Nurturing Your Child's Relationship with God: A Parent's Guide
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” Frederick Douglass
Raising children who not only believe in God, but live a life that pleases Him can be challenging. It requires patience, intention and the ability to lead by example. More importantly, it requires Kingdom living (or shaping our earthly lives like we are already living in God’s Kingdom).
But as Christian parents, we have a unique opportunity to create a foundation of faith for our children that will last beyond our lifetime and theirs. We can equip our children to have a meaningful relationship with the Lord that helps them navigate the complexities of life, faith and relationships.
In this article, we discuss strategies for you to use to help your child develop a relationship with God and live like God’s Heavenly Kingdom has already been established on Earth.
Find more resources to equip you as you nuture your children at MommyThriveHQ.
Why Helping Your Child Develop a Relationship with God is Crucial
Developing your child’s relationship with God:
Teaching our children the fundamentals of Christianity is not just a parental duty, it’s a responsibility and even a calling. Children are a gift from God and it’s our responsibility to be good stewards of our children’s spiritual development.
The Book of Proverbs speaks to our role in training our children in the ways of God both in the form of discipline (Proverbs 13:24 & 29:17) and in consistency (see Proverbs 22:6). Paul echoes these principles when he encourages parents to bring their children up in the discipline and instruction that comes from the Lord (Ephesians 6:4).
Instilling Truth in Your Children
Children are easily influenced and molded. When presented with information for the first time, your children will develop beliefs that become incredibly difficult to help them unlearn. In other words, we’re hardwired to believe what we hear first more than what might be true.
Your children’s experience of you is more likely to have a lifelong impact than their experience with people who enter their lives at a later stage. That’s one reason why a child with a neglectful upbringing is more likely to suffer from psychological challenges than a child who lived in a loving home.
Because children believe information presented to them first, it’s critical for us to be diligent about what information and influences our children are exposed to.
If you wait until your children are old enough to learn about God from school, television or any external source, you risk that their faith will be shaped by someone who doesn’t share your beliefs.
If instead, you begin teaching your children to develop their own relationship with God while they’re young they are more likely to have a meaningful relationship with Him over the course of their entire life.
If, for whatever reason, you didn’t start instilling faith in your children when they were younger, don’t despair! It’s never too late to begin good habits. It might take more work and you might meet more resistance, but the results are worth the effort.
Instilling a Sense of Purpose & Worth
One of the greatest challenges faced by young people today is finding a sense of purpose. A recent Harvard youth poll indicated that 51% of youth surveyed had recently felt “down, depressed or hopeless.”
It’s no secret that as America becomes more and more secular, the sense of value and purpose that comes with faith in God has diminished.
A major reason, then, to help your children develop their own relationship with God is to prevent them from falling into the trap of feeling worthless or without purpose. By orienting their lives around God and His purpose for them, you can help your children develop a lasting sense of direction and peace.
The notion that God has a plan for everyone occurs multiple times in Scripture. From God’s declaration in Jeremiah 29:11 that He has prosperity in store for us to Paul’s statement in Romans 8:28 that God works for the good of those who are called according to his purpose, the Bible is clear that God cares about us and has a reason for our existence.
Through serving Him and answering their calling, your children can fulfill their purpose and find meaning in life. In Christ, we all have the opportunity to live a life of significance and to make a positive impact in the world.
Turning to God for Guidance
One of the reasons why teaching your children how to have a relationship with God is so important is that it equips them for a life of routinely turning to God for guidance.
One way to show your children what it looks like to turn to God is to read and discuss life lessons from the Bible. Teaching life lessons such as loving God, being kind or forgiving others helps build a foundation of faith-based morals.
As everyday situations arise, we can use them to teach valuable life lessons from a biblical perspective.
When your child makes a mistake, you can remind them that God loves them no matter what they might’ve done. God will always be there for them during difficult times and God will always forgive them when they forgive themselves and others. As 1 John 1:9 notes, “But if we confess our sins to Him, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness.”
