Fatima came to faith in her second year at university. Her family did not share her new faith, and for a long time they did not understand it. Some of them still do not. When she married a young man from her campus fellowship a few years later, she promised herself that her children would grow up with what she never had: a Christian father and mother, family devotions every evening, and a home where the faith was simply the air everyone breathed.
Her husband left when their sons were six and nine. There was no dramatic scene. He took a job in another city, the visits became less frequent, and eventually they stopped. Fatima was left in a rented flat in Kubwa with two boys, a job as an accountant, and a picture of family life that had shattered.
She kept going to church. But the family seminars became painful. The slides always showed a smiling father at the head of a table, reading the Bible to a smiling mother and two well-behaved children. The speaker would talk about the priest of the home, and Fatima would sit near the back and feel that her family was a broken version of the real thing. When she tried to lead devotions herself, it rarely went the way she imagined. The boys were tired. Someone was always arguing. Many nights she was too exhausted to do anything except tell them to say their prayers and go to sleep.
There was one morning she never forgot. They were late for school, stuck in traffic on the expressway, and she lost her temper and shouted at her older son in a way she had promised herself she never would. Then she dropped them at the school gate and sat in the car park, crying, convinced that whatever her sons learned about God, they would not learn it from her.
Years later she discovered that she had been wrong about almost everything she thought her sons were noticing.
Children notice the distance
Children are remarkably good at spotting the gap between what their parents say and what their parents do. A father who leads family prayer after shouting at his wife at dinner may think the prayer is what his children will remember. A mother who teaches her children never to lie and then tells them to inform the caller that she is not at home has given two lessons at once, and the second is often the one that sticks. Every pastor has met young adults who left the church, and when you listen carefully to their stories, a surprising number of them describe the distance between what was taught at home and what was lived there.
This should sober us, but it should not drive us into despair or into pretending. No parent can close the distance completely. Every Christian father and mother will fall short of what they teach. The question is what children see us do with that gap. Do we hide it? Deny it? Blame others for it? Or do they watch us bring it honestly to God?
Spiritual example does not mean perfection. It means a parent whose life is genuinely oriented toward God, who is visibly growing in grace, and who tells the truth about his own failures. That kind of example is within the reach of every believing parent, in every kind of household.
Words in the heart first
The classic passage on spiritual instruction in the home is the one Jewish families still recite daily, the Shema of Deuteronomy 6. It begins, “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” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5).
Before the passage says anything about children, it speaks to the parent. Love the Lord with all your heart. Then: “these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart” (Deuteronomy 6:6). Only after that does it say, “thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children” (Deuteronomy 6:7). The order matters. What is to be taught must first be in the heart of the teacher. A parent cannot pass on what he does not possess.
The Hebrew verb translated teach diligently comes from a root meaning to sharpen or whet, as a blade is sharpened on a stone. It suggests repeated, patient, persistent work. And look at where this teaching is to happen: “when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.” The whole of ordinary life is covered. Sitting at home, travelling, going to bed, waking in the morning. Spiritual instruction in this picture is far wider than a formal session after dinner. It is woven into conversations in the car, comments at the market, prayers at bedtime and words spoken over breakfast.
Then the words were to be bound “for a sign upon thine hand,” placed “as frontlets between thine eyes,” and written “upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates” (Deuteronomy 6:8-9). The hand speaks of what we do, the eyes of how we see, the doorposts of the home and the gates of public life. God’s word was meant to be visible in the work of a person’s hands and the way a family’s life was conducted, inside and outside the house.
Under the New Covenant, God has done what the old covenant could only command. He promised, “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33). In Christ, by the Spirit, the word is no longer only written on doorposts. It is written within. Paul tells believers that they are “the epistle of Christ,” a letter “written ... with the Spirit of the living God” on “fleshy tables of the heart” (2 Corinthians 3:3). A believing parent’s life is a letter his children read every day. What makes that letter worth reading is the Spirit’s work within him, and it is that work which he passes on.
When thy son asketh thee
Deuteronomy 6 also anticipates a moment that every parent faces: the child’s question.
