Explaining Jesus and God’s love to your child is an awesome responsibility for every Christian parent. God is not willing to be someone in your life rather He wants to be everything in your life. If God is everything in your life then you just can not be silent about Him and His amazing love.
Remember the best investment you can do on your child is spending time to explain Jesus and His amazing love in spite of all your busy schedule.
Helping your children to know their creator and the author of life from their early age will not only help them to live a purposeful life but also save them from deception.
Deception is powerful enough to destroy the entire life of your precious child, therefore as a loving parent lead them to God to impart a purposeful life.
“One generation shall praise thy works to another, and shall declare thy mighty acts.” — Psalm 145:4
1. Start teaching the basic truths
God is the Heavenly Father
It is very important for your child to learn that our God is the heavenly Father. As a earthly father cares for his children, so our heavenly Father cares for us, even much more deeper love then our earthly father.
We can have a very personal relationship with our Heavenly Father. Moreover, He desires that we build a very personal relationship with Him.
God is all powerful and His power works in our weakness.
When your child sees that you are experiencing the power of God in your weaknesses, they start to believe that God is powerful enough to deal us in the best manner even in our weaknesses.
God loves us and cares for us.
Our God has not only proclaimed that He loves us rather He has shown His love in action and proved it.
When your child understands that Jesus being in the nature of God took the human flesh and became a servant to give His life on the cross for our sins (Philippians 2:5), it helps them to understand how loving is our God that he cares for us and loves us with an amazing love.
Our God is the promise keeping God.
It is amazing to know that God is a promise keeper. As your kids know this truth, it helps them trust in His promises. The Bible says, “Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away.” — MARK 13:31
Obeying God’s command makes our life beautiful.
God has given us a lot of commands not to make our life burdenful but to give us a purposeful and beautiful life full of joy, peace and hope.
Life is beautiful, but it is beautiful only when we obey the commands of God in each and every area of our lives. By neglecting or not following the commands of God, we will only mess up our life and invite pain and trouble, as a result live a life of burden and weariness.
Jesus said that, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” — Matthew 11:28
He wants to give us rest, what He desires from us to follow His commands.
As you explain this valuable truth to your kids at an early age, they learn to obey God’s command and eventually get closer to God.
God sees what we are doing, even in the most secret place.
“No one can hide from God. His eyes see everything we do. We must give an answer to God for what we have done.” — (Hebrews 4:13)
It does not matter where we try to hide or flee but we are never out of God’s sight. He is always looking upon and even in our most secret places where no human can see us.
Knowing this truth will help your child to understand that God is always watching our each and every activity. It will guide them to leave the wicked ways and follow God’s command even in a place where no one sees them.
God loves us so He disciplines us.
“God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness. 11 No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” — (Hebrews 12:10-11)
As a loving earthly father loves his child so disciplines us, in the same manner our Heavenly Father loves us and so He disciplines us for our good.
2. Devout yourself to obey the commands of God
Jesus said that If you love me, obey my commandments (John 14:15). There is no way to love God without obeying His commands. It is pretty easy to teach others to obey the commands of God but living a life of obedience towards the Word of God is not that easy. In order to prove your true and genuine love for God, you actually need to take a firm of determination to obey His each and every command in your day to day life, even though it may require you to sacrifice a lot, you may need to sacrifice your precious time, valuable wealth and many more. But the ultimate result of our obedience towards the Word of God will always bring a better life of joy, peace and hope.
As you determine to obey the commands of God in your day to day life, even though you will have to make a lot of sacrifices. Your child will observe that and learn to love God by obeying His commands.
The Bible says, “Be imitators of God” (Ephesians 5:1)
Children always imitate their parents, and as parents we imitate God, we will soon find that our children are imitating God.
How do we imitate God? We can imitate God by following the footprint of Jesus.
We must live a life of obedience to God as Jesus Christ lived a life of obedience to Father.
Remember Abraham, he is one of the great examples of a man of obedience. Even Though God asked him to sacrifice his beloved precious son Isaac, he just obeyed God even if it cost him to give away his most precious one.
As you being a parent devout yourself to obey the command of God in every day and in every situation, it will eventually teach your child to obey the command of God in day to day life. By obeying the word of God, they begin to love God sincerely.
3. Follow the footprint of Jesus in day to day life
Everyday is a new opportunity to walk in the way of the Lord and follow the footprint of Jesus. If you want your child to know Jesus and experience His amazing love then, you ought to follow the footprint of Jesus in your day to day life.
