Helping Your Kids Choose What’s Worth Worshiping
Imagine spending years telling your kid how gifted he is at football. You rearrange the family schedule around football. You spend thousands of dollars on football. You celebrate every touchdown, every trophy, every accomplishment. Then one day you wonder why football has become the most important thing in his life.
I heard a statement recently that stopped me in my tracks: Sometimes our kids worship idols that their parents built. Ouch!
Maybe it’s not sports. Maybe it’s grades, appearance, popularity, money, relationships, or success. None of those things are necessarily bad. But good things can become idols when they take a place in our hearts that belongs to God.
📖 “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.” (1 John 5:21 NIV)
Here’s the big picture: The goal of parenting isn’t to raise godly children. It’s to raise godly adults. Eventually, our kids will leave our homes and we won’t be there to make their decisions for them. We want to raise adults who live free from the things of this world controlling them and who choose to keep God first in their lives. To do that, we have to help them recognize the idols competing for their hearts.
1. Identify the idols in their lives. Jesus said, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:21 NIV) What consumes their thoughts? What can’t they imagine living without? Here’s another good indicator: What are they willing to lie about, hide, or compromise their values to keep? And here’s where it gets uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s difficult to identify the idols in our children because we struggle with the same ones. Even worse, sometimes they’re worshiping an idol we helped build. Ouch again!
2. Help them see that idols don’t work. Don’t just tell them something is wrong. Help them see where it leads. Tell them stories from your own failures. Show them examples of people who chased popularity, money, relationships, success, or approval only to discover those things couldn’t deliver what they promised. Good things become dangerous things when we expect them to do what only God can do.
3. Help them see the truth, beauty, and greatness of God. We can’t just take idols away. We have to help our kids fall in love with something greater. “Taste and see that the LORD is good.” (Psalm 34:8 NIV) We want them to see God as so good, so beautiful, and so great that they desire Him more than the things competing for their hearts. This isn’t simply about changing their behavior. It’s about changing what captures their heart.
Our kids are going to worship something. The question is what. Our job isn’t simply to keep them away from idols. It’s to help them see that nothing this world offers compares to Jesus.
And maybe that starts by asking ourselves a difficult question: What am I worshiping, and am I teaching my kids to worship it too?
Alex Bryant is a pastor, author, and speaker who writes about race, faith, and culture in America.