You can read the stories of Jesus forgiving people, even those who betrayed him. You can talk about how Jesus showed compassion and mercy to sinners and people who make mistakes.
If your child lies, you can emphasize the importance of truth and honesty to help them understand what God wants from his children.
Trusting Holy Spirit to Work in Your Children
One of the greatest gifts God bestowed on believers is the power of Holy Spirit to guide, comfort and help us.
Holy Spirit is the presence of God that fills your child as God’s presence filled the temple. Holy Spirit is a person and lives within us. Holy Spirit gives your child life, opens their spiritual eyes, leads, guides, teaches, comforts, counsels, loves, supports and forms your child into the likeness of Christ.
In essence, the presence of God Holy Spirit in the life of your child is your child’s relationship with God.
You can cultivate your child’s relationship with Holy Spirit in the Church (worship, prayer, education, relationships), in the family (prayer, Scripture, teachable moments, modeling), and in acts of love and mercy (giving to the poor and needy, helping in their communities, being helpful and kind to those around them).
By purposely modeling the characteristics of Holy Spirit to your child and knowing that God loves them more than you could ever know, you can ultimately have peace that your child is in God’s hands.
The Importance of Parental Leadership
While the Bible makes it clear that we must care for our children’s needs, it places much more emphasis on ensuring we raise children who believe in God. Our job is not only to guide our children but to lead by example.
The Biblical Role of Parents
There are multiple areas of your child’s life that you as a Christian parent are responsible for shaping. We’ll discuss them below.
Providing for Your Children
The first and most basic is that you must provide for and protect your children. It’s your job to make sure your children have basic necessities such as food, shelter and a safe environment to grow up in.
It can certainly be challenging to balance caring for your children’s physical needs with earning a living and all the other complexities of modern life.
But it’s important to not place all of your focus on the physical; your children need spiritual nourishment as much as they need physical nourishment.
Disciplining Your Children
Holding your children accountable for their actions can be extremely difficult and require divine amounts of patience, but the Bible is clear that we must discipline children.
This is not an issue of spanking versus timeouts as punishment techniques. Discipline is about being a consistent source of consequences for children who understand what’s right and choose to do the wrong thing.
Hebrews 12 gives us insight into the role of discipline: to make us godlier. “God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.”
Loving Your Children Unconditionally
Loving your children comes naturally but demonstrating unconditional love can be challenging, especially in circumstances where feelings of anger or fear run high or when your children may make choices that are disappointing.
However, just like God loves us despite our sins, we must love our children despite their decisions, personalities, and weaknesses. It’s important to show our children that our love doesn’t depend on what they do (just like God’s love for us doesn’t depend on what we do).
Showing unconditional love to our children helps them to see a glimpse of what God’s perfect love looks like and helps them to understand why their relationship with Him is critical.
Modeling Christ
God calls us to model Christ to our children. We’ll discuss this in more detail in the next section, but it’s important to note that we can’t just tell our children what to do and expect that they’ll listen. We must show them what being a Christian means for our words to have any lasting impact.
Leading by Example
Perhaps the hardest part of Biblical parenting is being an example to your children of who God is and how we should reflect Him on Earth.
The guiding principle here comes from 1 Corinthians 13’s emphasis on love. Here, Paul highlights the importance of love over other Christian principles (like faith, charity, and prophecy). In all of our relationships, especially those with our family, love should be the starting (and ending) point.
With Your Own Faith
The first step toward leading by example is practicing your faith. Reading Scripture, praying regularly, doing devotions, and attending church are all ways to grow your faith in God while showing your children what it means to be a Christian. Let your children see that faith is an integral part of your life; not just something you talk about on Sundays or at church events.
Another way to lead by example is to involve your children in all aspects of faith. Don’t just pray for them, pray with them. Teach them how to pray for themselves, for you and for others.
Within Your Marriage
Your marriage is another way to lead by example. If you and your husband are quick to anger with each other, argue all the time, raise your voices or engage in open hostility, you have missed a significant opportunity to show your children one example of a Godly family bond.
