Revive Our Hearts

Guest (Female): If you're a parent, have you ever tried to lead your child or your children in devotions and then immediately felt overwhelmed? Pastor Kevin DeYoung says, "Don't give up."

Kevin DeYoung: Doing something is better than nothing. Doing two minutes is better than no minutes. Some small thing whenever you can is better than grand plans that don't materialize.

Dannah Gresh: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of A Place of Quiet Rest. For April 22nd, 2026, I'm Dannah Gresh.

This week, we're talking about our need to renew our minds, and we're never going to rightly renew our minds apart from God's Spirit working God's Word into us. Now, if you're reading through the Bible with us this year, following the schedule you'll find at reviveourhearts.com/bible2026, you know that right now, we're reading about the kings of Judah.

If you think about it, much of the success or failure of Judah and Israel hinged on how well the truth about God was passed on from one generation to the next. How can you lead children to love God's Word? That's the question we're tackling today through Friday as we listen to a panel discussion from a recent True Woman conference. Before we go there, here's how Nancy responded to a busy mom of middle schoolers who's working on getting into God's Word with her children.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: The investment you're making in your children, it's priceless, and you don't have long to do it. Let me just reiterate: there are no magic formulas. If you take six hours a day to do that, there's no guarantee that your children will have a heart and a hunger for the Lord.

That's why the wise parent is a praying parent, because it takes God's grace and sovereign intervention in their lives to turn on the lights, to make it click. You cannot make it click. You can't do everything right, and if you could do everything right, you still couldn't make it click. But God is the one who can turn their hearts.

You just want to make sure as a mom that you are investing in their lives in the way God wants you to. And don't let the way God has led some other mother to do it put you in bondage. There may be another time of day or a different way of doing it that God puts on your heart as a mother. There are different seasons of life, your children are different, you're different. So ask the Lord, "Here am I, here are these children. How do you want me as a mother to be investing in their lives?"

Dannah Gresh: Again, that's our host, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, offering encouragement to a mom with a full schedule. Ultimately, the love for God's Word is something God has to do in your child. And that's where the panel discussion we're about to listen to started as well. Revive Our Hearts board chairman and radio veteran Bob Lepine moderated a conversation at a recent True Woman conference. Today, we'll be hearing from Kevin DeYoung and Sarah Jerez. Here's Bob.

Bob Lepine: Let me introduce our panelists to you as we are going to talk about how we help children and grandchildren, for those of you who are in that category, develop a love for God's Word. So I think you all know Pastor Kevin DeYoung. Kevin is a pastor in Charlotte, North Carolina. Christ Covenant Church is where he pastors. He's an author of many books and has podcasts and has a ministry called Clearly Reformed that I would commend to you. You can find it online, and it's kind of the repository for Kevin's collected works, sermons, and writing.

When I am looking for theological clarity expressed in grace and winsomeness, I turn to Kevin DeYoung as a source for that and would commend that to you as well. When you want to know what does the Bible say and you want it expressed in a way that demonstrates grace and winsomeness. Although winsomeness has kind of become a dirty word in the culture today, but do you own that word, winsomeness, for yourself?

Kevin DeYoung: I was using it before it became a bad word. I understand the danger, just like empathy. It can be used badly, but sure.

Bob Lepine: This is Sarah Jerez, who is in the middle. Sarah is a mother of six. She and her husband, Jonathan, live in suburban Chicago. He is the worship pastor at Wheaton Bible Church, and Sarah is also a songwriter, recording artist, and sings with her husband and is a part of the worship ministry. They have CDs available, right?

Sarah Jerez: Yes, probably not here, but online. All in Spanish.

Bob Lepine: Okay. So when they minister at Wheaton Bible, your husband sings English, you sing English, but in the Dominican Republic, other places you go, much of your ministry is in Spanish. You've also written a children's book, right? What is that?

Sarah Jerez: Yes. It's called El Dios que adoramos, which is The God We Worship. It's based on one of our songs that's known in Spanish. We wrote a children's book from it to teach children because the song goes through the history of redemption and talks a lot about the character of God. So we used it as a tool to teach children the truth behind the song.

Bob Lepine: And you've got songs for kids or just songs for grown-ups?

Sarah Jerez: They're for adults, but we get a lot of videos from kids and kids' choirs, and we do have a version of that song for children when we released the book.

Bob Lepine: Kevin, I want to start with you as we talk about helping our kids cultivate a love for God's Word. We have to start with the acknowledgment that that is a work of the Spirit in a child's life, and until the Spirit does that work, none of us love God's Word until the Spirit causes us to love God's Word, right?

