How to Start Discipling Your Kids

How do you start discipling your kids in everyday life?

In this episode, we talk about what is discipleship, why it matters and how to begin in simple, practical ways at home. If you’ve ever felt unsure where to start, this will help you take clear first steps.

We’ll cover:

• What discipleship is in everyday life
• Why discipling your kids should be a priority
• Simple, practical ways to begin discipling your children

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to Discipling Kids Podcast, where practical parenting meets practiced theology for families and ministries discipling kids for Christ. I'm your host, Pastor John Scheller. Hello everyone, it is great to be with you again today. You may notice on whatever podcast platform you use a little link that allows you to share questions and comments with me. I encourage you to use that. I have received some comments from people wanting to know just a little bit more about me, and I think that's fair. And while I do hope to share more about me and my walk with Christ in future episodes, I can briefly share about me for some context for you. So I'm Pastor John Sheller. I am the pastor of children and families here at Kenwood Baptist Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. I earned my Masters of Divinity from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. And I earned my Bachelors of Arts from Northern Kentucky University in Theater and History. And I really enjoyed working as a professional actor as well as in a family business for a short time before I went to seminary. I'm a dad, I have young children, and I'm a husband. My wife is a pediatrician, so we are very invested, as you can imagine, in the physical and spiritual health of children. We'd like to say that she gets the body and I take the soul. So that's me in a quick nutshell, and I appreciate for those of you who asked and wanting to know more about me. In the two previous episodes, we discussed that children are sinful and matter to God. Because they are sinful, they desperately need discipleship. And because they matter so much to God, they are worthy of our time to disciple them. But what is discipleship? And how do we do it? Well, in this episode, I'm going to focus on answering those two questions, the what and the how. In the New Testament, the word disciple comes up often. Jesus called disciples to himself and then commanded them, and what we call the Great Commission, to go and make disciples. As the New Testament was originally written in Greek, the Greek word for disciple is mathetes, which could be narrowly translated as a student. But not really. We would be getting closer if we translated it as apprentice, because a disciple was not just someone who was to learn a particular subject from their teacher, but as Jesus describes in Luke chapter six, verse forty, a disciple is someone who when fully trained will be like their teacher. In first century Judaism, disciples were well known in the context of rabbis. Jesus was often called rabbi because he functioned in many ways like a Jewish rabbi. We of course know him to be more than just a rabbi, but that was the category most people in first century Palestine could quickly place him in. Rabbis were often itinerant teachers who traveled and taught God's law. They would have a following of apprentices known as disciples. For example, a few years before Jesus, the famous rabbi Hillel had something like 70 disciples who followed him and learned his teachings. While I'm excited to talk about the history of Jewish and Christian education in another episode, here I'll briefly share that being a rabbi's disciple was like the height of the Jewish educational system, almost like a grad school today or a PhD program. While learning for disciples had formal moments, there was also a great deal of informal learning that took place out in the open air or along the road and during meals together. An old blessing is may you be covered by the dust of your rabbi, probably because of this idea of disciples following their rabbi closely on the dusty roads. Pupils and disciples were often described as studying at the feet of their rabbi, as even the apostle Paul described that he had done under Rabbi Gemaliel prior to following Jesus in Acts chapter 22, verse 3. So a disciple was to stay as close as they could to their rabbi. They were to sleep beside and eat with them. They were not just to learn the trade, but to become like a carbon copy of their teacher by also adopting their mannerisms, worldview, and particular interpretations of the scriptures. So even an English gloss like apprenticeship for what a disciple is in today's context still falls short because, for example, a plumber undergoing an apprenticeship isn't expected to adopt the worldview of their teacher, just their ability to do the trade. Jesus, however, expected his disciples to become like him, adopt his behaviors, habits, worldview, and so forth, and in due course to make more disciples who would also be like him. So discipling kids isn't just about keeping children fed, alive, relatively out of trouble, and making sure they can read, write, and do basic math, all of which are very important. But discipleship is also very focused on forming a child's worldview with the expectation that they will go on to share that worldview with others. And God explicitly expects parents to do this with their children. In the gospel, according to Mark, a scribe asked Jesus, which commandment is the most important of all? Jesus answered, The most important is Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, and with all of your soul, and with all of your mind, and with all of your strength. And that's in chapter twelve, verses twenty eight through thirty-four. When asked what is the greatest commandment, Jesus quoted from Deuteronomy chapter six. In Deuteronomy six, we have both the greatest commandment for every believer, and God's greatest commandment for every parent. What Jesus affirmed to be the greatest commandment in verse four is also known as the Shema, and is often recited twice daily as God's people affirm their fidelity to God and to him alone. God's people are to show their allegiance to God through love. And love in this context is not just something someone feels, but further something someone does. So to love God is to devote yourself to Him with your whole self, with everything you've got, emotionally, physically, mentally, financially, with everything, love God. As it relates to parenting, Deuteronomy chapter 6, verse 7 reveals that parents show their love for the Lord by involving their whole household in devotion to God. If you think about religious life for the ancient Hebrews, they rarely came together as we do as Christians on a weekly basis. They had certain religious festivals that brought them together on a yearly basis, but not weekly. Synagogues wouldn't come until hundreds of years later. And so the intention was that the place for living out love for God, as well as learning how to love God with one's whole heart, soul, and strength was and remains the home. These commands that God is giving his people to parents specifically in Deuteronomy chapter six, verse seven, is that parents are to be talking about God's word when they sit in their house, or when they walk by the way, and