Cultivate Your Children's Love for Christ
Lord's Day Exhortation
One of our desires as Christian parents is not just to teach our children to obey God’s commandments but to help them grow to love the standard.
If you simply teach your children to follow the rules, keep their manners, and be nice to others—but they have no genuine love for Christ and His people—it is all ultimately worthless. If they are not devoted in their hearts to the Lord, seeking to do His will, all the outward trappings of our Christian culture will be eternally meaningless. As the Puritan Thomas Watson once wrote, “Morality without piety is profound madness.” Morality without a love for God makes no sense. In fact, when it comes to children in the church, it can even become a snare if they come to believe they are united to Christ simply because of the family they are in, the church they attend, or the way they behave.
In your nurture and discipline of your children, you are not just directing their actions or developing their morality, but also cultivating their loves. You are watering the soil of a soul that contains a seed of faith, believing the promises of God—that He is faithful to every generation (Ps. 103:17). Therefore, your prayer for them can be like the Apostle Paul’s for the Philippians: that their love would abound more and more in knowledge and discernment, that they would approve the things that are excellent, and be filled with the fruits of righteousness by Jesus Christ (Phil. 1:9–11).
Now, one important part of teaching your children to love the standard is demonstrating that you yourself are under that same standard. Children are to obey their parents in the Lord, and parents, in turn, are to obey the Lord in word and deed (Eph. 6:1–4). This means that they should see you pursuing Christ, growing in holiness, and confessing your own sin and weakness.
And so the exhortation this morning is to teach all things for faith and obedience to your little disciples of Christ. But make sure you are teaching them to understand and love the standard. And by this I mean teach them to love the Standard-Giver, to love the Lord Jesus Christ, the One who fulfilled it perfectly on their behalf, granting us the grace to follow in His steps, even imperfectly.
This exhortation was given on June 21, AD 2026, at King’s Cross Church in Moscow, Idaho.