Following the footprint of Jesus will make you an ideal example for your child to follow.
Paul said “Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ.” — (1 Corinthians 11:1)
If you want your child to follow Christ then you must first start to follow Christ.
“He who says he abides in Him ought himself also to walk just as He walked.” — (1 John 2:6)
Your child has not seen how Jesus walked on the earth, when you walk just as Jesus walked, you actually display Jesus to them. Your child learns to follow the footprint of Jesus by following the footprint of you.
The best way to explain Jesus to your child and help them to know the love of God is to follow the footprint of Jesus and start walking the way Jesus walked.
4. Share the Biblical stories with your child
There are so many great Bible stories to share with your child. The entire life of Jesus is packed with life changing stories.
You can start with sharing ‘the story of the prodigal son’ (Luke 15:11-32)
The parable of the prodigal son in the Bible is an amazing love story to explain the tremendous love of God. This is a great story which displays the abundance of mercy and grace of our heavenly Father. This parable that was spoken by Jesus will help your child to understand the heart of God. This parable explains how God views us and how we can choose to live with Him or reject to live Him.
The great story can be the story of ‘the good Samaritan’ (Luke 10:25-37)
The Bible story of the Good Samaritan spoken by Jesus is a clear demonstration of who is our neighbour and how we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves.Our love for the neighbors is not only spending good time with them, rather the true love for our neighbor is tested when they are in desperate need and suffering.
The story teaches us a great lesson of how to love our neighbour and to be like the good Samaritan.
There are too many great Bible stories to share with your child to help them to learn about God and get closer to God to develop an intimate relationship with Him.
Some other great Bible stories are:
- The Creation of the Heavens and the Earth
- Adam and Eve
- The Tower of Babel
- Abraham’s Covenant
- The Fall of Jericho
- Joseph and his brothers
- Noah’s ark
- Story of Hebrews in Egypt
- Story of Hebrews in desert
- David and Goliath
- Jonah and The Whale
- Daniel In the Lion’s Den
- John the Baptist
- The Birth Of Jesus Christ
- The Resurrection of Jesus
5. Share the story of God’s work in your life
Another great way to teach your child about Jesus Christ is to share your testimonies and how God has shown His tremendous love to you. Your experience of the love of God will help your child to be ignited to know more about that loving God.
Praise the LORD, my soul, and forget not all his benefits. Psalm 103:2
It is very important that you do not forget all the benefits and blessings that the Lord has generously showered upon you, share all those with your child and it will work in an amazing way to help your child to learn to trust upon that living God.
I hope you are familiar with the song ‘Count your many blessings, name them one by one,
And it will surprise you what the Lord has done”. Truly when you start counting the many blessings of the Lord and share them with your child as a living story, they will become alive in the mind of your child to nurture their faith and love for God.
6. Teach your child about sin, savior and repent
Do not neglect to teach your children about the foundation of a happy and meaningful life that when we sin, we actually turn away from God and invite a life of mess but when we repent, we turn toward God and start a peaceful and joyful life.
Teach your child clearly that breaking each and every command of God is simply sin and he or she needs to be honest about the sin and acknowledge that he or she is a sinner.
Once they acknowledge the sin, teach them that they need a savior to be repented to and be free from the bondage of sin.
Let your child know this universal truth that only Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sin and paid the price of sin which is death and resurrected again because He alone is God.
Just as every criminal is to be punished, every sinner must be punished too, to prove the justice of God but our heavenly Father loves us so much that He took the human flesh for our sin and took our punishment and set us free.
What we need to do is repent of our sins and turn away from them and run towards our heavenly Father.
7. Be an integral part of a Biblical church
In order to let your child grow in an environment where they get to know more about God and experience Him in their lives personally, they actually need to spend more time with God. For the fulfilment of this, they are needed to be connected to the right children and people, and therefore becoming an integral part of a Biblical church and letting your children to mingle with the right children and people will be greatly helpful.
There are several benefits of becoming a part of a local church besides the spiritual growth.
Some of them are:
- It will strengthen the community Feeling in your child’s mind.
- Your child will learn to engage in the spiritual and community activities.
- They will become better communicators with your community.
- They will hear more of the Word of God and as a result hearing the Word of God will produce faith in them.
- And faith in God will create the fear of God in them.
- Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, so they will become actually wise children.
- Wisdom of God will help them to live a life of joy, hope and peace.
