FBC Family Ministry

08/31/2026

**A little look ahead at what our kids are learning this week, so you can be thinking and talking through these truths with them at home.**

We use words all day long, and our words can serve all kinds of purposes. We can use them to give information, describe something, ask a question, make a request, make a promise, warn someone, encourage them, or even command them. But there is an enormous difference between our words and God’s Word. When we command something, we are really expressing what we want someone else to do. A parent can say, “Clean your room,” but the words themselves do not make the room clean. We are still dependent on someone else to act. Any parent knows there can be quite a distance between the command and the accomplishment!

God is not limited in that way. When God speaks to accomplish His purpose, His Word is effectual. As Scripture says, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). God does not merely express what He would like to happen. His Word accomplishes His purpose. As Scripture says, “For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm” (Psalm 33:9). A human king can issue a command, but that command is only carried out as far as his authority, power, and influence can reach. For the King of heaven, there is no corner of creation outside His authority. When the Father speaks to send, His will is accomplished by the Son and through the Spirit. Unlike human authority, God’s speaking and God’s action are never disconnected. He Himself says of His Word, “It shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose” (Isaiah 55:11).

That helps us understand why we want our children to know the Bible. God’s Word is not merely a collection of information about Him, and it is not simply a list of commands telling us what to do. God reveals Himself through His Word, and through His Word we come to know Him personally. Our memory verses this month help us see that. Psalm 119:10-11 says, “With my whole heart I seek you; let me not wander from your commandments! I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.” Notice the goal. The Psalmist is not simply trying to accumulate more information. He says, “With my whole heart I seek you.” We learn God’s Word because through His Word we are learning to know the God who speaks.

Hebrews 4:12 then tells us something remarkable about that Word: “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword… discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” God’s Word is *living* because we are not merely studying ancient information, but hearing from the living God and coming to know Him. The living God speaks to His people through His Word. It is *active* because God uses His Word by His Spirit to convict, teach, correct, comfort, strengthen, and change us. It is *sharp* because it reaches places in our hearts that ordinary human words cannot reach. And it is *discerning* because God is never fooled by appearances, excuses, or self-deception. We can lie to other people, and we can even lie to ourselves, but God’s Word exposes the thoughts and intentions of the heart and tells the truth about God, about the world, and about us.

That is why we want our kids to do more than memorize Bible verses so they can earn a prize or know the right answers. We want them to store up God’s Word in their hearts because they are learning to know the God who speaks, the God whose Word is living, active, sharp, discerning, and always powerful enough to accomplish His purpose.

This week, consider asking your child: What makes God’s words different from our words? And what does Hebrews 4:12 tell us God’s Word actually does in us?

08/24/2026

Imagine that I knew a lot about my wife. I knew her favorite foods, her favorite places to go, the kind of gifts she likes, the things that make her laugh, and the stories from her childhood. I read books about marriage. I attended marriage conferences. I told other people how much I loved her. I constantly looked at my wedding ring and talked about what it represented, the promises I made, the day we were married, and how important my marriage is to me.

But what if I rarely, if ever, talked to my wife? What if I hardly ever sat down with her, listened to her, or spent meaningful time with her?

At some point, all of my knowledge about marriage would become a poor substitute for actually knowing and enjoying my wife.

Something similar can happen in our relationship with God.

We can know Bible facts. We can listen to sermons. We can memorize catechism answers. We can sing Christian songs, attend conferences, read good books, and talk about how much we love Jesus. All of those things can be wonderful. But Christianity is not merely knowing things about God. God has graciously made a way for His people to know Him.

One way we spend time with God, and the first we often think to do, is through prayer. Scripture repeatedly invites us to call upon Him, bring our requests to Him, confess our sins, thank Him, praise Him, and cast our cares upon Him. Prayer is not simply another Christian task to complete. It is one of the privileges of being God's children. We get to speak to our Father.

But relationships are not one sided. We also listen to God through His Word.

Psalm 119:10 says, “With my whole heart I seek you; let me not wander from your commandments!”

Notice how closely seeking God and keeping His commandments are connected. The psalmist does not say, “I love rules, so help me remember all the rules.” He says, “I seek YOU.”

God's commands certainly teach us how we should live, but they do more than that. They reveal something about the God who gave them. His commands reveal His holiness, His goodness, His justice, His wisdom, His faithfulness, and His love. When we open Scripture, we are not merely opening an instruction manual. We are hearing the words of the God we want to know.

And there is another way God has given us to know Him that I think we sometimes overlook: His Church.

