By the age of nine, Nifemi had given her life to Christ four times. Her mother kept count without meaning to. The first was at a children’s crusade when she was five, the second at a vacation Bible school, the third at a birthday party where a visiting aunt led all the children in a prayer before the cake was cut. The fourth was in children’s church on an ordinary Sunday, when the teacher asked who wanted Jesus to come into their heart and Nifemi’s hand went up before the sentence was finished.
She was, by every visible measure, a model Christian child. She could recite Psalm 23 and the books of the Bible faster than her mother. She sang in the children’s choir. She led the family prayer when asked, and her prayers had all the right words in them: cover us with the blood, we bind every evil, in Jesus’ mighty name.
Then came a night in the rainy season when NEPA had taken the light and the inverter battery had run down. The family had dragged mattresses into the parlour where the windows caught a little breeze. Her mother, Ibukun, was almost asleep when a small voice came out of the dark.
“Mummy, how do you know God is real?”
Ibukun’s eyes opened.
Punchline“Because sometimes when I pray,” Nifemi went on, “I am just saying the words. Like when we say the pledge at assembly. Is that bad?”
Ibukun told me later that her first reaction was fear, and her second was the sentence she had heard as a child whenever she asked anything awkward: Don’t question God. It was halfway to her lips. Then, lying there in the warm dark, she thought of how many times her daughter had raised her hand in church, and realised that this was the first time Nifemi had ever told her what was really happening inside.
What do you do when a child who knows all the right words tells you that the words are not yet her own?
Words before understanding
The first thing to say is that Nifemi’s question was not a crisis. It was a doorway.
Children learn the language of faith the way they learn every other language: by hearing it and repeating it long before they understand it fully. A toddler says “thank you” because his mother prompts him, long before he grasps what gratitude is. That is how learning works, and it is good. The words give the child a place to grow into.
The Bible describes exactly this stage in the life of one of its great prophets. Samuel had been serving in the tabernacle at Shiloh since he was weaned. He opened the doors, assisted the priest and slept near the ark of God. And yet:
Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD , neither was the word of the LORD yet revealed unto him. , and before the word of the LORD was revealed unto him And the LORD called Samuel again the third time. And he arose and went to Eli, and said, Here am I; for thou didst call me. And Eli perceived that the LORD had called the child. Therefore Eli said unto Samuel, Go, lie down: and it shall be, if he call thee, that thou shalt say, Speak, LORD ; for thy servant heareth. So Samuel went and lay down in his place. And the LORD came, and stood, and called as at other times, Samuel, Samuel. Then Samuel answered, Speak; for thy servant heareth.
“Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD, neither was the word of the LORD yet revealed unto him.” A boy could live in the house of God, wear a linen ephod and take part in its worship, and still not yet know the Lord personally. There is no scandal in that verse. It simply describes a stage. Samuel was surrounded by the things of God, and the time came when God spoke to him for himself.
Notice Eli’s part. He did not hear God’s voice for the boy. He did not tell Samuel what God was saying. He did something more valuable: he recognised what was happening and pointed the child toward the Lord. “Go, lie down: and it shall be, if he call thee, that thou shalt say, Speak, LORD; for thy servant heareth.” Eli’s role was to help the child listen.
That is a large part of a believing parent’s role. You cannot know God on your child’s behalf. You can surround the child with the truth, explain it patiently, show what it looks like to trust it, and point him again and again toward the God who calls children by name.
NuggetYou cannot know God on your child’s behalf. You can surround that child with truth, welcome the questions, and keep pointing toward the One who calls children by name.
The words must first be in your heart
The great charter for passing on faith in the Old Testament is the passage Jews have recited for centuries as the Shema, from its first word, “Hear”:
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD : And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.
The order of this passage is easy to miss. Before a single word is said about children, Moses speaks to the parent. “Thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart.” “And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart.” Only then: “And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children.”
Faith is passed on most naturally from a heart in which it actually lives. A parent who knows the vocabulary but has little real dealing with God will tend to pass on vocabulary. Children are extraordinarily perceptive. They notice whether prayer is something their parents do when they are frightened or something they do because they love God. They notice whether the Bible is opened at home or only carried to church. They notice what happens to their parents’ faith when the business struggles or Grandma falls ill.
This is not meant to load parents with guilt. None of us has an undivided heart all the time. But it does tell us where the work begins. If you want your children to know God for themselves, the most important thing you can do is to keep knowing Him for yourself.