If, instead, you can resolve conflict in peaceful ways, apologize to each other when you’ve wronged the other party, come to decisions together, and live in harmony, you can give your children a healthy example of how to live your faith.
At Home
As we mentioned above, how you treat your children is more important than what you tell your children. If you are quick to snap, yell a lot, have difficulty offering forgiveness or can’t apologize to your children when you mess up, your children will have a hard time understanding the Biblical principles of love, patience, grace, and forgiveness.
But if you are slow to anger, quick to forgive, use mistakes as teaching moments and can admit to your children when you’re wrong, you can teach your children how a healthy, Biblical family interacts and give them a glimpse of God’s relationship with us.
With Others
Whether it’s in traffic, at a family reunion or in church, your children watch how you treat others. This doesn’t mean that you won’t mess up. If somebody cuts you off in traffic and you respond in anger, you can use that moment to teach your children what not to do.
One area where your treatment of others is important is consistency. If you behave differently at church, for example, than at home, your children will notice. If you treat your friends with more kindness than your spouse, your children will notice. And they will adopt these behaviors themselves.
Instead, consistently treating everyone as a child of God, even when it may be challenging, can help your children do the same.
Incorporating Prayer into Your Child’s Life
Now that we’ve covered why it’s important for your children to develop their own relationship with God and your role in nurturing those relationships, let's turn to some practical areas where you can incorporate faith into your children’s everyday lives. We’ll start with prayer.
Praying for Your Child
Praying for your child is a powerful way to help them on their journey with God. But what exactly should you pray for?
There are multiple areas relating to your child’s relationship with God that you can pray for during your personal prayer time.
Spiritual Growth
Ask for God to guide your child’s spiritual growth so that they may know, love, honor, and serve God. Ask that He instill a passion for His Word in them and they use the Word as their source of truth.
Health, Prosperity, and Protection
Declare and decree the Lord’s promises over your children for safety, health, and prosperity, especially in uncertain times. You can ask Him to bless your children and prosper the work of their hands, both now and when they grow up (Psalm 90:17).
Morality and Values
Closely tied to spiritual growth are your child’s morality and values. You can ask the Lord to help your child develop a strong sense of right from wrong and the wisdom to know what to do in difficult situations.
Finding the Right Path
As your child grows into adulthood, it’s important for them to follow God’s path. You can pray that God will show them the path they should follow and open doors along the way (Proverbs 3:1-8 NLT).
Relationships with Others
Part of growing closer to God is surrounding yourself with those who will help you in that journey. Pray that God would bring the right people into your children’s lives whose standard is the Bible and who will provide a positive influence and Christian fellowship.
Praying with Your Spouse
Praying with your spouse for each other, your marriage and your children strengthens your marriage and models Christian living to your children.
A study on the impact of spouses praying with and for each other indicates that regularly praying strengthens the marital bond. Couples in the study who prayed together regularly had greater mutual trust in their partners.
Of course, this makes sense given the Bible’s emphasis on communal prayer. Spending time with your spouse in prayer is a form of intimacy between you and God as well as between you and your husband.
“Prayer helps couples deal with stress, enables them to focus on shared beliefs and hopes for the future, and allows them to deal constructively with challenges and problems in their relationship and in their lives,” writes Dr. W. Bradford Wilcox, a Professor of Sociology. “‘In fact, we find that shared prayer is the most powerful religious predictor of relationship quality among Black, Latino, and white couples, more powerful than denomination, religious attendance or shared religious friendships.”
Praying with Your Child
In addition to praying with your husband, praying with your children helps them learn from example, but it can also be a powerful way to build meaningful relationships with each other.
The Institute for Family Studies notes that, “When parents pray with their children, they are not only teaching them how to pray, but also modeling and emphasizing the importance of prayer in the hopes that their children will begin a practice of private prayer that they will carry with them into adulthood.”
In fact, recent Harvard research concludes that children who consistently prayed during their childhoods had better physical, mental and emotional well-being.