The Bible calls the Church the body of Christ and the household of God. God did not design the Christian life to be lived alone. We learn His patience when other believers are patient with us. We experience His mercy as brothers and sisters forgive us. We see His generosity when His people care for one another. We learn to serve, confess, encourage, bear burdens, worship, pray, and grow together.

That means church is not simply another activity we squeeze into a busy family calendar. It is part of how God shapes His people and teaches us what life in His family looks like. Spending time with God's church is spending time with him.

Parents, our children need more than definitions of prayer, Bible reading, and church. They need to see us live them.

They need to hear us pray because we actually depend on God. They need to see us open His Word because we genuinely want to know Him. They need to watch us love the Church, serve the Church, forgive people in the Church, receive help from the Church, and make gathering with God's people a joyful priority.

We certainly want our children to know the right answers.

But even more, we want them to grow up saying, “I knew these things were real because I watched my parents live as though knowing God was the greatest privilege they had.”

08/17/2026

Parents, before we gather this Wednesday, August 19th, would you join me in praying Psalm 119:18 for our children?

“Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.” Psalm 119:18

There is a reason we begin here. We are not simply trying to give our kids more biblical information. We are asking God to do something in them that neither a teacher, parent, nor pastor can accomplish on our own. We can teach faithfully. We can explain clearly. We can answer questions, memorize verses, give illustrations, and put the truth in front of them again and again. God can and certainly does use all of those means, but the work in the heart belongs to God.

Paul explains why in 1 Corinthians 2:12-14: “Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God... The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him... because they are spiritually discerned.”

This week we are going to talk about the illumination of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit’s work of opening our understanding so that we can see and receive the truth God has revealed in His Word. To help the kids picture this, I am going to write the words “Christ Crucified Is God’s Wisdom” on a black sheet of paper using a yellow highlighter. Under normal light, the words will be almost impossible to see. The black paper will represent the darkness of the natural human heart. The message is really there. The problem is not with the message. The problem is with our ability to see it. Then one of the kids will shine a black-light flashlight on the page, and suddenly the words will become visible. The black light will represent the work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit does not make God’s Word true. He opens our eyes to recognize the truth that was already there.

That connects to something deeper that we want our children to begin understanding about the human will. We always choose according to our nature. God Himself acts according to His nature. God cannot sin, not because He lacks a will, but because sin is completely contrary to who He is. God freely does everything consistent with His perfectly holy nature. Human beings also exercise our wills according to our nature, and Scripture teaches that, in Adam, our natural condition is fallen, or darkened. We do not naturally look at Christ crucified and say, “There is the wisdom of God!” Paul says the natural person sees the things of God as foolishness.

Think of it this way: a person cannot simply decide to flap his arms and fly like a bird. He has a real will, but his choices operate within the limits of his human nature. In the same way, fallen people cannot simply use their fallen nature to produce spiritual life. We need God to give what we do not naturally possess. Paul says that we must receive “the Spirit who is from God” so that we might understand the things God has freely given us. Elsewhere the New Testament describes this as being born again, being made alive, becoming a new creation, and putting on the new self. God changes us so that what once looked foolish becomes glorious.

That is why our goal on Wednesday nights is bigger than helping children know the right answers. We certainly want them to know the right answers, but we want more than that. We want them to see Christ as beautiful, His cross as wisdom, His Word as truth, and His grace as their only hope. And because only God can ultimately produce that kind of sight, we come back to where we began:

“Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.”

Parents, would you pray that with me this week? Pray that God would use His Word, our teachers, your conversations at home, and every other means He chooses to open the eyes of our children to see the glory of Christ.

08/12/2026

The Danger of the “Ask Jesus Into Your Heart” Gospel

“Give your children big truths they will grow into rather than light explanations they will grow out of.” - Tedd Tripp, *Shepherding a Child’s Heart*

We believe that principle deeply in the Children’s Ministry at FBC. Our responsibility is not simply to teach children Bible stories, help them memorize verses, or give them religious language they can repeat. We want to help raise children who know the gospel, understand the gospel, and, by God’s grace, come to believe the gospel. Because that responsibility is so important, we also believe that the language we use matters. Our goal is not merely to make the gospel simple enough for a child to understand. Our goal is to make it clear without changing it. Children do not need a smaller gospel than adults. They need the same gospel taught patiently, carefully, and in language they can understand.

That is one reason we intentionally avoid telling children that becoming a Christian means they need to “ask Jesus into their heart.” The problem is not simply that those exact words are not found in the Bible. Christians often use theological words that do not appear word for word in Scripture. The word *Trinity*, for example, is not found in the Bible, yet it faithfully summarizes the biblical teaching that there is one God who eternally exists in three persons - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The issue is not whether a particular phrase appears in Scripture. The issue is whether that phrase accurately explains what Scripture teaches. “Trinity” clarifies biblical truth. “Ask Jesus into your heart,” on the other hand, can obscure it.

