This is the second of two interviews with a woman I respect greatly. (The first was about befriending your teens.) She has been and is a faithful mother, wife, and servant of her church family. Her thoughts about discipling your children are well worth your time in reading and reflection.
“Listen to advice and accept instruction, that you may gain wisdom in the future.” Proverbs 19:20
Interview with Judith Pedersen: Discipling Your Children
Gerald and Judith Pedersen
1. Why is it important to disciple our children?
It’s important because these are souls that will spend eternity somewhere. They need to hear the truth that will save them from God’s wrath and hell and establish them as Christ’s followers. As their parents we have the greatest influence and opportunity for this with them as they grow up.
Technically, we are evangelizing them until they become Christians and then we are discipling them. Prior to coming to faith, they are getting a very close view of the Christian life and being blessed by the common grace of living in a Christian home. When they come to faith, we disciple them because those who are more mature in the faith are tasked with offering counsel, instruction, and guidance to the less mature in our spheres of influence.
2. How has the gospel changed your thoughts on how to raise children?
It wasn’t so much of the gospel “changing” our thoughts, but rather the gospel influencing each decision along the way as our parenting patterns formed. As children go through each day, we need to always be ready to respond to their words and actions with gospel concepts. The motivation for the behavior we hope for in our children should be to please God, not man. Wanting to please God should be out of gratitude, not out of the hope of earning God’s favor. The children’s initial desire to please their parents will hopefully lead to wanting God to be pleased with them, which only comes through repentance of sin and faith in Christ.
3. What are some of the ways we can train our children in righteousness?
I’ll start with a brief, Biblical understanding of righteousness. God’s righteousness is God’s holy character, expressed through the law. Due to The Fall (Genesis 3), we can never make ourselves righteous. In salvation Christians are given righteousness through Christ’s atoning work. In sanctification the Christian is progressively made righteous in character and conduct.
So, let’s think of training our children in righteousness as:
(1) teaching our children what righteousness is and how we receive it,
(2) allowing our children to see God’s sanctifying work in our own lives, and
(3) expecting behavior in our children which imitates as closely as possible (which may not be very close at all most of the time!) the holy character (righteousness) of God as seen in the Bible.
4. I love your habits of family worship! Can you describe a typical day of family worship in your home?
Morning
During breakfast, we each share a highlight from our personal Bible reading from the day before. Gerald then reads about a chapter from the Bible and looks at the notes in the study Bible for whatever might be helpful. Any of us can comment or ask questions at any time. Other elements include reviewing our church’s weekly memory verse, praying a prayer from The Valley of Vision, and singing one hymn from the Trinity Hymnal. This all takes about 15 minutes.
(Our morning corporate Bible reading plan is to randomly choose a book of the Bible and read through all of it before moving on to another book of the Bible. We check off each book until we have read through the whole Bible together this way.)
Evening
Evening worship used to be during dinner, but varying work schedules caused us to move it to a later time. This is when we all take turns praying and then finish with a hymn.
For the prayer time, we have a box of small cards that we rotate through. Each card has the name of a person or family we regularly pray for. Each of us can also offer other prayers during this time.
At the beginning of each of our three meals each day, whoever is present will hold hands, sing a short song (praise chorus, a hymn refrain, or one verse from a hymn) and say a short prayer. We take turns picking the song and leading the prayer. Sometimes the “chooser” will choose the Lord’s Prayer, in which case we all recite it together.
5. How did your family worship time evolve as your children matured?
First, let me offer this. Though it’s okay to have a little bit of family worship oriented to young children, the majority of the time should be geared to adults and older children. All through the years of marriage, regardless of the children’s ages, the parents need to experience family/household worship on an adult level.
The basic elements for us have been reading the Bible, singing hymns, and praying. In the early days we used various devotional guides (subscriptions) that included a Bible passage, a short message, and a prayer for each day. We also had a special book for holiday devotionals that included a hymn each day. Gerald liked that he left for work with the hymn in his head, so we added hymn singing to our regular devotionals at that point. Later we replaced the guides with simply reading the Bible and providing the opportunity for comments and questions, followed by praying and singing. (Our oldest, Katie, and Gerald helped me with this.)
6. Did you and Gerald grow up in Christian homes, or did you have to learn on your own how to raise children “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord”?
My mother took us to church regularly. (My dad wasn’t a Christian but attended church occasionally.) Mom also had us involved in Pioneer Girls and Boys Brigade, which were Christian alternatives to scouting. Gerald’s parents took Gerald and his sister to church regularly. Neither of us remember having family worship in the home, though there were meal prayers. Both of us were involved in children’s and youth programs and choirs at church. We’re grateful to our parents for their efforts in pointing us toward Christianity. When we became adults, then married and started having children, we persistently pursued a greater integration of the faith into every area of our lives than we had experienced growing up. We were never just learning on our own, though, as God used many fruitful means to direct us.
7. Why did you make the decision to homeschool your children?
We saw it as the best path for carrying out what our children needed. Passing on our Christian faith would be easier if their academic education was rooted in a Biblical worldview and if the majority of their day was spent under our watchful care and influence. We would be able to readily respond, as we saw fit, to their disciplinary needs and their various questions. With the low teacher-student ratio of home education, the educational process would be more easily customized to each child’s pace and strengths. Additionally, they would be better socialized in the age-integrated environment of home.
8. How would you encourage young parents (or older ones!) who feel that they’ve failed in the area of discipling their children and want to start afresh?
Perhaps you have never expressed your faith to your children in any form. Perhaps they have never seen you read your Bible, pray, sing songs of worship, or witness to people. My guess, though, is that it’s unlikely, unless you have just become a Christian, that you have completely failed in this area. It’s also unlikely, for all of us, that there isn’t more for us to learn and apply. We Christians are to be always reforming, climbing higher toward the call of the good Shepherd, our Lord Jesus Christ.
Remember that discipling our children is to be done out of joyful service to the Lord, not to be done to produce children that will make us feel good about ourselves or impress those who are looking in.
It’s important that when we “start afresh” in any area of the Christian life, we don’t slip into the mindset of expecting that, with the right “formula,” we’ll get the desired results. Raising children is a journey like any other aspect of our lives. We determine the desired destination and route, but prepare to deal with any unexpected delays and detours along the way (inevitable with sinners raising sinners!) without losing sight of where we are trying to go.
Thank you, Mrs. Judith, for sharing your wisdom in this interview! I’m so encouraged to be more faithful in discipling my own children.
If you’ve been encouraged by this interview as well, please share and/or save parts of it that were especially meaningful. The Pedersen’s family worship pattern is one worth trying if you’ve not yet established a regular time of family worship. And Judith’s encouragement to us to persevere through “delays and detours” is priceless.
Read more from Judith Pedersen here, in her thoughts about befriending your teens.
You may also enjoy other interviews in the series on how the gospel influences everyday life.
Making Your House a Home (Jaclyn Lewis)
Sharing the Gospel with Family/Friends (Emily Thomes)
The Ministry of Law Enforcement
