“Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. Make them known to your children and your children’s children.”
(Deuteronomy 4:9)
Moses addresses the individual first. He exhorts us to vigilance. We must "watch" ourselves, so that we "do not forget," so that the word will not "slip from our hearts." There is a progression here. Our hypocrisy and disobedience begins with careless attention to ourselves. That is, when we begin to thank the Lord like the Pharisee that we are not like other sinners, we are poised for spiritual drifting.
Moses goes on to say that we are not merely to remember the law and apply it in our own lives; we are responsible for doing the same in our families. I have been so encouraged by the many parents I have seen coming into worship with their young children. I know it is not easy. At times, I'm sure it can feel like the entire worship service was spent trying to keep your children occupied so they did not disrupt others rather than engaging in worship. For those of you worshipping at home via livestream, I know you face many of the same challenges.
Whether you are on campus or at home trying to lead your family to worship via livestream, I want to encourage you. As challenging and frustrating as it may be at times, by faithfully leading your children to corporate worship, you are setting a pattern and an example in their lives. You are showing them what is important to you and what you want to be important to them as well. In the same way you instill the importance of obedience, respect, reading, and writing by exhorting and encouraging your children in those things, by bringing them to corporate worship each week, you are instilling that worship of God is foundational to life.
To put it another way, at times, struggling to lead your family in corporate worship can be as formative in their discipleship as reading a Bible story and praying with them. It is the reason you may often hear people say that more is caught than taught.
One of the first men converted in the first church I pastored exemplified this pattern. He brought his daughter with him to church from the time she was a baby. As he grew in his faith, she was introduced to the Gospel not only by him, but also by that community. Other members cared for his daughter in the nursery, others taught her doctrine in Sunday School, others helped her memorize Scripture and the Catechism, others taught her to worship in children's church, and others taught her to sing her faith in children's choir. She named Christ as her Savior at an early age and walked with him in a way appropriate for her age.
This is not just a unique story. A few years ago, I read a study called “Families and Faith.”1 It is the longest longitudinal study ever conducted, asking the question “does a parent's faith (of any kind) translate to the next generation?” Are there predictors that can be isolated that determine whether your faith will be passed on to the next generation? The author followed 350 families for over 30 years Several conclusions were made, but I will mention just one of them. Parents, grandparents, and grandfathers in particular are the single most important determining factor for whether their children or grandchildren will continue in their faith as adults. The study found that the activity that assured that more than half of children would accept their family's faith as adults was taking them to church. The single most important predictor for whether children of the next generation will as adults embrace the same faith as their parents was their parents taking them to church.
There were two extremes in the study. In other words, there were two ways that you can assure that your children will imitate your example in the generation to come. One is never going to church. If you never go to church, you can be assured that your children will never go to church. On the other hand, if you go to church weekly, there is a great chance that your children will adopt your faith and worship weekly when they are adults. There is no assurance for anything in between, such as once a year or once a month. If you don't want your children to follow your faith, here is the way you can assure it, never go to church. If you want your children to model your walk with the Lord in worshipping the Lord Jesus Christ, leading them to corporate worship is an important step.
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For a short synopsis of the study, see Mark Oppenheimer, “Book Explores Ways Faith Is Kept, or Lost, Over Generations,” The New York Times, January 31, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/us/book-explores-ways-faith-is-kept-or-lost-over-generations.html. For the entire study, see Vern L. Bengston, Families and Faith: How Religion is Passed Down across Generations (Oxford UP, 2017).