Journal: Journal of Discipleship and Family Ministry
Volume: JDFM 05:1 (Fall 2015)
Article: Don’t Just Teach Your Kids About The Lord
Author: Matt McCauley

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JDFM 5:1 (Fall 2015) p. 115

Don’t Just Teach Your Kids About The Lord1

Matt McCauley

Matt McCauley (M.A., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary) serves as the Children’s and Middle School Minister at The Village Church in Flower Mound, Tx. He’s happily married to the very talented Ashley and is the proud father of a rambunctious and curious little boy, Wyatt. Outside of spending time at home with his entertaining family, Matt loves to be outside, eat good Texas barbeque, and avoid vegetables at all cost. He’s currently working on his D.Ed. Min with a concentration in Family Ministry at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Odds are, your kids aren’t going to remember everything you taught them. But it will be nearly impossible for them to forget the things you were passionate about. In fact, they will very likely grow up to be passionate about the same things. Perhaps this is why we are instructed to do more than just teach our children about the Lord. Psalm 145 tells us to commend, to praise His works to the next generation. John Piper describes this as the transmission of knowledge — the works of God — through praise or exhortation.

The Kind Of Knowing Worth Knowing

You see, there’s so much more to discipling your children than just getting the right information about God into their heads. There is an eternal difference between knowing about God and knowing him personally. Our hope for our children is that they would know

JDFM 5:1 (Fall 2015) p. 116

God and have a relationship with him.

We see this idea illustrated in the lives of three men in the Old Testament: Hophni, Phinehas and Samuel. In 1 Samuel, we meet two young men who knew much of the Lord but, as Scripture explicitly tells us, did not know the Lord. Hophni and Phinehas were PKs: Priest’s Kids. Their father, Eli, was a priest in the house of the Lord at Shiloh during the period of the judges. It’s an understatement to say that these boys grew up in church. They were literally raised in the house of the Lord and, no doubt, had a correct working knowledge of him. But right information about God is not the same as having a right relationship with him. As 1 Samuel 2:12 states, “The sons of Eli were worthless men. They did not know the Lord.”

The Hebrew word for “did not know” carries more meaning than just lack of understanding or knowledge. It suggests a lack of acknowledgement and, in a spiritual sense, suggests that Hophni and Phinehas did not believe in the Lord. This is quickly confirmed by the unspeakable acts the two sons co...

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