Revive Our Hearts

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: As Elizabeth Urbanowicz was babysitting her pastor's children, a teaching moment happened. As she was getting the kids ready for bed, she was reading in John, specifically reading Jesus' High Priestly Prayer. Their three-year-old goes, "Jesus is praying to himself?"

We'll hear how Elizabeth responded today on the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Incomparable. For April 23rd, 2026, I'm Dana Gresh.

Dana Gresh: Any parent who truly loves Jesus is going to want that same love to grow in his or her child, right? Even the older and fatherly Apostle John said in his third letter, "I have no greater joy than this: to hear that my children are walking in truth."

Yesterday, we heard the first part of a conversation from a recent True Woman conference. One of the points the panelists made was that there's no iron-clad guarantee. There is nothing parents can do to cause their children to love God's Word. That's a heart change only God can bring about.

However, they went on to say there are things parents can do that will help bring their children into greater contact with scriptural concepts, giving greater opportunity for the Lord to work in kids' hearts. Before we head into part two of that panel discussion, I'd like to again have Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth set us up with a struggle parents and grandparents often face with kids.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: A grandmom said the struggle today as we're talking about teaching children is that the kids today say, "Don't preach to me." I think it's important that you ask God to show you how to teach your children in ways that don't sound like preaching.

How to use everyday, real-life circumstances and situations to help make connections. That's why the Proverbs use so many word pictures. That's why Jesus taught in parables, in stories. "You see the grass over there? You see that sower over there sowing seed? There's a lesson here."

As you're living life with your kids, as you're just experiencing life together, you hear something on the news or something happens to a friend. Ask God to help you connect the dots. Where is wisdom or foolishness involved here? Then help you be able to point those connections out to your children, particularly at teachable moments when your children are open and tender.

Ask God to show you how to weave truth into the context of everyday life so your kids won't feel like the Christian life is a category. It's not something we do on Sunday morning or something we do during devotions, but you want them to feel it as part of the warp and woof of everyday life.

Having said that, and you trying to weave an understanding of your faith into everyday life, there will still be times when your kids will say, "Don't preach to me." When it comes down to it, God will show you there may be some times that you should just be quiet and just back off. There are different ages and different stages of development, but there will probably be some times when you need to have the courage to say, "I'm going to preach whether you want to hear it or not."

Dana Gresh: That's the host of Revive Our Hearts, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, with wonderful wisdom for parents and grandparents. Now, let's head to part two of that discussion from a recent True Woman conference on leading children to love the Word of God.

The panel participants are Kevin DeYoung, pastor of Christ Covenant Church near Charlotte, North Carolina; Bob Lepine, pastor of Redeemer Community Church in Little Rock, Arkansas and Revive Our Hearts board chairman; Elizabeth Urbanowicz, CEO of Foundation Worldview; and Sarah Jerez, a wife and mom who ministers to many through worship, especially in the Hispanic community. Bob Lepine served as the moderator. We're picking up where he's interacting with Sarah.

Bob Lepine: So how old is your oldest now?

Sarah Jerez: Fourteen.

Bob Lepine: Let's say your oldest gets to 16 and says, "I don't want to go to church. Do I have to go to church? I want to go to a different church." What are you going to tell him at 16? Or her?

Sarah Jerez: You're going to go anyway. You're coming with us. When you are of age and you want to be out from our roof and make your own decisions, then you're free to go.

Bob Lepine: When you start paying the cell phone bill and the car insurance, you can go wherever you want, right? Kevin, is that the right answer?

Kevin DeYoung: Yes. I'm not as good as my parents were, or maybe it's just more complicated times. We have twice as many kids, so that's my excuse. But to get all the kids to youth group, to Sunday school, to morning and evening service every week, there are some non-negotiables. Certainly, Sunday is one of those and they just know.

The Lord's probably not going to send a lightning bolt the first time you skip church for the baseball tournament. You want to talk about idolatry in our churches? This is really where the rubber meets the road. I get it. I have kids, I love sports. They have the weekend stuff, and you try to think maybe you could do this one that's at 1:00 PM.

You're going to have to draw the line somewhere. If you expect your kids to value church when you are telling them now that you don't value church, they won't value church. You are giving them the pattern.