when they lie down and when they rise, which is a beautiful way of saying all the time. It's not just on the special occasions that God wants his word before us, but rather all the time. And as you shape your life and household to love the Lord your God with your whole being, your children will ask, as we see in verse twenty, what is the meaning? What is the meaning of the testimonies and the statutes and the rules that the Lord our God has commanded you? You see, by God's design, children are curious. God intends children to ask someone why and what they're doing. Think of the questions you may get. Why are we going to church? Why do you pray? Why do you give money to the church? Why do you serve in the children's ministry? Why, why, why? And God expects us to anticipate those questions and to have a prepared answer. In Deuteronomy chapter six, verse twenty one, God prescribes an answer for parents to children. God says, Then you shall say to your son or daughter, we were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt, and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. And as a Christian, I might say, I once was a slave to sin, and by faith in Jesus Christ, now I'm saved. All the time we should be talking about faith in order to help our children fashion a worldview in which Christ is at the center. But exactly how do we do this as parents? Well, the charge to suddenly be talking all the time with your kids about faith can seem daunting, but know that you don't have to be an expert, and something doesn't have to be formal in order for it to be formational. Remember, the time a disciple spent learning from their rabbi was as much informal as it was formal. For example, when Jesus was teaching about anxiety and not worrying, he didn't offer his disciples a list of heavily researched examples from Scripture to prove his point. Rather, he pointed to the birds and the lilies and said, Look at those. They didn't worry and work for their splendor, but God took care of them. His point being, are you not of more value? So you can expect God to take care of you even better. A further aspect of informal formation is that faith is more often caught than taught. Meaning children are going to catch your faith more by watching what you do than hearing what you say. So an informal way of forming your child's worldview is by using normal daily occurrences to share your faith and model what you want them to imitate. You certainly should have formal moments such as regular prayer, like at meals, or scripture devotions before bed or upon waking, and regular attending worship services. But don't think formal faith formation must be lengthy. Rather, aim for it to be consistent. When there are questions that come up and you don't know the answer, like questions regarding, I don't know, say the Trinity, it's okay to say, hey, that's a great question. Now go ask your mother. No, I'm just kidding. But you can offer to explore that together to try to find an answer. And as your kids get older, another really helpful way to engage and further the conversation is just by saying, what do you think? And you'll be amazed at what comes out, and it might give you a window into their processing. This discipleship investment is massively important because as Dr. Christian Smith, a sociologist from the University of Notre Dame, concluded, most teenagers and their parents may not realize it. But a lot of research in the sociology of religion suggests that the most important social influence in shaping young people's religious lives is the religious life modeled and taught to them by their parents. You see, God has commanded parents to teach their kids because God also hardwired children to model their parents. Also consider time and access. If you take the amount of hours a young child is awake, their time at home or with family makes up 64% of a child's waking hours. Now I can't say for each family how exactly this time is used, but since it's the vast majority of time, how it is used will play a significant part in a young child's spiritual formation. The amount of time a child spends in church during their waking hours in a year is roughly 1%. So who do you think is going to have a greater spiritual influence over a child's life? The person who is with a child 1% of the time, or someone who is with them 64% of the time? Yeah, definitely the latter. For families, I highly recommend James Early's book, Habits of the Household. It is a really practical guide on how to begin creating new faithful habits in your home today that better reflect Jesus and share his love within your home. Does that mean we shouldn't even bother having children's ministry, given it's such a small percentage of a child's time? By no means. In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear gives a helpful example of how a small percentage or degree over a long period of time or distance can make a huge difference. He writes, imagine you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land hundreds of miles away in Washington, DC, instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff. The nose of the airplane moves just a few feet, but when magnified across the entire United States is the difference of hundreds of miles. Therefore, a consistent 1% of a child's time applied over their entire childhood can make a massive difference in where they end up landing in their faith formation. So, parents, working with a children's ministry team of both pastors and volunteers is very important in those early years because by the age of 13, most people's worldview is so deeply formed that it rarely endures significant change. And that's according to Dr. George Barna of the Barna Institute. Dr. Barna says a person's worldview starts developing in the 15-month to 18-month age range and is largely in place by the age of 13. Therefore, those years are the prime window of opportunity for discipleship and to shape someone's worldview. That means it is during a person's first dozen years on earth that they amass the knowledge, relationships, experiences, and wisdom that shape their lifelong perspectives on how the world works, their place in that world, and how they will carry out their vision of self and life for the duration of their stay on earth. So it's not surprising to learn that two-thirds of Christians believe in Jesus before the age of thirteen. And this isn't a new phenomenon. DL Moody in an eighteen seventy one sermon said regarding child discipleship If I can get a boy of twelve years, I will have him. If I cannot get him then, he is very likely to be lost to me. So parents and ministry volunteers know that when you're working with a child, they are more open and receptive to accepting Jesus now than they will be at any other time in their life. Of course, with the in crashing of the Holy Spirit, anyone can become a Christian at any age, but the older they get, statistically speaking, the less likely they will accept Jesus as Lord and Savior. So now is our time as parents and those pouring into children in the ministry and seeking to share Christ with them. Now is the time to give of ourselves to serve children and to share Jesus Christ with them. Thank you for listening to Discipling Kids Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe so you can receive the latest updates about new episodes and other events.