Help Your Children Love the Nations
The heart of the gospel is this: One Redeemer with a great love for the whole world.
It’s our privilege to make this truth known everywhere, and we often cultivate mission conversations with young adults, the prime candidates for being sent or becoming senders in the next generation.
Both are necessary and great. But what if great could be better?
What if kids raised in believing homes heard about God’s heart for the nations for the entirety of their childhoods? Two decades from now, what impact might this purposefulness have on going and sending?
WHAT WE TEACH EARLY STICKS
When we cultivate a heart for the nations in our kids, we imprint on wet cement. It sticks.
Robert Moffat was quite small when his mother began reading stories of the early missionaries to him. He marked that storytelling as the root of his missionary aspirations.
Moffat spent over 50 years in Africa. He and his family shared the gospel, discipled believers, and translated Scripture. They rejoiced and suffered alongside the people they loved. Three of his surviving children also took up missionary work, including the daughter who married David Livingstone. What we teach our kids “along the way” has a lifelong impact (Deut. 6:7).
When we instill God’s heart for all people into the DNA of childhood, we negate the need to play catch-up—that strategic yet often frantic work of educating young adults in God’s kingdom-expansion purpose.
When my husband and I moved to West Asia with seven of our children, we weren’t sure what to expect. Amid the struggles of learning a new language and culture and working full-time to establish a business, we saw something marvelous happen in the hearts of our kids. We watched the Spirit grow a love and a passion for all people. The Spirit used the experience of being surrounded by gospel work and mission stories in the lives of our children.
That experience planted a desire to expose every child to great mission stories and the lives of the unreached. As parents, we get to participate in this beautiful work in our homes.
WHAT WE TEACH AT HOME MATTERS
Do you have a photo of missionaries your church has sent? Commit to learning about them, emailing or texting them (they would love to hear from you), and praying for their work. Pin their location on a map and learn something about where they live.
Curate artwork and items in your home that reflect God’s creative work in his humanity. For example, some Indian batik, a painting of an African baptism, or a favorite family Scripture framed in the language of a people waiting to hear the gospel are all great conversation starters and a reminder of what heaven will be: “A great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Rev. 7:9).
Introduce your children to resources like Wonder Letters that bring unreached language groups alive for your family, the Pray the World Devotional, or pop open a missionary biography to read aloud once each week.
Throughout history, God has used normal, imperfect humans to do his extraordinary work. Our kids need to know that he still does that today. The goal of making Jesus known everywhere begins at home. It expands into our community and to the nations. It is a goal worthy of sharing with the ones who will take it and send it there.
