Do Your Children Believe?: Becoming Intentional About Your Family's Faith and Spiritual Legacy

by Terence Chatmon

Overview

Are your children ready to live out their faith in the real world?

Most parents who value Christian faith want their children to enjoy a vibrant, growing relationship with God, both now and throughout their lives. But few of those parents ever attach this hope to an ongoing plan; therefore, they fail to lay a reliable spiritual track in front of the fast-moving train of family life. This book is a junction point where deep parental desire meets workable design and where timid inadequacy meets Christ’s sufficiency. It’s where individual families become multiplication factories, exerting a lasting impact not only on their coming generations but even on the culture at large.

The death of Joshua and his contemporaries was barely old news in Israel before the people of God experienced a Judges 2:10 moment: “There arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done” (ESV). One generation is all it takes. One generation who stops remembering. One generation who stops creating. One generation blinded to God’s real work in their lives who then subtly quiets the expectation of His new work in succeeding generations.

 

Do Your Children Believe? appears at a time in history when another Judges 2:10 moment doesn’t sound so incredibly far-fetched—a day when many people’s only real knowledge of God comes from what they’ve heard and read about, not what they’ve actually seen and experienced, and when His work is more about the dutiful following of rules than the daily adventure of walking with Him as Lord.

Imagine, instead, a generation of your family who knows God with intimate familiarity. Who doesn’t just pretend at faith but actually lives it. Kids who can tell you what they believe and why it matters. Teenagers who handle adversity with the resilient joy of godly wisdom. A family who prays together and worships together, growing into young adults who are equipped and inspired to keep this torch ablaze from the moment their own new families begin.

This book is here to make that reality happen, written by an author equipped with not only a passion for the concept but also a proven plan for success—a wealth of first-hand personal stories from his wife and kids for how they’ve put this plan into living action with remarkable blessings in tow. When God puts His power behind families who embrace this kingdom call, on-the-ground change will result in off-the-charts revival.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780718078546
Publisher:	Nelson, Thomas, Inc.
Publication date:	02/07/2017
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishing
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	581 KB

About the Author

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Read an Excerpt

Do Your Children Believe?

Becoming Intentional about Your Family's Faith and Spiritual Legacy

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By Terence Chatmon

Thomas Nelson

Copyright © 2017 Terence Chatmon
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7180-7854-6

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CHAPTER 1

BETTER ANSWERS TO GOOD QUESTIONS

I've never met a man of faith who didn't want to be the spiritual leader in his home. He may not have known whether he could do it, may not have seen how he could possibly make time for it, but it's something he knows he should do. And wishes he was doing.

At the same time, I've rarely, if ever, met a woman of faith who wasn't dying for her husband to ascend to that role. And if he won't, or if he isn't there to do it, she realizes she's going to need to be that for her children. Whatever it takes. It's that important.

Believing parents know their kids need a strong foundation of faith, and they want to be able to give it to them.

So you'd think with this much consensus there wouldn't be a neighborhood in America where at some point in the evening, or at least at some point in the week, half the families weren't huddled together over the Scriptures, holding hands in prayer, kicked back in serious spiritual conversation, or making plans for their next big ministry project over the weekend or during the summer.

Yet even with such honest, across-the-board desire — on everyone's part — the hard truth remains that fewer than 10 percent of Christian families ever really engage with one another for the express purpose of encouraging or informing their growing faith. And not 1 percent could show you any kind of written plan that even briefly describes the spiritual direction they're praying for and working toward together.

If ever there was a math equation that didn't make sense or add up, it's that one.

And it has me wondering why. Not that for twenty years of married life I wasn't square in the middle of the 99.9 percenters. Despite having been a prominent business executive with three of the most recognizable companies in the world (Citibank, Coca-Cola, and Johnson & Johnson), despite being an elder at one of the largest churches in the greater Atlanta area, despite being confident in my abilities to lead a well-constructed Bible study for any group of people on any given Sunday, I was admittedly failing — and failing miserably — as the spiritual leader in my home. I was succeeding just about everywhere in life I could succeed, except for the one place where I was truly irreplaceable. I was proving to be inept and inadequate at the only job where no one else could come along to bail me out or fill in for me if things went south.

