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What are the best ways to embed a Christian Worldview in your kids from an early age? It’s not as hard as you might think, though it does require some intention and diligent work. This episode explains the first steps to making it happen.

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The basics of a Christian Worldview for your kids

Stop for a moment and think about situations where you’ve either been employed or done some sort of volunteer work, and your job description was not very clear. Have you ever been in that situation? That can be a very tough place to be because you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing or even why you’re supposed to be doing it. Most of the time, you wind up taking your best guess and you miss the mark. somebody’s critical of what you did because it wasn’t what they expected, but yet they didn’t tell you what they expected.

Too often, we Christians operate the same way, believe it or not. We go about life without a clear understanding of why we’re here and what we’re supposed to be doing as Christians. We have this vague general idea that we’re supposed to be good, we’re supposed to be light, but we don’t know what that means. 

Where we want to go in this episode is to talk to you about your responsibility as a parent to ensure that your kids don’t wind up in that boat, that they know why they’re here, and they know what they’re supposed to be doing. We call this Christian worldview. It’s just the way you view the world as a Christian. 

So let’s look into scripture and see what God says about what our worldview should look like. Yeah, it’s very important that we as parents understand what it should look like if we’re going to teach it to our kids.

Ephesians 1, 9-10 says, “His purpose which He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth.” 

That means when the right time came in history, God sent Christ. And here’s what He sent to do, to unite all things in Him. Things in heaven and things on earth. So God’s unifying things, He’s bringing things together. That’s His purpose for all of history. And notice, it’s not centered around human beings. It’s centered around the person of Jesus Christ.

That’s an amazing thing in our humanistic world, isn’t it? In our self-centered world, that’s a good reminder for all of us. 

So He’s uniting things, earthly and heavenly. He’s bringing harmony and peace and unity between things. And He’s revealing and enacting that plan through us, through believers to people in the world.

So in these verses in Ephesians, it says, He set forth in a plan in Jesus, and that plan is the salvation that Jesus provided for us by dying on the cross. His sacrifice enabled God the Father to be able to forgive us of our sins. 

And so when we accept Christ into our life, we are united with the Father. So that’s the beginning step of this uniting happening.

Live out your unity with God (1)

Live out your unity with God first

Once we have become believers in Jesus Christ, we, as parents, have to live that out ourselves. We have to get practiced and get into the habit of living as Christians before our kids if they’re the ones that we’re wanting to teach this sort of a Christian worldview and Christian way of living. 

So how do we live out our unity with the Father, practically, would you say?

We have to do the things that fuel it, that cause it to be nurtured and grown. So things like reading and studying the scripture, memorizing it so that we get it into us, and we learn to think like God thinks. We also need to be involved in prayer. You know, any relationship needs communication.

So we interact with God, we listen, we speak, we pray according to his Word in the scripture, and he responds with answers to prayer as we pray according to his will.

And then we also have to simply obey. When God tells us to do something, we do it.

And it’s essential to get that piece, I think, very clear in our minds.

God, being the sovereign creator of the universe and the one who has the plan, tells us as His people what to do to play our part in the plan. And if we refuse to obey that, we’re not walking according to the purpose He has for us.

So His Christian worldview is for us to find salvation in Christ so that we can be unified with Him through Christ. And practically, we do it by reading the Bible, praying, and obeying.

Focus on the love of God (1)

Next, focus on God’s love

Obviously, as parents, we want to teach that to our children. We want to guide them to understand. And the best place to start in helping our children embrace this is to start with God’s love.

We’ve got a very familiar passage here.

1 John 4:9. It says, “In this, the love of God was made manifest among us.” So stop and make sure you understand what John’s saying. He’s about to tell us how God showed us his love, how he made it apparent to us.

He says that God sent his only son into the world that we might live through him.

So Jesus coming, which was God’s plan, was an act of his love. That’s what our kids need to see, is God’s love for them.

Why did God want to sacrifice His Son? Because He loved us so much. That’s got to be so much a part of our teaching and our conversation within our home to our children.

They need to have it brought before them all the time of how much God loves them and why He loves them.

  • We show them that through teaching them the gospel.
  • We show them that through the blessings and the good things they receive in life and use it as an illustration of God really loves you; He gave you this good thing.
  • There are just all kinds of opportunities and examples.

We would be making a huge mistake not to encourage you as parents to take the initiative in leading your children to accept Christ as Savior. From the earliest stages when they can understand your words, you want to start talking about how Jesus died for them to take away their sins. 

Our second child, our daughter, would say, “Jesus took away my icky sins.” She actually came to understand Christ taking away her sins at age two and a half. Of course, she had to grow an understanding of that because that is very young, but she was able to say that to us. I remember her telling her grandparents, That Jesus took away her icky sins. 

We as parents are responsible to guide our children to understand that. 

There are arguments both ways. Some say that you should wait till your kids are old enough, wait till your kids really can understand it because you don’t want their faith to just be because you have faith. But wise parents will take advantage of the young, impressionable, open hearts that our children tend to have when they’re very young. And we don’t say “take advantage” in a bad way, in a manipulative way. You as a parent are telling them the most loving thing you could ever tell them, that God in the universe loves them, and that He gave His only Son for them.