You make decisions on this once-in-a-lifetime thing, okay, maybe. But you just see parents who are sowing these seeds two weekends out of the month or ten weekends a year. If you tell me that we're going to church or we're listening to your sermon online, it's not the same. I'm glad it's better than nothing, but it's not the same.

My kids, too, are going to be out of the house someday, and I hope they'll make those decisions. I told one of my kids—I'm sure we've got people with tattoos in the room, so I'm not making an absolute statement about you and your tattoo—I'm just giving you my convictions and what I told my kids. One of my sons was talking about his friends getting a tattoo, and I said I can't even give you a foolproof absolute answer, but I can just tell you that this dad does not pay for college for children with tattoos.

That's what I can tell you. That's just going to be my rule. When you're done, I suppose you can do it and show off your little fish on the small of your back. I'm not making an absolute judgment, but parents can be afraid. We have all those things about how you are going to fight on every time you've got that article of clothing and that thing. Yes, but church is one of those things. In this family, we go to church. You're part of this family, and as long as you're part of this family under our roof, we're all going to church. Once you start negotiating, well, the first rule of negotiating with terrorists is don't do it.

Bob Lepine: You know the concern on the part of these moms is they're going to harden their hearts toward God if I make them go. It's going to turn them bitter toward God's Word if they're 16 and they're sitting there with their arms folded and their teeth clenched and they're just hating being there, that I'm somehow going to be sowing seeds of rebellion and future deconstruction. Should we not worry about that?

Sarah Jerez: I think it's all about the way you do it as well. It's not like, "You're going to go because I said so." Hopefully not, though that might happen sometimes. I think if you have a conversation with your kids where maybe you hadn't been doing this in the past and now you're going to correct it and start going more often, and they're going to struggle with that, have a conversation.

Say, "You know what? I apologize to you because I have not been faithful in putting God and His Word and His people first in our family. I know, because I love you so much, that this is what is good for your soul eternally and even now." Because I love you so much, you're going to come with us on Sunday morning and sit with me there. You can be praying for the heart of your child as they're sitting there with their serious face.

It's all about the way and the explanation behind it. That's when they're older. When they're younger, I'm just like, "You're part of the Jerez family and we love Jesus and go to church." I love what Pastor Kevin was saying about idolatry in our homes. Our kids know our idols. Those idols are in our homes. It might be sports, academics, or the happiness and success of our kids in general.

Our kids usually end up loving what we love. Usually, you don't have to convince a family of die-hard football fans or soccer fans for their kids to love to play soccer. I know it's different and there's sin involved when it comes to spiritual things and spiritual blindness. But when there is a joy in following the Lord and embracing His ways, and even when it's hard, telling your kids that Jesus is better, it makes a difference.

When they see that you're willing to tear down idols out of love for Jesus, it makes a huge difference when it's an overflow. I love curriculum and books, and I think it's because ultimately in my heart, I believe that is what's going to do it. If I pick the right book or curriculum, that's what's going to finally reach my child.

But it really, as we see in Deuteronomy 6, starts with: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. The Word shall be written on your heart, and then you teach them diligently. It makes a huge difference when it's an overflow.

I asked my daughter when I was coming here, "What would help you love the Word?" She said, "I like when we do devotionals or things like that, but honestly, my favorite thing and what I think really helps me is when we just have conversations."

I do believe that it's both intentional, but the organic is probably even more important. When you walk by the way, when you rise up... exactly. The earlier you start, the better. But even as they're older, a lot of times they do really want to talk about things. You might not tell right away, but even starting little by little talking.

If the Word is in your heart and that's what's coming out, and it's not a nagging, not just a catechizing—although we do catechize our kids—it's really an overflow of, "This is what's true, this is what's good, this is what's beautiful." That's why I give it to you, not because I have to or because this is just what we do, but I really know that this is what's best and most wonderful for you.

Maybe to simplify things—I think it was Elisabeth Elliot who said it's simple but it's not easy—I think things are a lot simpler than we think. We kind of overcomplicate it to avoid doing things. I think the simplest things are the things that impact our kids, like the talking before bed and being able to bring God's truth to the things they're struggling with.

Kevin DeYoung: Let me real quick just say about the heart. If your child is 17, the heart's already not in a good place. Your having them go to church is not the cause of their heart. It's possible that we can sin in response to their sin, and we want to avoid that.