A helpful way to summarize the gospel is with four simple categories: God, man, Christ, and response. The gospel begins with God. God is our Creator. He made us, sustains us, and has authority over His creation. Genesis begins, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” and everything that follows rests on that reality. God determines what is good because He is good. He determines what is righteous because He is righteous. He determines what sin is because He is the Creator and King. Before a child can understand what it means to be saved, he needs some understanding of the God against whom we have sinned.

Then we must understand man. Human beings were created in the image of God, but because of Adam’s sin, humanity is now fallen. Scripture does not describe us as basically good people who occasionally make poor decisions. Romans tells us that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” and Ephesians describes us apart from Christ as “dead in our trespasses and sins.” We sin because we are sinners, and our sin separates us from the holy God who made us. This matters because the gospel only makes sense when we understand what we need to be saved from. We do not merely need Jesus to help us behave better, make us happier, become our friend, or give us a comforting religious experience. We need forgiveness. We need reconciliation with God. We need righteousness that is not our own. We need new life.

That brings us to Christ. Because sinful people cannot rescue themselves, God acted. The eternal Son of God took on flesh, lived the righteous life we have failed to live, died in the place of sinners, bore the judgment sin deserves, and rose bodily from the grave. The gospel is not fundamentally the story of sinful people figuring out how to reach God. It is the story of God graciously coming to save people who could never save themselves. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Jesus did not come merely to make salvation possible for people who could somehow get themselves most of the way there. He came to save sinners.

Finally, the gospel demands a response, and this is where the language of “asking Jesus into your heart” most clearly misses the mark. The consistent biblical response to the gospel is repentance and faith. Jesus began His public ministry proclaiming, “Repent and believe in the gospel.” When the Philippian jailer asked Paul and Silas, “What must I do to be saved?” they did not tell him to ask Jesus into his heart. They said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” Peter called people to repent. Paul preached repentance toward God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. The biblical pattern is remarkably consistent.

Repentance means turning from sin toward God. Faith means trusting in Jesus Christ and His finished work as our only hope of salvation. Those are not two unrelated things, nor are they works by which we earn salvation. They are the God given response of a sinner who has been brought to see both the ugliness of his sin and the beauty and sufficiency of Christ. Salvation is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, and even our coming to Christ is the result of God’s gracious work in us. No one spiritually dead in sin wakes himself up and decides to regenerate his own heart. God gives life. God opens blind eyes. God draws sinners to His Son, and those sinners truly respond by repenting and believing.

This is precisely why “ask Jesus into your heart” can be so confusing, especially for children. What exactly is the child being told to do? Is Jesus physically outside of him waiting to be invited inside? Is salvation accomplished because the child used the right words in a prayer? If he sins tomorrow, does that mean Jesus left? If he cannot remember exactly what he felt when he prayed, should he do it again? The phrase can easily move the focus away from the objective work of Christ and toward the child’s subjective, emotional experience. Instead of asking, “Do I understand that I am a sinner, and am I trusting Christ?” the child may spend years asking, “Did I really mean it when I asked Jesus into my heart?”

The phrase also has a tendency to bypass repentance. A child may sincerely ask Jesus into his heart without understanding that he has rebelled against a holy God or that he is being called to turn from his sin. He may understand that Jesus loves him and that heaven is better than hell, but that is not yet a full understanding of the gospel. If the problem is simply that Jesus is outside and needs to come inside, then salvation becomes an invitation rather than a rescue from sin and judgment. It can make the decisive issue whether the child has prayed a particular prayer rather than whether he is trusting in the crucified and risen Christ.

This does not mean that prayer has no place in conversion. Of course a sinner who comes to understand the gospel should call upon the Lord. Scripture itself says, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Nor are we opposed to helping a child put his thoughts into words when he wants to pray. What we must avoid is giving a child the impression that the prayer itself saved him, or that repeating a particular set of words is the biblical definition of becoming a Christian. There is no magic sinner’s prayer. Christ saves. Faith receives Christ. Repentance turns to Him. Prayer is one natural expression of that faith, but prayer is not the mechanism that causes salvation.

Revelation 3:20 is sometimes used to defend the "ask Jesus into your heart" language: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” But in that passage Jesus is addressing the church at Laodicea, a congregation that had become spiritually complacent and lukewarm. The verse is not presented as an evangelistic formula teaching unbelieving children how to become Christians. We should be careful not to take an image from a specific rebuke to a church and turn it into language that replaces the clear and repeated biblical commands to repent and believe.

