Passing It On: God’s Blueprint for Raising Godly Children:
2 min read
Raising children in the Lord means telling them, again and again, what God has done. Not perfectly, not with all the answers — but faithfully. You are a living link in a chain stretching back generations and forward into ones you will never see.
There is a moment — maybe at the dinner table, maybe in the dark hallway after a nightmare — when a child asks you something about God, and you feel suddenly small. What do I even say? You wonder if you are qualified for this. You are not alone in that feeling.
But look at what this psalm is asking of you. It does not say, “Raise a theologian.” It says don’t hide these things from your children. Tell them. Tell them the praises of Yahweh, his strength, the wondrous deeds he has done. The qualification isn’t expertise — it’s willingness to speak.
The ancient Israelites understood something we sometimes forget: faith is not a private possession. It is a gift meant to be carried forward, hand to hand, story to story, generation to generation. Every time you pray out loud with your child, every time you say “God was with us through that hard season,” you are doing exactly what this passage describes. You are telling the generation to come.
And this is bigger than your household. The psalm envisions children who will grow up and tell their children — a ripple moving out far beyond anything you can trace. You may never know the full reach of your faithfulness. A bedtime prayer you’ve said a hundred times in exhaustion might be the very thing your grandchild remembers when they are forty years old and afraid.
You do not have to have a perfect faith story to share. You just have to have an honest one. The God who “established a testimony in Jacob” is the same God at work in your ordinary, imperfect home today. He is not waiting for you to get it together before he uses your words. He is already using them.
Pause and take a breath. Think of a child in your life — yours, a niece or nephew, a neighbor. Tell God what you hope for them.
Ask him to bring to mind one true thing about his faithfulness that you could share with that child this week — something simple, something real.
If you feel inadequate or afraid, say so. Tell God exactly where you feel unqualified, and ask him to be enough where you are not.
Close by thanking him for the people who passed their faith to you, even imperfectly. Let gratitude be the last word of your prayer.
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