By: Jay Younts, Vice Moderator of Synod
Young people are leaving the church. More specifically, young people are leaving the ARP. This is hardly breaking news. In March of 2021, Gallup released a poll that showed for the first time in Gallop’s history of taking polls, fewer than half, 47%, of Americans claimed to belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque. That number has decreased by 20% since the year 2000. Our own denomination has not escaped the downward trend.
The lifeblood of our church is our covenant children embracing the faith they have been taught! This lifeblood is draining away. In response, it is perhaps easy, even comfortable, to look at the impact of a godless culture and cite that as a reason for this move away from the church. Or, perhaps, we can look to the influence of social media platforms and lay the blame there. Similarly, it is not hard to find fault with the government, education, news media, or failures in individual churches. But are these factors really the explanation for our decline and the loss of so many of our covenant children? Are we just victims of a godless culture?
The source of the problem is much closer to home. In too many homes, broken relationships have become common. Parents and teenagers become frustrated with each other. Each feels the other has broken trust. The wounds do not fully heal. The parents remain, longing for their sons and daughters and grandchildren to return. Often, it is a long wait.
Trust has been broken, but not in the way that demographic analysis would uncover. The issue is not with parents and children. At the root, at the heart of the problem, the decline is broken trust with God. Children are given to parents as a trust from God. When we fail to raise children as God directs, we have broken trust with him. This is a hard reality that we must address.
There is a way back to healthy covenant families and churches. We can, by God’s grace, see blessings of the covenant flow from generation to generation once again! We can restore our trust with God so that we can build trust in our children. This pattern is etched for us on the pages of Deuteronomy.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up (Deuteronomy 6:5-7).
From this passage, we see the Holy Spirit’s covenant pattern for building faith and trust in the next generation:
- Parents love your God with every beat of your heart, every thought of your mind, every movement of your body.
- The commandments, the word of God, are to sink deeply into your heart because of your love for them.
- Then, these commands, established in love, are to flow into the lives of your children at every point in their daily life.
- In short, this is leading your children from your heart to their hearts.
This is not about keeping rules or avoiding ways to anger God. The response to the covenant mercies of God is to be one of gratitude. The love of God and his commands is to dominate all of life. Anything less than this all-in commitment fails to keep God at the center of life and results in broken trust with God. And that is exactly what led to Israel’s decline. Fast forward to the end of Joshua’s life to see what happened.
After that whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel. Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and served the Baals. They forsook the Lord, the God of their ancestors, who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed and worshiped various gods of the people around them. They aroused the Lord’s anger because they forsook him and served Baal and the Ashtoreths (Judges 2:10-13).
In the devastatingly short span of one generation, the Israel no longer valued the love of God and his mighty acts. While the new nation’s culture was certainly ungodly, that was not the reason for the children of the covenant turning from God. The problem was that children did not grow up to know God or how he had blessed Israel! In Deuteronomy 11:2, Moses warned the Israelites their children would not see all the signs, wonders, and judgments that they had seen first-hand. The wonder of God was to be transmitted via the pattern of heart-to-heart transfer laid out in Deuteronomy 6, not by visually witnessing these amazing events.
But as Judges reports, the commands and urgings of Deuteronomy were ignored. The people got the idea that God was a God to be manipulated rather than served. They had forgotten the covenant call of God upon their lives:
And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you? He requires only that you fear the Lord your God, and live in a way that pleases him, and love him and serve him with all your heart and soul. And you must always obey the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good (Deuteronomy 10:12-13).
God required their love and commitment to him 24/7. Moses repeats the pattern he gave in Chapter 6. The transfer of the knowledge of God is to be heart-to-heart, not “scroll-to-memory,” as Isaiah 29:13 teaches. Attempting to follow God with principles memorized to please parents, pastors, and people results in broken relationships, broken trust, and children who have little use for God and his word.
If we are to avoid a repeat of Judges in our churches and our nation, we must return to the pattern of leading our children from the heart. Textbooks and Sunday school lesson plans are not enough.
So, in 2022, and the years to come, what would this look like? What practical steps do we need to implement to stop stumbling in the darkness and find the full light of day, the light of God’s truth to show our children? (Proverbs 4:18-19)
We must realize that God is not confined to Sundays, church buildings, and church events. If God is to be the God of our hearts, he must be the God of all of our life. Parents, pastors, and the people of God must be about desiring the presence of God in every moment of life. (Proverbs 3:5-6) Your children spend only a fraction of their time in the gatherings of the church. They live in a world that has little or no use for God at all. They need to know about a God who is not limited to “church.” This means our children need to know from their hearts what it means to know God in a real-life setting where temptations are more common than Bible teaching. This “heart” knowledge must come from our lives as parents and members of the covenant community who live out the truth of Deuteronomy 6 day in and day out.
Loving God from the heart must be paramount if we want to influence the hearts of our children. If we are to be true to the words of Moses and of Jesus, this means that daily life, not just church life, must be about consciously loving God at every moment. Our focus is to be singular in nature.