As parents, we need to be wise to try to discern what are the issues of the heart. There can be that sort of, "I hate everything about this, I'm already rebelling in my heart." Or maybe they just don't go to bed on time on Saturday night and they're dead tired. Or your son loves basketball and all of his friends are doing the basketball league and they have their tournaments on Sunday morning.

If you storm at your son and say, "Don't you love Jesus more than you love basketball? We go to church in this family!" That's not the way to do it. You want to try to understand and let your children understand that you understand you're asking them to do something hard.

"I understand all your friends are doing this." And they say, "But then their parents are Christians and they let them skip church." "I know, and we're doing something a different way. I know how much you love basketball, so we are asking you to do something that is difficult. That's part of being a Christian; we do things that are difficult." Does that solve all of it? No. But sometimes it helps our kids realize there are trade-offs in life and we're asking them to do something that's going to have a cost, and we shouldn't pretend that it's all just great and we're not asking them to do anything difficult.

Bob Lepine: This is Elizabeth Urbanowicz. Elizabeth gives leadership to a ministry called Foundation Worldview. Rather than me explaining it, I'll let you explain what you're doing.

Elizabeth Urbanowicz: Foundation Worldview is a ministry that's designed to equip Christian parents, educators, and church leaders with practical tools to get children between the ages of 4 and 12 to think critically and biblically. In one year of our kids' lives, they're going to be faced with more competing ideas than most people throughout human history have faced their entire lives. From the earliest of ages, we want to equip them with transferable skills to carefully evaluate every idea that comes their way and understand that Scripture is true.

Bob Lepine: Elizabeth has a book that's now in the resource center called Helping Your Kids Know God's Good Design: 40 Questions and Answers on Gender and Sexuality. She's dealing with an issue that is coming up here and there in the culture, right? This is the flashpoint. In fact, as young adults are deconstructing, this is the issue that is leading to deconstruction. Getting our kids to understand God's good design on these issues is a part of that foundation that has to be poured to protect them because they're going to get pulled in a lot of directions. Elizabeth, is there a problem reading Bible stories to a five-year-old?

Elizabeth Urbanowicz: I would say no, there is not a problem reading Bible stories to a five-year-old. But what I see a lot of times in our ministry at Foundation Worldview is a lot of parents take children's Bibles and that's the only thing that they immerse their kids in. There's a lot of great children's Bibles out there and they can be very helpful, but our children are not too young to be immersed in God's Word.

So what we want to do is, even from the youngest of ages, we want to read Scripture with them. It doesn't have to be a whole chapter, but just so they're getting used to hearing Scripture. Then another thing that we hear a lot of times from parents that write into our ministry is that their kids don't really understand what the Bible is.

That's what we want to do. We want to help them understand the Bible as this one continuous story that Pastor Kevin did a great job last night going through nine different themes that we can understand the Bible as. We don't just want to teach our children David and Goliath or Daniel in the lions' den. A lot of times if we're reading those in children's Bibles—now not all children's Bibles—but a lot of times those children's Bibles then lead our kids to put themselves in the story.

When we read the story of David and Goliath in 1 Samuel 17, that narrative is not in the Bible to teach us how to slay our giants. That narrative is in the Bible to show us that God is the faithful covenant keeper. God was being faithful to the covenant that He made on Mount Sinai with His people, and David trusted Him.

God was fulfilling His promise back in the garden in Genesis 3:15 to eventually usher in the one who would crush the serpent's head. God was setting David up to be on the throne to eventually usher in the Davidic kingdom, which was going to be the line of Jesus. So it's so important that as we are reading Scripture with our kids, as we're talking about Scripture, we're helping them understand it as one big story of God's grand plan to rescue us from our sin. It's not these little isolated narratives where we learn good moral lessons. Do we learn how to live as moral people from Scripture? Yes, God has given us His moral law, but we want to help our kids understand the entire narrative of Scripture.

Part of what that involves is even just teaching our kids how to soundly read, interpret, and apply Scripture. For example, think about how you were taught to read. When your teachers or your parents were teaching you how to read, they could have given you a list of words to memorize. You would have memorized those words and could you have read after that? Yes, you could have read anything that contained the words that you had memorized.

But what would have been the weakness with that? Every time you wanted to know what a new word was, you would have had to go to somebody else to learn what that new word was. So instead, whoever taught you how to read taught you 26 different letters. They showed you the shape of those letters and they told you the associated sounds, and then they taught you to put those letters together.