But something did come along to reverse this inverted picture of what a godly family man was supposed to be. And if you are willing to join me for a little while, I think you'll see something that might be helpful for you as well.

One chilly December weekend, my wife, Wanda, and I were away from home, off on an anniversary trip to the north Georgia mountains. We try to do these brief getaways every year, but this one was particularly special — we were celebrating fifteen years together in marriage. The peace and quiet gave us time to talk without interruption about both the past and the future, our memories and our dreams. It was wonderful. I was loving every minute of it. Until ...

Being the business leader that I am — and Wanda being the thoughtful woman that she is — we already had actually planned to spend a portion of our weekend reflecting on three specific questions in terms of our lives together, especially as they related to our children and family: (1) Where have we been? (2) Where are we? and (3) Where are we going? Call it a romance-buster if you like, but Wanda and I have found that taking the time to intentionally talk about our relationship and our family always draws us closer and enhances our marriage. We had even written out some notes to ourselves beforehand — a working list of our personal hopes, fears, and observations. We didn't want to overlook anything while we had each other's full attention and were thinking big-picture about our marriage, our family, our life, our future.

Back and forth we went — an unhurried rekindling of the vows we'd made more than a decade earlier. Real life in real time. Some of it rich and full; some of it competing, confusing, and highly challenging because any time you have children, as you know, you have worries and concerns. Even if they're good kids — as ours were — even if they're steady in church, strong in character, staying out of trouble — life is still working against them all the time. And it's working simultaneously against our focused attention as parents on what we truly need to be for our children.

Wanda, astute as ever, had really been picking up on this. In addition to being hard at work managing the everyday, present demands of our home and family, she'd already begun widening her field of vision to notice some treacherous ground down the road, much sooner than I'd begun to see it. She was grateful for how well our kids were doing and proud of who they were growing up to be. But she was beginning to ache in advance for the kinds of settings and scenarios they were fast approaching, times when Sunday school answers wouldn't cut it any longer, when their faith would need to be theirs, not just an extension of ours, when the questions and confrontations would be consistently bigger and the stakes higher than any of the ones they'd faced until then.

"I just wonder, Terence," she asked me that December day around the fire, "do you think they're really prepared to defend their faith, say, in a college environment?"

Good question. Hearing it stated so bluntly like that, I admit the sudden notion did frighten me as well. We'd done a decent job, I thought, of teaching our kids honesty and commitment and personal responsibility. How to manage their time, their money. I felt pretty good about all that. But my bride was right. I couldn't sit there and answer her with any firm level of confidence that yes, our children were up to the task of a professor with an agenda or to the needling questions of a roommate with serious, cynical doubts about God's existence.

This was indeed a problem. Something we really ought to be thinking about. In fact, that's exactly how I answered her:

"What do you think we ought to do about it?"

Pause here for a pregnant moment of silence — because next came the one question that not only challenged my whole perception of myself as a parent but, over the course of years, also has led to a radical change in our family's life and even to the writing of this book. Throughout the many days since, my wife's question has moved me from being a man consumed by my work and its weekly timetable into a man who's driven instead by what the generations of our family will look like a hundred years from now. No longer am I at a loss for words about the true state of my children's relationship with God, having no real clue where they stand in their grasp of biblical truth and their love for walking with Him. And it's all because of one question, perfectly timed — a question that sliced through the compulsive fog of my career-driven significance, forcing me to determine in that moment whom I was going to be as a man.

"What do you think we ought to do about it?" I'd said to her — my reflex response, spoken with all the sheepish instinct of the typically passive husband and father. Wanda's comeback, however, was much better than mine. It went something like this:

"We?

"No.

"What are you going to do about it?"

I (and we) have never been quite the same since.

