Beyond The Checklist Church

Many parents get the kids through the church check list and leave it to the professionals. I believe if you want your kids to have deeper faith walk you need to get beyond the church checklist. This week I make a couple suggestions from studying the kings of the Bible. 

Transcript

Ethan: 0:01

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

0:09

This is raising joyful children in an angry world. I'm your host, Paul Osborne. Well, this is the first podcast of 2026, and I wanna take on a subject that was prevalent in my growing up years, and it seems to still be part of the current Christian parent culture. It goes something like this. A parent decides to get the church checklist completed. So the sequence goes something like baptism, maybe if you're Catholic, it includes first communion, then confirmation, especially if you're a confessional Protestant or if you're evangelical, maybe you're a Baptist. It becomes that profession of faith. And then the baptism. Anyway, you've made the commitment statement. You've done the classes, and now your child is a member of the church. They stand up. Everybody applauds. And then they get on with the rest of their life. And as far as the spiritual things, well you get what you get at church. Now, all of this has value, but I wanna say, I kind of think there's serious doubts as to whether or not this church checklist track. Is going to help your child have real deep union with Christ, uh, that they can hear the intimate voice of God in their day-to-day walk. They'll certainly have a crisis relationship and they'll certainly have their salvation and hopefully they'll live out their faith to some degree. But how do you help them live in the kingdom with the Lord and walk through this life essentially? How do we deepen? What happened in that track at church, and I think this is really the rub of what I want to call kingdom life. So I've been in some studies and writing on some stories of the Kings and how they help us out on the New Testament, our King of Kings. But I want to go through a couple of them because I think they offer some insight to you as parents who are the kings and queens, the royal people of your homes. You start with Saul and David, and Saul is a church checklist guy. He gets his anointing, he gets his oil, and then he just tries to live life independently. He doesn't wait for Samuel to come and make the sacrifice. He does it himself because Samuel's running late. He clearly does not have that deep trust. Of the Lord. Whereas David sees the promises of God, the anointing of God, there is a significantly deeper walk. And so this is what I looked at. I wanna share a couple of these stories with the Kings. I'll start with Jehoshaphat'cause he's sort of an interesting guy. He is a great-great-great grandson of King David. He hears of an invasion coming and so he gathers the people, women, children. And the men, and he uses this rhetorical kind of question method. He says a prayer something like, are you not the God who's in heaven? And he starts to ask these kinds of questions. Aren't you the one that led us out of the land of Egypt? Aren't you the one that gave us this promised land? And when he's asking these questions, he's kind of reassuring himself and he's also reassuring his people. And I think as kids get older, this kind of question, prayer, question statements even, uh, is really powerful. We're talking to God out loud and using these questions in front of our kids. these questions help remind them of who God is in their daily lives, in their daily conversations, right? Jesus used this same method. He would say, who do people say that I am? Why do you say I'm good? Do you not know? It was always questions. And here's the thing. I've been learning about questions, particularly in, you know, writing stories. There is a, there is a study that believes that the human brain and the human emotions, when given a question, a puzzle is presented. It just can't help itself to seek the answer, so this is why good fiction will rouse your curiosity with a puzzle that the brain or the question that the brain has to know the answer to. Every movie, even bad movies will, will sit there and watch them.'cause we need to know how it's going to end. And that's because that's how our brain functions. and I think in this, this rhetorical question that Jehoshaphat uses, it is very, very helpful in helping your kids deepen their relationship. And then you, then you look at King Hezekiah and, and really you could use Josiah as well. Both of them had to remove idols. In other words, the things that were in the lives of the people of Judah, which is the southern kingdom of Israel, the God's people. What was it that was. What was harming them that was blocking and interfering with their relationship with God. It was usually something that belonged to the world. They were trying to do what the rest of the world does, and those things eventually became idols. And I think as parents, particularly as you get into a new year, gotta ask yourself, what idols do we got going on here that are preventing us from deepening our relationship? That's another question. And then one of the other things that both Hezekiah and I believe Josiah did is they reestablished the Passover feast. And I want to suggest that one of the ways I, I believe that you can help deepen your family's walk with the Lord Jesus is to add something other than. The holidays of Christmas and Easter, mainly either Pentecost Ascension or Epiphany. These are days that are part of both the church calendar, and if you're not in a church calendar kind of church, they're in the Bible. And I, I mean, I just remember I was given a story and I was in kind of an evangelical school. We were talking and the story ended with Marco Polo coming back to Venice and celebrating the Ascension. And one of the kids said, oh, we don't do that here. And I said, well, yeah, I, I understand not everybody celebrates the ascension, but the ascension is in your Bible. Jesus does ascend into heaven, and it is something that we can celebrate because you celebrate his descension on Christmas. We are, we are every bit as welcome and encourage to celebrate his ascension into heaven. I believe, uh, these are the kinds of things that will help you in 2026. Hopefully help your kids deepen their walk and, and give them more reminders that there's more to this than the church checklist. I can only say it too many times that what we really are striving for. Is a deep union with the Lord Jesus and a relationship where our kids hear his voice and like sheep follow their shepherd.

Paul: 7:40

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.

Paul (2): 7:53

Until next time, let's remember the words for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven