At tonight’s prayer meeting we had an excellent discussion on the challenges of raising children in the 21st century. We have been working through the Proverbs, an excellent source of wisdom for parenting, and tonight began by talking about how appealing a sinful life can seem.

The bulk of the conversation centered around what we, as parents, ought to do to give our children the best foundation for faithfulness. The discussion was excellent but when I got home I thought of one more thing I wished I’d said.

As parents, it’s easy to looking at raising children through the lens of “how can I raise faithful children?” That sounds good but it really isn’t. What that reveals is a results-oriented mindset too common among Christians today. I meet lots of Christian parents who seem tired and worn-down beyond what their circumstances should warrant. I often find this mentality to be near the heart of their problem.

A better question is: “How can I faithfully raise my children?” (See the clever thing I did there?) You cannot control the faithfulness of your children. Thomas Jackson often repeated John Jay’s wise refrain: “Duty is ours, consequences are God’s.” What you can control, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, is your own faithfulness. Why not focus on that?

Children need biblical instruction. They need to be taught right and wrong; sin and repentance. But what Christian children need, in addition to those things, is a decade+ of observing parents who actually love God and are driven to faithfulness from that motivation rather than any other.

It does children some good to observe moral parents. It does them some good to observe parents with good religious disciplines. But if you want to give your children the best possible foundation let them observe that your morality is the result of an incredible sense of gratitude for what God has done for you. Show them that your performance of religious duty is the result of a zeal for the Lord, a delight for his law, and a love for his house. If you want them to believe that the Christian faith is something worth having in their lives let them see that you believe it’s worth having in your own.