stage of what it means to be a knight. Again, there were stories of the Bible and David and Goliath real army stories that we shared about his grandfather, my dad, and his story in the Korean war and the silver star and the firefight that he was engaged in. There were legendary stories of the nights that have lessons in them, like song of Roland. And then we came to the closing ceremony, right? In which he was given his night dog tag with the prayer on it. A patch from the 7th Infantry, my dad's army unit, And his target sheet that was filled with holes. And then, you know, of course his shirt and a special pin as his first step in going through this course of becoming a knight. I think there are, there are important things. Our kids should memorize the Lord's prayer, Bible verses, Psalm 23. There's Bible stories they have to be taught. There's no question, but I think if we can go beyond the linear where they can taste it, they can feel it, they can experience it, where we bring godly prayer into the experience, where we ask the God of the kingdom to be with us and in it. There's something about that that takes that young soul beyond just reading them the Bible or doing something linear. This entire thing, I know it could have blown up on me, but I felt like God gave it to me. And it is a real treasure of stories that I hope I can share as he grows older. It didn't cost me more than a hundred bucks to do all of it, and I pray that God will use it. This is something I wanted to put on the podcast, not in a bragging way, not in a boastful way, because I would not have gotten this on my own. In fact, I, I'm pretty convinced I was way too linear in the raising of my kids. I'm, I'm convinced now as I try to do Sunday school classes as a sub or I do VBS, man, it's hard and you get too linear and certain kids just kind of check out. I wanted to share this because I think this is a path to helping our kids. Gain their identity, understand the kingdom and how the kingdom works, and it's nothing like the world. The ultimate battle for the heart and soul is a fight for identity. Our king invites our kids to know who they are, what to believe, and where they belong. Until next time, let's remember the words for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.