Kevin DeYoung: I was planning on saying this, so I'm glad that you said it. The one good insight I was going to bring here was to say the simple answer to the topic of this seminar is you can't. What can you do to make your child love the Word of God? You can't.

But the longer answer and why we're here is there are patterns and there are things that you can do to put your children in the way of God's Word that God might by His Spirit move because His Word never returns empty. But it is really important, not just as a theological plank, but really in our hearts. It's both hopeful, humbling, helpful to remember we cannot cause our children to be born again.

That's one of the things that God is always teaching us as parents, especially the older they get, you realize how many things you really can't control. As any of us with multiple kids have the experience of saying, "Wait, you had the same mom and dad. You're exactly the opposite. How did this happen?" You realize there's genes and there's lots of nature and then there's mysterious things. So you're right. We're going to talk about some of the good things we can do, maybe some of the bad things we can avoid, but only God can really help any of us to love His Word.

Bob Lepine: How many of you have boys? Moms, you have boys? Okay, lots of moms. How many of you would like for your boys to grow up loving God's Word the way Kevin DeYoung loves God's Word? So what did your parents do to help you?

Kevin DeYoung: I like that question because I'd rather talk about what my parents did than what I'm doing or not doing. Telling my kids that I do this seminar and they were saying, "Do you want to have a conversation with us about the Bible before you go so you have something you can share with everyone?" That would be helpful, give me some good examples.

My parents are both still living. They still live in the same house we grew up in since 1985 in Grand Rapids. They're both in their 70s and I'm very thankful for them. Like many of you have that wonderful boring testimony that they never knew a day when they didn't know Jesus.

So yeah, there are some clear things like they brought us to church: morning, evening. We went on Wednesday, we went to Sunday school. I always say I'm glad church wasn't open other days because we would have had to be there too.

And most days, not every day for sure, but a lot of days, read the Bible after a meal. This was before the great proliferation of wonderful books and devotions and things. I just remember it was a chapter that Dad read. "Any questions? Let's pray." But it was a chapter and, over many years, even though you miss some days, you get through the whole Bible.

Were there a lot of times I was sitting there thinking, "This is so boring"? Yes. Was I staring at my peas or my meatloaf that I wasn't eating yet? Yes. But it was there.

So we have to always be careful not to reverse-engineer parenting theories based on the way that we parent, which is I think what a lot of books end up doing. I think it was Alistair Begg I heard say one time he was talking to a man who said when he had no kids, he had six theories, and once he had six kids, now he has no theories about parenting. So I want to be careful not to just tell you what we're doing because there's a lot of different ways to do things.

But here's one of the things I do believe: that I think being a parent to raise kids to love the Lord and love the Word is like most things in our Christian life. It's a lot easier and a lot harder than you think. If there's one big idea in a lot of my books, I think that's probably it. Crazy Busy, Just Do Something, Hole in Our Holiness, Impossible Christianity. It's all kind of the same thing. You just get one of them; you don't need to get any of the others.

I saw this thing online one time about all the Pixar movies. It was like A Bug's Life: what if bugs had feelings? Cars: what if cars had feelings? Monsters: what if monsters had feelings? Inside Out: what if feelings had feelings?

So my books kind of have that big idea that being a Christian is easier and harder than you think. It's harder because dying to yourself and following God is the work of a lifetime, and you won't finish it. And yet it's easier because God doesn't give us impossibilities. He wants us to follow Him.

So all of this is landing here on your answer. I think what did my parents do well? I would say this if they were in the room, I think. There's lots of things they didn't. I don't remember my dad sitting me down and having "the talk." Now, you probably should; I'm really glad he didn't, but there's different things you have to be aware of. We didn't have any of the Paul Tripp, and I love Paul Tripp, conversations about what's the gospel moment in this.

But here's looking back. I didn't realize this, but looking back, I think, what did I know? I didn't know; it wasn't a lesson, but you just picked it up. I knew my mom and dad loved each other, they loved us, they loved Jesus, they loved the church.

That doesn't guarantee your kids are going to do the same, but I think my kids, hopefully they have a lifetime to read all the good books. I want them to read now, I want them to get worldview, I want them to do foundations, but hopefully they can do that for a lifetime.

You get however many years you have with them in the house. You are teaching them. You are catechizing them, whether you have family devotions or not. They are picking something up from you, and what our kids learn is what normal is. They think that's normal.

And if they grew up and I had a privilege growing up in that kind of house, a whole lot of things, "That's normal." And then you realize, "Wow, a lot of people didn't have that for normal." If my wife and I love each other and the kids know that, and they know we love them, and they know we love Jesus and the Bible and we love church, I don't know that guarantees they're all going to follow the Lord, but I think those are the most important planks that the Lord will use to get them on a lifetime of faithfulness and loving the Word.