Eventually, now you can read any word you encounter. When we think about immersing our kids in God's Word, we want to make sure that we're giving them some tools, some transferable skills, so that they can one day read the Bible on their own. We don't want them to be dependent on us for their spiritual nourishment. So we need to actually get in Scripture with them and model how you soundly read, interpret, and apply Scripture so that one day, Lord willing, by God's grace, they might become self-feeders who actually seek God through His Word.

Bob Lepine: What you're describing sounds like what you do with high school kids, not with four-year-olds. With four-year-olds, they want to learn about slingshots and rocks and chopping off giants' heads, right? And they want to act that out in the living room. How do you teach them hermeneutical principles at four and five? What do you do?

Elizabeth Urbanowicz: Well, there's this special vitamin that you give your kids... no, I'm just kidding. Obviously, God has designed our children according to a certain pattern, and we have to look at what is God's design. Your four-year-old doesn't know how to read yet, so you're not going to be teaching your four-year-old how to read God's Word on their own.

But you can still be reading Scripture with them at that young age. I still remember back when I lived in Chicago, I was babysitting for my pastor's kids one night. They had asked me to just pick up where they were that night in John. As I was getting the kids ready for bed, I was reading in John 17 and was reading Jesus' High Priestly Prayer.

The five-year-old goes, "Jesus is praying to himself?" That question never would have come up if we weren't actually reading that portion of Scripture. I knew that they had taken their kids through the New City Catechism, so I asked them one of the questions. I said, "How many persons are there in God?"

Their five-year-old chimed in right away, "There are three persons in the one true and living God: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit." I said, "Exactly. So who is Jesus in that? That's right, He's God the Son. And who is He praying to right there? Right, He's praying to God the Father."

Even when they're little, it's just really developmentally appropriate things. Once your kids get older, though, you can do simple things, even things that you just see in culture. For example, how many of you have ever seen a mug or a t-shirt or maybe a tote bag that says, "God is within her, she will not fail"? How many of you have ever seen that?

Yes, that's like the faux girl-power verse. I recommend once your kids are old enough to read, you can say, "Oh, look at that jacket over there that says 'God is within her, she will not fail.' You know what? When we get home, let's read that Bible verse in context."

Context means we're going to read some of the verses before it and we're going to read some of the verses after it. Then when you're at home, you can read through that passage. I think it's Psalm 46 that that comes from. As you're reading through that, you learn that the "her" and the "she" in that verse is the city of God.

It's not any individual female. That Psalm again is about God being faithful in keeping His covenant with Israel. So even from young ages, we can just do little things here and there. It's not sitting them down for an hour a day and having Bible class with them, but just little things as you're tucking them into bed, as you encounter different things in culture, teaching them the skills so that they are slowly learning how to approach God's Word.

Dana Gresh: Great advice from Elizabeth Urbanowicz, who was part of a True Woman panel discussion that also featured Bob Lepine, Kevin DeYoung, and Sarah Jerez. I loved it when Sarah said, "It's simple, but it's not easy." Isn't that true of so many of our responsibilities?

You'll find a list of the resources they've produced linked in the transcript of today's program at ReviveOurHearts.com. By the way, if you're in ministry leadership, did you know that we make it easy to hold your own mini True Woman conference with the women in your own church or Bible study?

Using the event kit from Revive Our Hearts, you can basically build your own conference. You stream the messages from our website, and we provide discussion questions and other great tools to go with them. We break it down for you into easy steps to follow, and get this: it is completely free. The event toolkit is maybe one of our best-kept secrets here at Revive Our Hearts. Find out more and review the various packages available when you go to ReviveOurHearts.com/toolkit.

This week, we're offering you Blair Linne's riveting book, Made to Tremble, as an expression of our gratitude to you for your donation of any amount to support the ministry of Revive Our Hearts. Made to Tremble helps you sort through the various emotions related to anxiety and panic attacks, and takes you to passages of Scripture that give you peace. Ask for the book by Blair Linne when you contact us with your gift at ReviveOurHearts.com or when you call us at 1-800-569-5959.

Tomorrow, our panel discussion continues. How can parents and grandparents encourage their children to love the Bible more? We'll talk about some important tools anyone who works with children can use. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.