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Family Ministry: How a Biblical Worldview Shapes the Way We Teach Our Children

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To have a biblical worldview is to interpret every aspect of our lives—including our relationships with children—within the framework of God’s story. At the center of God’s story stands this singular act: In Jesus Christ, God personally intersected human history and redeemed humanity at a particular time in a particular place. Yet this central act of redemption does not stand alone. It is bordered by God’s good creation and humanity’s fall into sin on the one hand and by the consummation of God’s kingdom on the other.

This story of creation, fall and law, redemption, and consummation is the story that Christians have repeated to one another and to the world ever since Jesus ascended into the sky and sent his Spirit to dwell in his first followers’ lives. This age-old plot-line should frame every aspect of our lives—including how we treat and train children.

Gifts From God and Sinners in Need

In each movement of God’s storyline, it is clear that children are neither burdens to be avoided nor byproducts of human sin. Every child is a blessing and a gift (Ps. 127:3–5). Even before humanity’s fall into sin, God designed the raising of children to serve as a means for the multiplication of his manifest glory around the globe (Gen. 1:26–28). A few bites of forbidden fruit, raising Cain as well as Abel, and a worship service that ended in fratricide took their toll on that first family–but God refused to give up on his first purpose to turn the family into a means for revealing his glory. God promised that, through the offspring of Eve, he would send a redeemer to fulfill his plan to pour out his glory over all the earth (Gen. 3:15; 4:1, 25). The family becomes a path both for bringing the Messiah into the world and for passing the message of the Messiah from one generation to the next.

After the fall, men and women still exercise divinely-ordered dominion over God’s creation by raising children (Gen. 1:26-28; 8:17; 9:1–7; Mark 10:5–9). What has changed in the aftermath of the fall is that children have become not only gifts to be nurtured but also sinners to be trained. And yet, in all of this, the family remains a means in God’s plan, never the goal and never the source or center of our identity.


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