Bob Lepine: You talked about family devotions, and I want to just mention I remember a conversation with Don Whitney, who has written extensively on this subject and is good on this, but he said as he was leading his kids, most often he felt like, "This is going nowhere. I'm failing. They're bored." But he persisted.

I gave up. I just thought this isn't working, so why try? He persisted. When his daughter graduated from high school and was a commencement speaker, she started weeping at commencement about the faithfulness of her father to lead them in family devotions. And he was sitting in the audience going, "Wait, what? You never wept when we were doing this. You were rolling your eyes and yawning and your head back like this." But that faithfulness made a statement even louder than whatever the daily devotion was.

So there's something to what we're patterning and the repetitive nature of that. I want to ask you about a lot of these women who may be going, "I wish my husband would take more leadership in this area of spiritual training and development than he's doing, and I've tried nagging and that doesn't work. Do you have other strategies you recommend to me?"

Kevin DeYoung: You're right, nagging does not work. And it goes both ways, because sometimes I talk to men who will say, "Well, my wife doesn't respect me or she doesn't follow my lead." I'll say to those men, "You're not going to get it by saying, 'Honey, respect me. Follow my lead. Submit to me.' No, keep leading, keep being loving. And even if she says, 'Well, I don't want this spiritual leader,' show her what kind of spiritual leader."

So conversely, yes, that's right. Many men, I'm sure not your husbands, but some I've encountered, they can be confident in, I mean, just tear it up on their weekend warriors playing soccer, or they're super ambitious with their workplace and they may have lots of ideas. They're totally confident to get under the hood of the car. I don't do that myself.

But then when it comes to this, it feels very uncomfortable. Very rarely do we like to do things we don't feel good at. I think especially as men, we don't like to be embarrassed, especially if we feel like our wives are better at it.

So you're right, nagging's not going to work. Encouraging other sorts of habits where maybe others could speak into a husband's life, but even there's only so much you can do. If you nag every week about going to church or go to a small group or "What about that Bible study?", I think a well-placed, "I'd be happy to watch the kids if it enables you to do this," because really, a man needs other men to speak into his life. He can learn things and he should listen to you as well, but he needs other men to challenge him in this area.

So if you have a husband who just is very passive in this area and unwilling even to open the Bible or one of these many good devotions and read it and perhaps then ask if he would be willing to pray or open us in a word of prayer, it's really important, if especially young boys as they grow up, if they sense that this is something for women, this is not something that manly men do, just has a very deleterious effect on young boys and young men in particular.

You think of 1 Peter 3. One won over often without words, won over by prayer, won over by the steadfastness of your attitude and your grace and your humility, and leading in what ways you can, and offering some low-hanging fruit to a husband to participate, hopefully in some way.

And, I'm sure you're thinking this already, but absolutely, absolutely do not embarrass him or shame him when he does not know something or he does get something wrong, or you are frustrated by how little he knows or how obvious that was to you, because that's just the quickest way to just, "I'm not. I tried this once. I am not trying this again. I don't need to be put in my place and feel embarrassed. I already feel like a little boy and I don't know all these things that you know."

Encourage whatever small little efforts are there. And because there are so many good resources, it really has never been easier than to have, now there's no substitute for the Bible, but it's never been easier to have some good resource that's going to explain the Bible, do a devotion on the Bible, even have a prayer.

So when I did The Biggest Story Bible Storybook, it was a friend of mine who said, who's much better at family devotions than I am, said, "Please include a one or two-sentence prayer at the end because I have talked to a lot of men who feel very uncomfortable praying. They don't know how to do it. Include two sentences for someone to pray." And so I put that there. So there are lots of resources that can help take those baby steps and encourage whatever small steps your husband might be taking.

Bob Lepine: And that could just be, "Honey, would you read the story from this one, The Biggest Story Bible Storybook? Just read it to the kids tonight and have them pray the prayer at the end." And it's simple and all he has to do is read the story. It's easy, that he can't fail at that. Anyway, we won't talk about how he might fail.

Kevin DeYoung: And before you move on, I just want to encourage you: this is not false humility. We are not family devotion warriors at our house. I wish we were. There are people who are better. My good friend Jason Helopoulos has books on family worship. I know he does it every single night. We are your poster family for struggling. I don't know that I will ever write a children's book, but I always tell people I have the title. The title: The Inmates are Running the Asylum. That's the title.

So our problem is, like many of you, it's just very hard to get around the table and all sit down. We have kids 5 to 22. It's very difficult. When we do, we do something. Doing something is better than nothing. Doing two minutes is better than no minutes. Doing 30 seconds is better than a plan that you do once every six months and you pull out the book and you try to do a half-hour service and you realize that didn't work. Some small thing whenever you can is better than grand plans that don't materialize.