Then look at the setting of the teaching. “When thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.” The pictures cover a whole day: meals, journeys, bedtime, morning. The faith of Israel was to be passed on in conversation woven through ordinary life, not only in formal sessions.
That is encouraging for busy families. Family devotions have great value, and I would urge every household to have some regular pattern of reading and praying together. But much of what children learn about God will come in the unplanned moments: in the car on the school run when a song comes on the radio, at the dinner table when someone mentions a friend whose father has died, on the mattress in the parlour when the light has gone and a question floats out of the dark.
The phrase “teach them diligently” translates a Hebrew verb that carries the sense of sharpening or repeating, pressing something in by going over it again and again. That is how understanding grows: by patient repetition, through many conversations over many years.
Questions are part of the design
Ibukun’s instinct, don’t question God, is common in our churches, and it comes from a good place. Many of us were taught to show reverence by keeping quiet, and we have seen how mocking questions can be used to tear faith down.
But look at how the Scriptures themselves expect children to respond to what they see. When Israel crossed the Jordan, God told Joshua to have twelve stones carried from the riverbed and set up as a memorial. Why?
That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones? Then ye shall answer them, That the waters of Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD ; when it passed over Jordan, the waters of Jordan were cut off: and these stones shall be for a memorial unto the children of Israel for ever.
“When your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones?” God built a question into the landscape. The memorial was designed to provoke curiosity. And the parents were told how to respond. They were to tell the story of what God had done.
The same pattern appears at the Passover. “And it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto you, What mean ye by this service?” (Exodus 12:26). And it appears again a few verses after the Shema: “And when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying, What mean the testimonies, and the statutes, and the judgments, which the LORD our God hath commanded you? Then thou shalt say unto thy son, We were Pharaoh’s bondmen in Egypt; and the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand” (Deuteronomy 6:20-21).
Three times God anticipates the child’s question, and three times He welcomes it. The answer each time is a testimony: this is what the Lord did for us. Commands make sense inside a story of rescue.
So a child’s question is often an invitation. “How do you know God is real?” “Why did God let Grandpa die?” “Why do we pray if God already knows?” “Is Jesus like Father Christmas?” These deserve honest answers. Sometimes the answer will be a story. Sometimes it will be a reason. Sometimes it will be, “That is a hard question. I do not fully know, but here is what I do know, and we can look into it together.”
There is a difference between a question asked to understand and a question asked to mock, and children can learn that difference too. But most children’s questions are genuine, and when a parent shuts them down, the child does not stop wondering. He simply stops asking you. And then he takes his questions to the internet, or to a classmate, or to a lecturer at university who will be delighted to answer them for him.
The God of the Bible is not threatened by honest questions. “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD” (Isaiah 1:18). John the Baptist, in prison, sent to ask Jesus whether He really was the one who should come (Matthew 11:3). Jesus did not condemn him. He sent back evidence. Thomas wanted to see the wounds, and Jesus showed him (John 20:27). A child who learns that questions can be brought to God is learning something precious about the kind of Father He is.
Faith that dwelt first in a grandmother
Paul’s young colleague Timothy is the New Testament’s clearest example of a person who grew up in faith and then came to own it. Paul writes to him:
When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also.
Timothy’s household was not ideal by the standards of a church brochure. His father was a Greek (Acts 16:1), apparently not a believer. The faith in that home came through the women: his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice. Many Nigerian Christians will recognise the pattern. In countless homes, it has been a praying grandmother, a faithful mother, an aunt who took the children to church when no one else would, through whom the knowledge of God first came.
Look at the word Paul uses to describe that faith. “Unfeigned.” The Greek is anupokritos, literally “without play-acting”, without hypocrisy. What Timothy saw in his grandmother and mother was real. It was not a performance for visitors or for the pastor. It was the same on Monday as on Sunday.
And then Paul says something important: “which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also.” First in them. Then in thee also. The faith had to come to live in Timothy himself. It could be modelled, taught and prayed for across three generations, but it could not simply be inherited like a family surname. Each generation must come to trust Christ for itself.
That is both sobering and freeing. Sobering, because we cannot assume our children will believe simply because they were born into a Christian home. Freeing, because our task is not to produce faith in them by force. Our task is to make the faith we hold visible, unfeigned and attractive, and to trust God with the rest.