Help them understand what sin is, and that God’s saving them from their sin. These are elementary concepts that kids can get.

Why would we not want to start talking to them about the love of Jesus at the youngest age? God’s desire is for us to be united with him through Christ. So at the youngest age, we want our children to start feeling that closeness, experiencing that unity.

And God will, in His timing, draw them to Himself.

Our job as parents is to start teaching them as soon as they’re able to understand words.

As the proverb says, “train up a child in the way he should go, and when he’s old he won’t depart.” What we’re describing here is training. This is teaching your kids how to think about God’s plan for the world.

And a little bonus thought here for you is the earlier your kids get that and truly are saved, the more time the Holy Spirit is working in their life and is able to help them and help you as a parent to guide them and teach them. It’s a blessing when you can see that happen. 

Another way you can show them God’s love is by your love being an example and a demonstration of God’s love. Don’t just pass over that too quickly because how you love your child, that is how they’re going to see God’s love and that will impact them for the rest of their life. That can be a really scary thing because we all know that we’re going to blow it.

  • We’re going to raise our voice when we shouldn’t.
  • We’re going to discipline too harshly at times.
  • We’re not going to have wisdom in a certain circumstance like we wish we would and say, Oh no, my kid’s going to think of God the way that I just acted.

That’s where humility comes in and that’s where confession to your children comes in and you’re able to say, “I didn’t treat you like God would treat you. Will you forgive me?” You’re making a distinction between your behavior and God’s attitude and your children are able to see that. They actually respect it when you come with a humble confession like that.

Love for others (1)

Love for others is the next step

We’ve started with God’s love as the basic starting point for where we want to guide our kids in understanding God’s plan. Next we want to teach them how to love others. 

Do you remember the command Jesus gave, the first and second greatest commands? First is to love God. Second is to love other people. A good verse for that is…

1 John 4, 11, where it says, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” We, as parents, are responsible for guiding our children to understand that. 

With young children, it’s great to have this mindset as parents in teaching your children to get along with each other. It’s such a common thing for brothers and sisters to fight, the whole idea of sibling rivalry. It doesn’t have to be that way in your home. 

As you teach them about God’s love, you can very easily say, “Now that you know that Jesus loves you, He wants you to show love to your little sister, or He wants you to show love to your brother by sharing your toy with them.” You make it very practical. And then you can spread it out to their friends at school or at church. And you can spread it to the idea of how they need to love and respect you as parents. It’s just a natural outgrowth of how they need to apply their understanding and knowledge of God’s love for them.

We’ve got to be unafraid, parents, to be direct in our confrontation of unloving attitudes. Once, with our son and our daughter, our first two kids, our son had mistreated our daughter, and she was crying and upset by what had happened. He at first seemed a little callous to it. He wasn’t really getting that it was such a big deal that he had mistreated his sister. 

So we called them both over, and had them stand facing each other so that they could look in each other’s eyes. We said to our son, “Look at your sweet sister. You love your sister, don’t you?” And he began to cry.

Some people might think this is manipulation, but it’s not. It’s talking about the facts. He loves his sister. And so the behavior he just did, I explained to him, was not loving behavior, was it? And he said, “No.” And I said, “It wasn’t like Jesus, was it?” And he said, “No.” And I said, “So what do you want to say to your sister?” And he put his arms around her neck, hugged her and said, “I’m sorry, Melinda.” It was just a beautiful, sweet thing.

That illustration will help all of you parents out there get some courage. You don’t have to be afraid that you’re manipulating your kids or playing on their emotions or whatever this godless society would tell you that would look like. That’s not what it is. It’s speaking to the reality of what exists between your kids and helping them apply it with integrity.

Fast forward a few years, our last two children were also an older son and a younger daughter. Our wife went into our son’s room one day and I could tell by their tone of voice they were arguing. When asked what was going on, one of them said, “I wanted to let them play with this first.” And then the other one said, “Well, but I wanted them to play with it first.” So here they had learned the example of being loving to one another, probably from watching their older three siblings, and they were arguing about who was going to be the one to serve.

Keep it simple

We want to keep this simple for you. When you think about teaching your kids a Christian worldview, there’s a lot more we could talk about, but the basics of it are that God is unifying everything through Jesus Christ. We want our lives and our children’s lives to be unified with God through Jesus Christ, because of His love for us. And then we want to display that to the world through love.

And so you’re teaching your kids those basic facts, you’re holding them accountable to it, and you’re guiding them in their behavior and in learning to apply it.

Carey Green

Carey Green

Bible Teacher, Podcaster, Author

Carey is a retired pastor who served in local churches in various roles for over 20 years. He’s the host of to Christian podcast, “The Morning Mindset Daily Christian Devotional,” co-host of a Christian parenting podcast, “God Fearing Kids and the Parents Who Raise Them” which he hosts with his wife, and co-host of “You and Me And Jesus: A Christian Marriage Podcast,” also hosting alongside his wife, Mindi. Carey has written numerous books, including a Christian Speculative Fantasy Fiction series, “The Dragon Slayer Chronicles.” He’s the founder of Podcast Fast Track (a full-service podcast production company focused on serving small businesses and entrepreneurs) and love family, Jesus, and life.

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