Bob Lepine: Sarah, I see you moving the mic toward your mouth. Go ahead.

Sarah Jerez: My parents are actually in the room, and it might be encouraging to you too to hear from someone who I didn't grow up with parents who were believers from the time I was born. They were born again when I was in high school. And just to encourage you that even if you didn't start when children were very young, your faith can still have a huge impact on your children.

And for me personally, what impacted me was seeing the before and after in my parents' life. And that they were people, talking about loving the Word, who would take God at His Word. That they would see something in Scripture and immediately submit their life to it. They would change what needed to be changed, they would obey what needed to be obeyed, and that was of a huge impact in my life. To see how they used to live and how the Word of God coming to their life, embracing Jesus Christ, came with submitting and loving and trusting and taking God at His Word.

Even today, yes, my mom is here. She's the director of Revive Our Hearts in Spanish. So the Lord has done so many things in and through them, and it's really been through their just embrace of God's Word. And I think that before your kids, seeing you submitting to His Word, not just reading and not just teaching it to them or reading verses with them, but seeing that you really believe what this says and then that your life follows suit, it'll just be a huge impact because kids, they smell hypocrisy from a mile away.

And it's not about being perfect. It's not about not making mistakes. It's about being open with them about those things because they already know them. It's already clear to them. So just being able to say, "You know, even in my sin, even in my struggle, I love Jesus and I love His Word and I'm willing to submit and embrace and do what He says even when it's hard."

Bob Lepine: Her mom, by the way, came to the very first True Woman event in Schaumburg, Illinois, it was 17 years ago. With you and with a number of women from the Dominican Republic and came away from that saying, "We must have this in Spanish." God birthed that at that event, and she's given leadership to that for the last 17 years.

And a lot of what's going on, in fact, in some ways what's going on in the Spanish-speaking world is growing bigger and faster than what's going on in the English-speaking world, and your mom's commitment to that is God's used her in a great way, and you can acknowledge that here. Laura, thank you for that.

And I'm just curious with that conversion, I've said for years, your kids will, they may do what you tell them, they will become what they see. And so make sure that what they see matches what you're telling them. In fact, if what they see doesn't match what you're telling them, those are seeds for deconversion, for deconstruction later on. The authenticity of what they see needs to match up with what's going on. How did you get introduced to God's Word being a part of the family structure when you were in high school, or was it a part of the family structure?

Sarah Jerez: Yes, they obviously, being new believers, they were so excited about everything. They really dove into being part of a community. I remember the church we were attending at the time when they were born again had a class on introducing you to the whole Bible and walking you through it. It was kind of like a hermeneutics but for beginners, for people who had no clue even what to do with this book, and they took me to it as well.

And then they did try and do some family devotionals. I actually attribute my conversion to one of those nights. And they did very few. It barely happened. I think we did it a few times. And one of those, I think I was born again that night.

So even with your loaves and fishes and the one time you did it, who knows what can happen. But it was mainly through their involvement in a local church as well, and they'd always bring me to everything. They would force me; it was not an option. And thankfully, we were in a church that had a really high view of Scripture.

Dannah Gresh: Leading your children to love God's Word, it's ultimately something only God can do in their hearts, but parents and grandparents can help bring kids into the light of the Scriptures.

We've been listening to the first part of a conversation that took place at a recent True Woman conference. Today, we heard from Bob Lepine, Kevin DeYoung, and Sarah Jerez. Tomorrow and Friday, Elizabeth Urbanowicz hops in with ideas too. Kevin, Sarah, and Elizabeth have all authored resources designed to help expose children to the riches of God's Word. You'll find links to their books and websites in the transcript of this program at reviveourhearts.com or on the Revive Our Hearts app. Be sure to check them out.

We want to help you revive your heart and renew your mind. To that end, let me tell you about Blair Linne's book, Made to Tremble. As we heard earlier this week, Blair experienced debilitating anxiety attacks as a result of striking a deer while she was driving. The Lord helped calm her anxious mind through a variety of means, and it led her to write Made to Tremble. You can receive a copy as our thanks for your donation of any amount to Revive Our Hearts. Request it when you contact us with your gift at reviveourhearts.com or call 1-800-569-5959.

Well, the panel discussion is just getting going. Tomorrow on our program, Bob Lepine, Sarah Jerez, Elizabeth Urbanowicz, and Kevin DeYoung offer more wisdom. They'll help parents develop more of an appetite for the Word of God in their children. I hope you'll join us for that. 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.