Scripture that makes wise unto salvation
Later in the same letter, Paul returns to Timothy’s childhood:
But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them ; And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.
“From a child thou hast known the holy scriptures.” The word translated child is brephos, which can refer even to an infant. Timothy had been hearing the Scriptures read and explained for as long as he could remember. That is the work of Lois and Eunice again, faithful and ordinary.
But notice what Paul says the Scriptures are able to do: “make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.” The goal of all that childhood teaching was not simply good behaviour, or Bible knowledge, or the ability to win a memory verse competition. It was salvation, through faith in Christ.
This has a practical consequence for how we teach the Bible to children. It is easy to tell Bible stories only as moral lessons: be brave like David, be obedient like Samuel, be kind like Ruth. There is truth in those lessons. But if that is all a child hears, he may grow up thinking the Bible is a book of heroes to imitate, and conclude that God’s favour depends on how well he imitates them. The child who absorbs that message will either become proud or quietly give up.
The Bible’s great story is the story of God rescuing people who could not rescue themselves. David is brave, but David also fails terribly and needs mercy. The Passover lamb, the ark in the flood, the bronze serpent in the wilderness, all point forward to Jesus, who died for sinners and rose again. When we teach children the Scriptures, we should keep bringing them back to Him. A child should know not only what God expects of him but what God has done for him.
Paul also says, “knowing of whom thou hast learned them.” Timothy could trust what he had been taught partly because he knew the people who had taught him. Their lives matched their words. A child weighs the message by the messenger. That is one more reason why a parent’s honesty, including honesty about his own failures, matters so much.
Explaining the gospel patiently
How, then, do we explain the gospel to a child in a way that leads to real understanding?
We begin by remembering that “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17). Faith grows as the child hears and understands who Jesus is and what He has done. So the heart of the task is explanation, given at the child’s level and repeated over years.
For a young child, that might mean very simple truths, said often: God made you and loves you. Everyone does wrong things, and wrong things spoil our friendship with God. Jesus, God’s Son, came and died on the cross to take the punishment for our wrong, and God raised Him from the dead. When we trust Jesus, God forgives us completely and makes us His children for ever. The Holy Spirit comes to live in us and helps us to love God and others.
As the child grows, each of those truths can be deepened. What does it mean that Jesus took our punishment? Why did He have to rise again? What does it mean to trust Him, as opposed to just knowing about Him? Can a Christian still do wrong, and what happens when he does? Let the child ask. Let him restate it in his own words. Gently correct what he has misunderstood.
Be careful not to reduce the gospel to a formula. “Say this prayer after me” can be a helpful way for a child to express trust in Christ, and many of us first prayed that way. But the prayer is the expression; it is not the thing itself. Trust in Christ is the thing itself. A child who has prayed a prayer four times may still be unsure whether it “worked”, because she was taught to look at the prayer instead of at Jesus. Point her back to Him. Her security rests on what Christ has done and on God’s promise to receive those who come to Him, not on the precision of her words or the depth of her feelings on a particular Sunday.
John wrote his first letter partly “that ye may know that ye have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). Assurance for a child, as for an adult, comes from the promises of God, confirmed by the inner witness of the Spirit who “beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God” (Romans 8:16).
You do not need to manufacture an experience
Many parents feel a quiet pressure for their children’s faith to look convincing. We want to see tears at the altar, or a dramatic moment at camp, or a story we can tell the house fellowship. And there are settings where children are pushed toward that kind of moment: long, emotional meetings late at night, vivid accounts of hellfire told to six-year-olds, repeated altar calls until every hand is raised.
I want to speak carefully here. I believe God meets children by His Spirit in real and sometimes powerful ways. Children can be filled with the Holy Spirit, can sense His presence in worship, can pray with a sincerity that puts adults to shame. Jesus thanked His Father that He had “revealed them unto babes” (Matthew 11:25), and we should expect God to work in our children’s lives. Many children who come to faith at a camp or a crusade go on with God for the rest of their lives.
But we must not try to produce by pressure what only God can produce by grace. Jesus said, “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him” (John 6:44). And He compared the new birth to the wind: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). We cannot schedule the wind.
When adults manipulate a child’s emotions to produce a response, several things can go wrong. The child may learn that faith is a feeling, and doubt it the moment the feeling fades. He may come to associate God with fear rather than love. He may learn to give the response adults want, which is exactly the habit Nifemi was confessing in the dark. Or, as he grows older and recognises the manipulation, he may reject the whole thing as theatre.
