Victorious Family

There are spiritual battles at every stage of life.

Children growing into adulthood struggle with identity, purpose, and trust in authorities of their life, especially divine authority. Life’s middle years demand focus on work, family, and many practical matters. Our later years bring declining health, the loss of independence, and a sense that the biggest battles have already been fought.

When it comes to faith, we are never on cruise control. Every age and life stage brings spiritual struggles and the need to fully depend on God. So, the question is, how is God using your life stage as a call to faith in Him?  How is God calling you to set your heart on Him so that other important things matter less, and He matters more? He becomes a non-negotiable.

Simply put, Victorious Family is about family discipleship!

Discipleship is built on relationship. It’s not an information-oriented process; it’s a life-oriented process. It’s a fully involved, fully engaged, completely participatory way of bringing Christ directly into the center of your home. And when Christ is truly positioned at the center of your home, you can be sure He’ll make an ongoing impression of some kind on every person in the family. No need to ever question or worry about that.

The different ages of your children do require different ways of thinking through the process. Different ways of communicating and making connections. But rather than viewing this challenge as a problem, think rather of the privilege of continually looking for ways to make the attractiveness of life with Christ more real to them.

First, involve your whole family in the creation of the family discipleship plan. When everyone from your six-year-old to your sixteen-year-old is enthusiastically encouraged to weigh in on what you’re trying to do, each child obtains their own measure of ownership in it. And the more ownership they feel as part of what your entire family is trying to do, the more ownership they’ll also begin to develop over time for their personal, one-on-one relationship with Christ as well.

Give them the opportunity to dream with you. Give them the responsibility for taking charge of certain things. Give them the reinforcement of your full attention as they start asking the kinds of questions that used to rarely if ever come up, not before you opened the door like this for dealing more systematically and prayerfully with their issues. Let them play a big role in helping determine how this vision of yours takes shape in them, in their own lives.

And second, help them develop specific goals for themselves. Your family, in order to stay united in purpose and in the Spirit, will always benefit from embracing certain spiritual goals in common. The things you do and pursue together will contribute to the shared identity that’s so important to develop in your home. But your individual relationship with each child can really take a light-year leap forward as you help set personalized goals for their particular age or stage of spiritual maturity.

For the little ones, some of this might entail an expectation for answering two or three questions after church on Sunday, like: (1) “What did the pastor talk about?” (2) “What did it mean to you?” (3) “How can you put that message into practice this week?” Something like that. You might give them a particular chapter to read—maybe Genesis 1, about creation—maybe Psalm 1, about the blessings of obedience—maybe the first part of John 1, about the nature of Jesus—and then plan a special time when you can sit down with them and talk about it. You might set a goal for them to learn the books of the Bible, for instance, at whatever speed or pace you feel is realistic. It’s really just completely up to your discretion.

But where will they learn these things if they don’t learn them from you? Why should the church or perhaps their Christian school be primarily responsible for training them in what the Bible teaches? Why should they grow up struggling to know who God is, not sure where the great stories of Scripture are located, unfamiliar with their way around the one Book we say is the fount and foundation of all truth and instruction for their lives? If our kids aren’t shown and shepherded at home how to understand Christ and apply His Word, seeing it modeled by the way we ourselves continue to pursue certain spiritual goals and desires, then who is!

I was sitting in a Bible study recently where one of the guys in attendance—a single man, young, maybe in his late twenties, early thirties—said something to the group like, “You know, I’ve always had to look outside my family to try understanding faith. I mean, we went to church and stuff, but I don’t remember my mother or father—either one—ever talking to me about Christ, ever reading the Bible with me, ever even helping me think through how to date a girl—even something as practical as that—in light of what God teaches and what was best for me. I’m left even now, as a grown man, just trying to figure it out on my own.” I sat there realizing, as he was talking, the only reason we don’t hear this kind of testimony more often is just because people don’t have a lot of places or occasions for saying it. But I’m afraid we all know it’s the prevailing experience of the majority of young men and women who grew up in so-called Christian homes—where Christ, for some odd reason, hardly ever came up in conversation.

Listen, again, I’m not criticizing here. If I let it, I could curl up in a great big ball of remorse from all the missed opportunities I passed up, whole seasons of years when I never gave much more than a passing thought to helping my kids develop spiritually and more in love with Jesus. I may not know all the reasons why we parents shove this honor and responsibility down underneath our other goals and desires and reasons for living, but I promise you I’m personally acquainted with a whole lot of them. And I’m still trying not to be mad about it—simply to receive God’s forgiveness and do something about it.

But what if you set a goal for taking your children, at a particular stage of their spiritual development, through the entire book of Romans, showing them the whole grand sweep of God’s salvation? What if you set a goal for driving them, at a certain age of your choosing, out to a cemetery one Saturday afternoon to demonstrate for them the risk of taking drugs or abusing alcohol? What if you and your spouse actually set a goal for when one or the other of you would initiate the first stages of a “sex talk” with your kids, not simply a description of its anatomical mechanics, but a vivid explanation of God’s purposes for why He’s given us the freedom of sexual purity?

Think of the openness you’d be developing with one another if taboo topics weren’t off the table but were part of how you intentionally interacted together. Think of the protection you could provide your children by enabling them to engage in important discussions within the safe laboratory of your home instead of within the cruel arena of the schoolyard or the confusing space of their own imaginations. Think of the trust you could earn (or rebuild?) by letting them see your humble, yet passionate desire to help them spiritually thrive, in ways you perhaps never knew until you were grown and were making up for lost time.

The sky is the limit for the kinds of goals you may want to set for your children. No one else knows them as well as you do. But you will come to know them even better as you guide them through some intentional age/stage goals to help them develop their growing faith. Best of all, they’ll be coming to know God and His Word even better, putting them ahead of the game spiritually for kids their age, and putting them in position to live out their faith in Him with deliberate devotion for a lifetime.

If you have a passion to raise your children in the Lord, this Family Home Kit – Victorious Family resource is designed for you.

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