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: And the LORD shewed signs and wonders, great and sore, upon Egypt, upon Pharaoh, and upon all his household, before our eyes: And he brought us out from thence, that he might bring us in, to give us the land which he sware unto our fathers. And the LORD commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the LORD our God, for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as it is at this day. And it shall be our righteousness, if we observe to do all these commandments before the LORD our God, as he hath commanded us.
“What mean the testimonies, and the statutes, and the judgments?” The child sees the family keeping the commandments and wants to know why. Notice how the parent is told to answer. He does not begin with the rules. He begins with a story. “We were Pharaoh’s bondmen in Egypt; and the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.” The commandments are explained by redemption. First God saved; then He gave His people a way to live.
This is a powerful pattern for Christian parents. When our children ask why we pray, why we go to church, why we refuse to lie on a tax form, why we forgive people who hurt us, the deepest answer is not “because those are the rules.” It is the story of what God has done. We were slaves to sin, and Christ set us free. Paul says it directly: “ye were the servants of sin, but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you” (Romans 6:17). Our obedience is a response to grace, and our children need to hear it explained that way.
Notice also the phrase “before our eyes” in verse 22. The parent is to speak as a witness. “The LORD shewed signs and wonders ... before our eyes.” Children need to hear their parents’ own testimony: how they came to faith, how God has been faithful, how He provided when the money ran out, how He comforted them in grief. A parent who has no personal story of God’s goodness to tell will struggle to make the commandments sound like anything other than a burden.
Verse 25 says, “it shall be our righteousness, if we observe to do all these commandments.” Under the old covenant, faithful obedience was Israel’s righteousness in the land. We must be careful how we carry this into a Christian home. Our children must not grow up thinking that their good behaviour earns their standing with God. In Christ, our righteousness is a person, the one Jeremiah called “THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS” (Jeremiah 23:6). We teach our children to obey because they have been loved and redeemed, not in order to be.
The household after him
God said something remarkable about Abraham:
For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the LORD , to do justice and judgment; that the LORD may bring upon Abraham that which he hath spoken of him.
Punchline“I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him.” God had chosen Abraham with the future in view. His faith was meant to shape those who came after him.
Yet Abraham was a deeply imperfect man. Twice he lied about his wife, telling foreign rulers she was his sister because he was afraid for his life (Genesis 12:13; 20:2). And a generation later, his son Isaac did exactly the same thing. “He said, She is my sister: for he feared to say, She is my wife” (Genesis 26:7). The son repeated the father’s failure almost word for word.
This is sobering. Children inherit our faith, and they also inherit our patterns, including the ones we never addressed. Fear, deceit, anger and favouritism ran through the generations of Abraham’s family, alongside genuine faith. Isaac favoured Esau; Rebekah favoured Jacob; Jacob in turn favoured Joseph, and the consequences nearly destroyed the family.
We should not read this with fear, as though children were doomed to repeat everything their parents did. In Christ, patterns can be broken. A man who grew up with a father who never spoke kindly can become a father who blesses his children by name. A woman whose mother ruled the house through silence and sulking can learn to speak her hurt honestly and forgive quickly. That change rarely happens by accident, though. It usually begins when a parent looks honestly at what he received, names what was harmful, and brings it to God instead of passing it quietly to the next generation.
I once heard a father in a men’s fellowship say, “My father beat us when he was angry, and I promised I would never do that. I kept the promise. But I realised one day that I had replaced the belt with my tongue.” He had broken one pattern and kept another. His honesty that morning became the beginning of real change in his home.
So spiritual example has two parts. One is the faith we live openly before our children. The other is the honest work of addressing our own failings before they become our children’s inheritance.
Fathers and the nurture of the Lord
When Paul addresses family life in Ephesians, he speaks directly to fathers: “And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4).
In the Roman world, a father had almost unlimited legal power over his children. Paul’s instruction would have sounded surprising. He tells fathers to restrain their power, so that they do not provoke their children to anger. Colossians adds the reason: “lest they be discouraged” (Colossians 3:21). Harshness, inconsistency and hypocrisy all provoke children. A father who demands what he will not do himself, who corrects in rage, or who is spiritual in public and careless at home, is sowing discouragement.