Some children come to faith at a clear moment they can always remember. Others grow up trusting Jesus from so early that they cannot recall a time when they did not. Both can be entirely genuine. Paul put it well: “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:6). Parents plant and water. God gives growth. That frees us from the burden of making our children’s faith look a particular way.
What we can do is keep the soil good. Let the Scriptures be heard. Let honest questions be welcomed. Let the children see unfeigned faith in their parents and grandparents. Pray for them persistently. And when a child does express trust in Christ, in whatever words she can manage, receive it gladly, encourage her, and keep teaching.
The generation to come
The psalmist saw this work stretching across generations:
We will not hide them from their children, shewing to the generation to come the praises of the LORD , and his strength, and his wonderful works that he hath done. For he established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers, that they should make them known to their children: That the generation to come might know them, even the children which should be born; who should arise and declare them to their children: That they might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments.
“We will not hide them from their children.” Each generation receives the testimony of what God has done and passes it on, “that the generation to come might know them, even the children which should be born; who should arise and declare them to their children.” And the purpose is clear: “That they might set their hope in God.”
That is the goal. Our children may carry our religious habits for a while, but the aim is that their own hope should be set in God. We are aiming for children who, when we are no longer beside them, will still pray, still open the Scriptures, still bring their questions and their failures to the Father, because they have come to know Him themselves.
There will be seasons when it is hard to tell whether that is happening. A child who was eager at eight may be quiet and questioning at fifteen. That is not necessarily a sign of failure. Many people who later walk closely with God passed through such seasons. Keep the conversation open. Keep praying. Keep being the kind of believer whose faith is unfeigned. The God who called Samuel in the night has not lost track of your child.
Ibukun did not say don’t question God that night. She swallowed the words and lay still for a moment. Then she reached across the mattress in the dark and found her daughter’s hand.
Punchline“That is a very good question,” she said. “Shall I tell you how I know?”
She told Nifemi about the year before Nifemi was born, when the doctors had been worried and Ibukun had prayed in the hospital corridor with no words at all, just tears, and had felt a peace she could not explain. She told her about reading the Gospels as a university student and being struck by how Jesus treated people. She admitted that there were still days when she prayed and felt nothing. “But Jesus is real whether I feel Him or not,” she said. “And He likes it when you tell Him the truth. You can say to Him exactly what you just said to me.”
There was a long silence. Ibukun thought her daughter had fallen asleep. Then, very quietly, Nifemi began to pray. It was a short prayer, with none of the phrases she had learned in church. “Jesus, I don’t know if I’m doing this right. I want You to be real to me. Please help me. Amen.”
It was the fifth time Nifemi had prayed to receive Christ. Ibukun told me that it was the first time she was certain her daughter had meant every word, because for the first time the words were her own.
You do not need to manufacture your child’s faith. Fill your home with the truth. Let the Scriptures be heard and the questions be asked. Live a faith that is unfeigned. And when your child is ready to speak to God in her own small, honest voice, you will be there in the dark, holding her hand.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- What phrases of faith do your children repeat? How much do you think they understand of what they are saying?
- How did the adults in your own childhood respond to questions about God? How has that shaped the way you respond to your children’s questions?
- Which ordinary moments of your family’s day (meals, journeys, bedtime, mornings) could become natural places for conversation about God?
- How clearly have you explained the gospel itself to your children, as distinct from Bible stories and moral lessons?
- In what ways might you have pressured a child toward a spiritual response rather than trusting God’s timing?
This Week
This week, ask each of your children, at a relaxed moment, one open question: “What is one thing about God you have wondered about?” Do not correct or lecture straight away. Thank them for asking, give the best simple answer you can, and if you do not know, say so and promise to look into it together. Write the questions down, and return to at least one of them before the week ends with a passage of Scripture you have read together.
A Prayer
Father, thank You for the children You have placed in my care. I cannot make them know You, but I can point them to You, and I ask You to draw them to Yourself by Your Spirit. Put Your words first in my own heart, so that my faith will be unfeigned and my children will see it. Give me patience to explain the gospel again and again, and grace to welcome their questions without fear. Forgive me where I have pressed for appearances instead of trusting Your work. Call each of my children by name, as You called Samuel, and let them answer You for themselves. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.