Family Discipleship Minute 9: Continuing the Foundation

This series of posts is an attempt to expand the reach of the message about family discipleship. As stated before, it is not my message; rather it is part of a growing movement given voice by people such as Will and Meeke Addison, Voddie Baucham Jr., Mark Holmen, Ron Hunter Jr., Timothy Paul Jones, Rob Reinow, and others. This movement is important to me for two main reasons. One, it is biblical. Two, after almost 27 years of youth ministry, I am fully convinced that this is the only hope the church has for successfully training young people to be fully devoted followers of Christ.

Today’s post continues the discussion begun in Family Discipleship Minute 7, which looked briefly at the idea of building your own theology of family. To this point, I’ve listed what I believe are four big principles related to a biblical idea of family. In review, those principles are:

• Family is the first institution ordained by God
• Marital unity is a living picture of the unity found in the Trinity
• Marital unity is a living picture of Christ and the church
• In God’s view, marriage can only honorably be dissolved by death
• Singles and childless couples are equally important families within the body of Christ.

The next part of our theology of family is to consider the roll of children. Again, I will keep this very brief and encourage you to delve into these ideas on your own. In fact, I think I’ll just bullet point these as well.

• Children are the normal result of godly marriages (Genesis 1:27-28)
• A main goal of having/rearing children, since we bear God’s image, is for the world to be filled with His glory (Genesis 1:27-28)
• Children are a blessing from God and should be valued accordingly (Psalm 127:3-5)
• Parents (with the dad as the leader) bear the responsibility for training children in spiritual matters (Deuteronomy 6:4-7, Ephesians 6:4)
• Children should honor their parents (Exodus 20:12, Ephesians 6:1-3)

At this point, you have a list of Scriptures and thoughts to get you started developing a theology of family. Please continue to think about this and read what others say about it. Next week we will take a brief look at ecclesiology, a theology of church. Once we have a belief system of family and church we can put them together to see how the two institutions should cooperate in training children.

Please do me a favor. I need to get this message out. Again, this is not about me. I'm simply echoing what others are saying. The more I read, the more I observe, the more strongly I believe the idea of parents teaching their children to follow Christ must be proclaimed and practiced. The favor I'm asking is, will you help me spread this concept? How? Simply share the link to one of these family discipleship minutes on your social media or in your own blog. If you are really bold, you could email the link to one of these posts to friends who might find it useful. Thanks for stopping by. Thanks for reading. Thanks for sharing. God bless you.

Questions to ponder or comment on:

How have your children blessed you?

If one purpose of rearing children is to spread God's glory throughout the earth, how will your children fulfill this role? Do they even know that they are supposed to do that?