The positive command uses two words. Nurture translates paideia, which means training and discipline, the whole process of raising a child. Admonition translates nouthesia, which carries the idea of putting something into the mind, instruction by word. Both are “of the Lord.” The father is not training his children in his own preferences. He is bringing them up in the Lord’s ways.
Paul addresses fathers specifically, and we should hear that. In many Nigerian homes, there is an unspoken division of labour: the father provides money, and the mother provides prayer. Fathers attend church but leave the spiritual nurture of the children almost entirely to their wives. Paul will not allow that. A father’s spiritual example matters enormously, and when it is absent, children notice.
At the same time, Scripture never treats this as the father’s task alone. “My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother” (Proverbs 1:8). Father and mother both teach. Both are examples. In homes where both are present, they share the responsibility together, and children benefit from seeing their faith lived out in two different personalities, two different ways of praying, two different ways of serving.
Your children are reading your life as a letter every day. What makes it worth reading is the honest evidence of God’s grace at work in you, failures included.
The honesty to acknowledge failure
NuggetBecause no parent lives up to what he teaches, the most important part of spiritual example may be what we do when we fail.
Paul could say, “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). That sounds confident. But the same Paul described himself as the chief of sinners: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief” (1 Timothy 1:15). His example pointed beyond himself to Christ, and it included the story of his own need for mercy. He was an example of a forgiven man.
That is the example our children most need. “He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy” (Proverbs 28:13). When a parent who has been harsh, dishonest or hypocritical goes to a child and says, “I was wrong, and I am sorry. I have asked God to forgive me, and I am asking you to forgive me too,” something remarkable happens. The child sees the gospel lived out in front of him. He learns that faith is not a performance. He learns that grown-ups need grace as much as children do. And he learns what to do when he fails himself.
Many parents fear that admitting failure will undermine their authority. Generally the opposite is true. Children already know when their parents have failed. What undermines authority is pretending otherwise. A parent who confesses his wrong grows in credibility, because his children can see that his faith is real enough to bear the truth.
This honesty should be appropriate to the child’s age, of course. A parent does not unload every adult struggle on a young child. But children should see their parents pray when they are troubled, repent when they are wrong, and receive forgiveness when they have failed. “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed” (James 5:16). That verse belongs in the home before anywhere else.
Lois, Eunice and a Greek father
When Paul wrote his last letter to Timothy, he remembered how the young man’s faith had begun:
I thank God, whom I serve from my forefathers with pure conscience, that without ceasing I have remembrance of thee in my prayers night and day; Greatly desiring to see thee, being mindful of thy tears, that I may be filled with joy; 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 faith “dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice.” The word dwelt means to make a home. Faith lived in those women and then, Paul says, came to live in Timothy too. And Paul describes it as “unfeigned faith.” The Greek word is anupokritos, without hypocrisy. Here is the very thing children are looking for. What reached Timothy was the real thing, faith lived honestly in front of him, with nothing staged about it.
Now look at Timothy’s family background as Luke describes it:
Then came he to Derbe and Lystra: and, behold, a certain disciple was there, named Timotheus, the son of a certain woman, which was a Jewess, and believed; but his father was a Greek: Which was well reported of by the brethren that were at Lystra and Iconium. Him would Paul have to go forth with him; and took and circumcised him because of the Jews which were in those quarters: for they knew all that his father was a Greek.
“The son of a certain woman, which was a Jewess, and believed; but his father was a Greek.” Luke mentions the father twice. He is never described as a believer, and the fact that Timothy had not been circumcised suggests that the father had not shared his wife’s faith. Timothy grew up in what we might call a divided home. The faith came through his mother and grandmother.
This is a word of great encouragement for many readers. If you are a mother praying alone for your children, or a grandmother raising grandchildren, or a believer married to someone who does not share your faith, you stand in the line of Lois and Eunice. Their home did not fit an ideal picture. And from that home came one of the most trusted leaders of the early church, a young man Paul called “my dearly beloved son” (2 Timothy 1:2).