None of this means that every Christian who has ever used the phrase “ask Jesus into your heart” believes a false gospel. Many faithful Christians have used those words while intending to communicate genuine trust in Christ. Some of us may even have heard that language when we first came to faith. The concern is not to condemn Christians who have used an imperfect phrase. The concern is that when we have the opportunity to teach the next generation, we should give them language that is clearer, stronger, and more biblical.

We want our children to grow up remembering more than a prayer they once prayed or an emotional moment they once experienced. We want them to understand who God is, who they are as sinners, what Christ accomplished on the cross and in His resurrection, and how God commands sinners to respond. We want them to know that their hope is not that they once invited Jesus somewhere, but that Jesus Christ has accomplished everything necessary to save sinners, and that everyone who repents and believes in Him will be saved.

Children are capable of learning big truths. More importantly, they need them. The gospel is too precious, and their souls are too important, for us to replace the Bible’s clear language with a phrase that may be easier to say but harder to understand. Our children do not need a gospel they will eventually have to unlearn. They need the gospel they can spend the rest of their lives growing into.

08/10/2026

This Wednesday, August 12, we are looking at Jesus and the Apostles’ view of Scripture, and I think this lesson is far more important than it may sound at first. Because eventually, almost every theological disagreement becomes an authority question: Who gets the final word? Is it me? My feelings? My experiences? A pastor? A priest? A theologian? A church council? A denomination? A scholar with a string of letters after his name? Two thousand years of tradition? The surrounding culture?

All of those things may deserve different levels of consideration. None of them deserves the place that belongs to the Word of God. The problem is that human beings desperately want to sit in the judge’s chair. Sometimes it sounds modern: “That may be true for you, but this is my truth” (Thanks Oprah). Sometimes it sounds academic: “Paul was simply reflecting the culture of his time.” Sometimes it sounds historical/religious: “Yes, the Bible says that, but the Church has the authority to tell you what it really means.” And sometimes it is shrouded in a God made in the image of man: “I know what the Bible says, but I just feel like God is telling me something different.” Different packaging, same fundamental problem. I have placed some human authority between myself and the Word of God, and ultimately I have reserved the right to decide whether God’s Word is acceptable to me.

That is precisely what Jesus did not do. Jesus said, “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35). When Satan tempted Him, Jesus repeatedly answered, “It is written” (Matthew 4). He said that not an iota or dot would pass from the Law until all was accomplished (Matthew 5:18). After His resurrection, He took His disciples through the Scriptures and showed them how they pointed to Him (Luke 24:27). Jesus did not treat Scripture as an interesting collection of ancient religious opinions that needed to be filtered through contemporary sensibilities. He treated it as the authoritative Word of God.

The apostles followed the same pattern. The Bereans were praised because they examined the Scriptures to determine whether what they were hearing was true (Acts 17:11). Peter referred to Paul’s writings alongside “the other Scriptures” (2 Peter 3:16). Again and again, the argument of the New Testament is not, “Here is my personal perspective.” It is, “What has God said?”

That is why Christians need to learn this. Rejecting biblical authority rarely begins with someone announcing, “I no longer believe the Bible.” It usually begins much more subtly: “Well, that’s just Paul.” “That was cultural.” “My pastor says...” “My priest says...” “Scholars today say...” “I just can’t believe God would...” Eventually we reach the point where Scripture is allowed to speak only after we have decided what it is permitted to say. At that point, Scripture is no longer our authority. We are.

The apologetic question underneath all of this is remarkably simple: If Jesus Christ treated Scripture as trustworthy, binding, and incapable of being broken, on what basis does someone who claims to follow Jesus adopt a lower view of Scripture than Jesus Himself? You cannot indefinitely separate “I love Jesus” from “I reject what Scripture teaches.” You can not claim to love Jesus and reject very Scriptures that reveal him.

So, yes, listen to pastors. Read theologians. Learn church history. Study the original languages. Know the creeds and confessions. Hear the arguments. We should be humble enough to learn from people who know more than we do. But none of them sits above the Word, and neither do I.

The Christian posture is not standing over Scripture asking whether we approve of it. It is sitting beneath Scripture and asking God to correct us. The question is not merely, “Do I believe the Bible?” The deeper question is, “Do I agree with Jesus and the Apostles about the Bible?” Because if they trusted it, taught it, appealed to it, and treated it as the authoritative Word of God, following Jesus means we should do the same.

08/30/2025

Raising children isn’t ultimately about children…

Appeasement benefits no one

10/23/2024

A hard but important subject to think about...
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