A TALE OF TWO GENERATIONS

Writing a book like this is difficult, not because I'm dealing with any shortage of passion on the subject or I'm unclear about what to say but because I realize I'm issuing a challenge that seems nearly impossible to many people. It certainly did to me.

Your reaction to what I'm about to say on family discipleship — despite a keen interest and desire on your part to grow in this area, as well as in your spiritual leadership at home — could easily fall victim to discouragement or to a curt, overwhelmed dismissal. We humans are nothing if not creatures of habit. The path of least resistance is almost always the path we've been the most comfortable taking. We're old hands at dropping back and punting. We're quick to look at what others are apparently doing well and automatically conclude, hey, we're not anything like them. We sure can't do it like they do it.

You may already be sitting there right now, thinking, He obviously doesn't have the same challenges or set of circumstances I do. Sounds good on paper, I guess, but it'll never fly here. Not with me. Not with us.

I get that.

The makeup of your family may seem like a source of complication. You may be the parent or grandparent, for instance, to children of various ages, with varying temperaments and experiences — toddlers to teenagers in different stages of life and with different attention spans. Your kids may even be grown, with schedules and interests that are hardly under your control anymore. You may be a single parent, forced into this role through unfortunate circumstances you never intended or saw coming. And you're thinking, Come on, Terence, I'm barely making it work as it is.

In addition, regardless of the makeup of your family, your background and personal history may come with its own built-in excuses for considering yourself disqualified from pressing forward: lack of knowledge, lack of time, and lack of the kind of track record that gives your voice much influence, authority, and credibility at home. The potential barriers to success can be large and layered. You look around, note the land mines, and decide you're better off just backing away from the responsibility, hoping your kids can somehow figure out all this stuff without you. I get that too.

But here's how I'd like to begin our discussion. The following example cuts across all demographics and obstacles, presenting a predicament that's common to each of us. It's a looming crisis that remains as relevant today as it did four thousand years ago in the history of God's people.

Among all the heroes of the Bible, few can match the sterling example and reputation of Joshua — the Old Testament leader of Israel after the death of Moses; a stout warrior of deep conviction, valor, and principle; a courageous visionary who brought back a daring minority report on the desirability of the promised land, and then later led the entire nation in laying claim to it by conquering a vast number of established, enemy armies. Joshua — whose given name and legacy proved semi-prophetic of Jesus, the One who would walk that very land of promise two millennia later — was a man among men, a spiritual giant of his time.

All of which makes the biblical report of Joshua's death in Judges 2 and its immediate aftermath so noticeably surprising and distressing. Joshua, "the servant of the Lord" (v. 8), died and was buried in the hill country of Canaan, as were all his contemporaries in the days and years that followed. "That whole generation," the Bible says, in language that sounds very King James in tone, had been "gathered to their ancestors." But then the writer of the book of Judges added this disheartening observation: "another generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel" (v. 10).

The very next generation.

They were already starting to forget.

Let that dire, descriptive statement settle on you for just a minute.

Those who had grown up during the years when Joshua and his fellow leaders had shepherded their homes and nation were now adults and parents themselves, raising the next generation of God's people. According to God's Word, the prevailing pattern at play at that moment in Israel's history was of families and children who hadn't been taught, who couldn't remember, who didn't themselves possess a personal, intimate knowledge of the God who had made them distinctive as a nation. Shocking, isn't it?

One generation, twenty years, give or take. Fresh on the heels of the Jordan River crossing, the fall of Jericho, the hard lessons of their defeat at Ai.

Joshua, you'll recall, in his farewell sermon had admonished the people with what's now a famous challenge: "Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord" (Josh. 24:15). They answered his appeal that day with a unanimous rally cry: "Far be it from us to forsake the Lord to serve other gods! ... We will serve the Lord our God and obey him" (vv. 16, 24). In celebration, Joshua ordered that a large stone be set up as a permanent memorial of this historic moment. He declared the monument a witness to the promises they had made, as well as a warning against failing to follow through on their covenant with God and with one another.