Faithful caregiving in every kind of home
Scripture is full of children raised outside the ideal picture of a mother and father together under one roof. Moses was nursed by his own mother and then raised in Pharaoh’s palace by an adoptive mother (Exodus 2:9-10). Samuel was raised by an elderly priest in the tabernacle. Naomi took her grandson Obed “and laid it in her bosom, and became nurse unto it” (Ruth 4:16). And there is this:
And he brought up Hadassah, that is , Esther, his uncle’s daughter: for she had neither father nor mother, and the maid was fair and beautiful; whom Mordecai, when her father and mother were dead, took for his own daughter.
Mordecai took in his orphaned cousin and “took for his own daughter.” Later in the story, when Esther had become queen, she still listened to his counsel, “for Esther did the commandment of Mordecai, like as when she was brought up with him” (Esther 2:20). His faithful care in her childhood shaped her courage as an adult.
Many homes today look like these. Single mothers and single fathers. Grandparents raising grandchildren while the parents work in another city or abroad. Aunties and uncles who have taken in a sibling’s children. Step-parents, foster parents, adoptive parents. Widows and widowers. Couples where only one spouse believes. If that is your home, hear this clearly: your faithful caregiving is fully seen by God, and your spiritual example is just as real as that of any family on a seminar slide.
A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation. God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land .
“A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation. God setteth the solitary in families.” God Himself steps into the gaps that human families leave. He also places people in families, including the family of the church. Jesus promised that those who had left family for His sake would receive “an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children” (Mark 10:30). A single parent’s children can have godly uncles and aunts in the congregation who add to what one parent alone cannot provide. Churches should take that responsibility seriously, and stop treating the two-parent home as the only kind of family in which faith can grow.
One more word needs saying. Some households are not safe. If a home involves abuse of any kind, a parent’s first spiritual duty is to protect the children and get them to safety, involving the authorities and qualified help as needed. No picture of family unity, and no appeal to covenant, should ever require a child or a spouse to remain in danger.
Fatima turned fifty last year. Her sons, now twenty-four and twenty-seven, organised a thanksgiving service in Abuja and asked to speak. She was nervous. She half expected them to talk politely about her cooking and leave it there.
Her older son stood up first. He said that when he was a boy, his room was across the corridor from hers, and in the mornings, before the call to get ready for school, he would sometimes wake early and see light under her door. If the door was slightly open, he could see her kneeling beside the bed with her Bible open. “I did not know what she was praying,” he said. “I just knew that my mother talked to God before she talked to anyone else.”
Then he told the story of the morning in traffic. Fatima felt her face grow hot. She had no idea he remembered. “That evening,” he said, “she came into our room and sat on my bed and said she was sorry. She said she had asked God to forgive her and she was asking me too. I was nine. I had never heard an adult apologise to a child before.”
He said one more thing. In all the years since their father left, he had never heard his mother speak about him with contempt. “She told us to pray for him. She did it herself. That is how I learned what forgiveness looks like.”
PunchlineThe family devotions she had worried about so much were not mentioned once.
Fatima’s sons did not grow up in the home she had planned. They grew up in a home where faith was unfeigned. It lived in a woman on her knees before dawn, and in a mother who said sorry, and it came to live in them too.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Where do your children see a distance between what you teach and how you live?
- What is your own story of God’s faithfulness, and have you told it to your children?
- How do you usually respond when you fail in front of your children?
- If your home does not fit the idealised picture of family life, how does the example of Lois, Eunice or Mordecai encourage you?
- Which of your own patterns, good or bad, do you most want to address before your children inherit them?
This Week
This week, tell each of your children one specific story of how God has been faithful to you: how you came to faith, a time He provided, or a time He comforted you. Then think of one recent moment when you failed in front of them. Go to them, name it specifically, and ask their forgiveness. Finally, choose one ordinary moment each day, in the car, at breakfast or at bedtime, to speak naturally about God, as Deuteronomy 6 describes.
A Prayer
Father, thank You for the children You have placed in my care. I confess that my life has not always matched what I teach them, and that they have seen my failures. Thank You that Your grace is greater than my weakness. Write Your word in my heart by Your Spirit, so that what I pass on to my children is real. Give me the courage to repent openly and the humility to ask their forgiveness. Where my home does not look the way I hoped, remind me that You are the Father of the fatherless and that You see every act of faithful care. Let unfeigned faith dwell first in me and then in them. 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.