Jesus tells us that we cannot pursue God and material stuff. (Matthew 6:24) Only one pursuit can be the bottom line. Christ is not saying we abandon our work and daily activities. He is saying God must be first in all that we do. We are dependent on him for everything, including our next breath. He doesn’t say stop working but that we should acknowledge we only succeed if God is willing. (James 4:13-17) If we are to encourage our children to love the wonder and beauty of God, he must be the God of all of life, from Monday through Saturday as well as Sunday!
This is what Deuteronomy and Matthew (Matthew 22:37-40) mean by saying that we must pursue God with every fiber of our being, every beat of our heart. Our children are the closest, most intimate observers of how you and I live. They see first-hand if our God is a Sunday god or a 24/7 God. They get the contrast between a god who is the god of Sunday and correct behavior and the God who is King of everyday life.
Because of the atoning work of Christ, God is our refuge when we fail, when we sin, when we break trust with others. He does not treat us as our sins deserve. (Psalm 103:6-18; Psalm 130:3-4) Is that how your children view you when they sin when they mess up? Are they confident that you will not treat them as their sins deserve? Do they know you will be a refuge for them when they fail to obey? Or have they been driven away from you because instead of being their refuge, they know you will be their judge? Do they perhaps think that you serve a Sunday god who is a refuge only on Sundays?
Your children, your teenagers, are repulsed by the god of Sunday. This god has nothing to say to them when they face the pressure of a culture that calls them to serve their desires for pleasure and acceptance. They need the confidence that their parents, their pastors, elders, and members of the covenant community are people of safety and refuge in life’s storms. They need the assurance that they are more important than the acquisition of stuff. They need the confidence that parents will understand their struggle with sin and are there to help, not condemn. They need to see parents who know the peace that comes from repentance and brokenness before the Living God, not the Sunday god.
Solomon presents this game plan for parents implanting wisdom in the hearts of their children. For example, Proverbs 6:20-23 shows the intimate connection between the heart of the parents, the wisdom of God, and the heart of children. The goal is to apply wisdom to life!
The pursuit of wisdom cannot be solely, or even primarily, an academic endeavor. Again, see Isaiah 29:13 and Mark 7:6-7. Information learned about God in an academic setting without engaging the heart is toxic and destructive. Wisdom is the skill of taking the truth of God and applying it to life. It is a matter of the heart. Wisdom is best transmitted in the classroom of life. We all may not be as smart as some are, we may not be as brilliant as some are, but we can ALL apply the truth of Scripture to life and become wise, as wise as God wants us to be!
Loving God and pursuing wisdom must become the foundational building blocks of growing trust with our children. This is what will return our church to a place that does not lose the next generation to the lure of an ungodly culture. Solomon shows us the way!
Proverbs 6:20-23
My son, obey your father’s commands
and don’t neglect your mother’s instruction.
Keep their words always in your heart.
Tie them around your neck.
When you walk, their counsel will lead you.
When you sleep, they will protect you.
When you wake up, they will advise you.
For their command is a lamp
and their instruction a light;
their corrective discipline
is the way to life.
It is not by accident that Solomon restates the pattern of heart-to-heart transfer found in Deuteronomy 6! Let’s take a closer look at his words.
Verse 20
Parents are to bind the life-giving words of God deeply into the hearts of their children. Children are best led by example, by casual conversation, by reaction to adversity, and most importantly, by seeing a deep love for God. The parents’ words are to become the means that God will use to guard the hearts of their children.
The backstory to this passage is about parents who love God and their children from the heart, as Deuteronomy 6:5-7 teaches. These are parents who have put God first. They have made understanding their children a priority. God is presented as One who is worthy of being loved and followed each moment of every day, not only on Sundays. The positive response of valuing God’s word is no accident but the result of parents who have lived out the instruction of Deuteronomy.
Verses 20-21
Children are commanded to have the words of their parents in their hearts so that they will be protected from the attacks of the world around them. In verse 21, there is the directive to take these words of their parents and bind them upon their hearts. This instruction is to be displayed around their neck as if it were a beautiful necklace. See Proverbs 1:8-9.
Verse 22
Children and wisdom
Following the pattern of Deuteronomy 6, the impressed wisdom of God leads, protects, and advises children in every corner and in every moment of their lives. Even though parents are not present, the wisdom of God is living and active in the children’s hearts. This is the goal of covenant education, of making God real to your children.
Verse 23
The result of wisdom and truth transmitted from the heart is light that speaks truth to them so that they experience the value of parental instruction. This is wisdom applied. By choosing to follow what was in the hearts of their parent’s children have a light that guards their hearts and builds trust. This instruction from the heart to the heart builds relationships instead of undermining them. It builds trust, first with God and then with our children.
This is the path that will re-establish our covenant families and churches with the lifeblood of the Covenant. May God bless us with a renewed hunger and desire to glorify God and enjoy him forever. This will rebuild broken trust and influence the next generation for the glory of God.