Yet, after a few more cycles of the earth around the sun, the world these ancient people inhabited became a place where they and their children — to repeat the leaden testimony of Judges 2:10 — "knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel."

This verse just nails me. Even with an up-close understanding of myself and my own heart, even with an acute awareness for how fickle we humans can be by nature, this dramatic turnaround in the people's zeal and devotion strikes me as incredible. It's unthinkable. So fast. So precipitous. So deep a dive into disinterest, disbelief, and (as the woeful accounts from the book of Judges would go on to describe) the long-term decay of their once-mighty nation. Years of suffering, death, and oppression would follow — snap! Just like that — as if their miraculous, redeeming, overpowering history with God had never happened.

Unbelievable.

I take this observation from Scripture as a grave, cautionary tale. Tell me, in fact, that we're not seeing some of these same conditions in the age in which we live. I won't bore you with a bunch of statistics; you probably know or can deduce many of them from what you've seen, heard, and, perhaps, personally experienced. You know, for example, the extent to which destruction and disharmony exist in the modern family — and how much even churchgoing Christian families possess in common with families who barely claim to know God at all. But more important — and more personally — you know what's almost sure to happen if your children venture into young adulthood and beyond without developing a vibrant, thriving relationship with Christ, without being discipled by parents in a loving home environment, and without discovering through prayer and firsthand experience what their God is truly capable of, the work He has done and can still very much do.

I'm not talking about whether your children have professed belief in Christ or been baptized, officially marking themselves as Christians, as church members. I'm talking about kids who deeply know the Word, kids who are confident in articulating the basis for their faith, kids who are active in synthesizing their biblical understanding with the kinds of lifestyles they lead and the heart for service and servanthood they embody.

If you want to see those kinds of kids develop from the seats around your table, through the offhand, ongoing, organic living out of godly truth in your home, I'm here with what I know from experience to be a proven, biblical plan for putting this enormous task into God's hands and watching His sufficiency take over with astounding effect.

I'm here to help you answer the question, "What are you going to do about it?"

LEGACY BOUND

I'm convinced that you, like most parents, want to do the right thing. You want your kids to grow spiritually, mature in the faith, and (as the apostle Peter said) be able to "give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have" (1 Peter 3:15). As a dad, I wanted those things, too, not only for my children but also for me. I wanted to grow and mature — all of us, all together.

One problem: I didn't know how to make that happen.

And most likely that's you. You want it. You've always wanted it. But you've just never really known how to go about it. You haven't known where to start. Neither did I. It sounds too hard, too far above us. Borderline impossible.

The plan I'm going to share with you in this book is, I admit, challenging. Anything that's worthwhile always is. But at the same time — and I'm not just saying this to oversell you and keep you hooked on the line here — it's also very easy once you get going.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Do Your Children Believe? by Terence Chatmon. Copyright © 2017 Terence Chatmon. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword by Steve Green, xiii,
Part I: The Calling,
1 Better Answers to Good Questions, 3,
2 Making It Personal, 17,
3 Steps in the Right Direction, 31,
Part II: The Plan,
4 From Daunting to Doable, 47,
5 Up and Down the Family Tree Step 1: Discover Your Spiritual Heritage, 61,
6 The Story of Your Life Step 2: Articulate Your Testimony, 75,
7 Who? What? How? Step 3: Define Your Values, Your Vision, Your Mission, 89,
8 Intentions in Action Step 4: Set Your Goals, 107,
9 Fun for All Ages Step 5: Personalize Your Plan to Fit All Your Children, 121,
10 Who Do You Know Who Needs Jesus? Step 6: Adopt a Family Prayer Focus, 135,
11 Live It Like You Mean It Step 7: Draft Your Family Covenant, 149,
12 Momentum-Building Moments, 159,
PART III: THE PURSUIT,
13 Sufficient to the Struggle, 175,
14 Legacy, 185,
Appendix A: Generational Spiritual Development Plan, 195,
Appendix B: Sample Devotional Plan, 201,
About the Author, 207,