In Deuteronomy 6:5-7, God commands us as parents to impart His teachings to our children. Prayer is a large aspect of our and our children’s relationships with God.
Using the Bible with Your Child
The Bible is our source of truth regarding God, His work and His purpose for humanity. Part of your role as a Christian parent is making sure that your children are in the Word and turn to the Bible for comfort, guidance and knowledge.
Reading the Bible on Your Own
The first step in instilling a love for the Bible in your children is to model that love yourself. Spend time reading, meditating on God’s Word, taking notes, and asking questions.
Not only will your own Bible-reading practice enhance your capacity to care for your children in a Godly way, but your children will see your passion for God’s Word and be more encouraged to follow your example.
Reading the Bible with Your Children
When you’re passionate about God’s Word, reading the Bible with your children is not only rewarding but fun!
Here are some strategies to get you started with helping your children develop their own love for God’s Word.
Make it a Habit
Reading with your children on a regular basis will help them learn the importance of the Bible and its place in our lives as Christians.
Just like with prayer, mornings and bedtime are both natural times to have some quiet time with your children. You can choose to use a kid’s version of Scripture or get them started early by reading straight from your preferred version.
Make it Fun
Who says that reading the Bible can’t be fun? Filled with incredible stories of God’s love, mercy, and, yes, discipline, Scripture has much to offer your children. You can also use the stories and adventurous aspects of Scripture to teach your children important lessons, especially when a difficult question arises.
Making it Intentional
Relying on Scripture can help your children understand and apply Biblical themes to multiple situations. Books with questions can yield excellent conversations around topics your children will face in the world.
By making shared Bible time intentional, you can create teachable moments and help your children grow in their faith.
Encouraging Your Children to Read the Bible on Their Own
Helping your children create their own quiet time with the Bible is a gift that will last a lifetime. Here are some ways to nurture your child’s interest in Scripture.
Use Age-Appropriate Bibles
Illustrated Bibles are great for younger kids or children who have trouble grasping ambiguous concepts. Not only do they provide a pictorial representation of Scripture, but they heighten the excitement of stories like Noah’s Ark, Jonah, David and Goliath, Jesus’ birth, crucifixion and resurrection, and many more.
Teens may appreciate a Bible with application and commentary so they can learn how to read and interpret Scripture with some guidance. Questions and analysis included in these types of Bibles can also prompt them to think through issues they’re facing in new, Biblical ways.
Set Aside Time
Setting a specific time each day for everyone in your family to do their own Bible reading is one way to encourage your children to read on their own.
Even if it’s 5 minutes after dinner, building a routine that includes personal devotions and Scripture reading can instill healthy, Christian habits that will last a lifetime.
Recognize Their Efforts
Celebrating your child’s diligence in reading the Bible on a regular basis provides positive reinforcement and makes it more likely that they’ll continue to do so.
This doesn’t mean you have to bribe your children or offer a monetary reward.
Instead, consider having a special dinner where you can discuss what they’ve learned. Or go out for ice cream.
Doing something to show your child that their efforts are noticed and appreciated goes a long way toward helping them stay on track and helps them continue to grow in everyday life.
Nurturing Your Child’s Relationship with God
In this article we discussed the importance of your child’s relationship with God and how you can help your child develop and grow that relationship.
If you struggle with helping your child develop their relationship with God, first remember that God has a plan for you and your child. Your efforts go a long way toward helping your child become a God-fearing adult
Second, keep in mind that God sent Holy Spirit to guide, comfort, and nurture your child. Your child has been given the grace, strength dominion, authority and power to live in God’s promises and His blessings.
Finally, start small. No one can build a relationship with God in one day. It takes years. Instead of trying to do all the things in this article at once, start with a daily prayer. Then when that becomes a habit, add daily scripture reading. Gradually increase the time your family spends in communion with each and with God until it’s no longer a chore but a habit.
If you’re ready to learn more about how to help your child have a meaningful relationship with the Lord and build their identity in Him, click here to find out more about MommyThriveHQ.