Giving Your Words: The Lifegiving Power of a Verbal Home for Family Faith FormationSample

Lasting words

To wrap up our thoughts about the words you say to your children, we’ll consider what can be called “lasting words.” You’ve heard them many times before. In the language of philosophy, they are called transcendentals—the irreducible and interrelated properties of being that are shared by all humans. Medieval Christian theology focused on three transcendentals that are properties of God’s being—truth, goodness, and beauty.

The point of this brief discussion is that the words you give to your children will ultimately help to shape their understanding of God’s nature as true, good, and beautiful. In a deeply fallen world filled with what is false, evil, and ugly, only the conviction that there is a personal God who stands in opposition to those corruptions of His nature will give your children a reason to press forward in life.

Truth is a word of demarcation—either something is true, or it is not. The loving and believing words we just considered are true, but they only scratch the surface of what we believe. From the time our children were very young, we would tell them that they had a treasure chest of truth inside them, and we as parents were filling it up with valuable treasures—wisdom, understanding, knowledge, discernment, and more.

Good is a linguistic ubiquity in English— “Good job”; “I’m good”; “It’s all good”; “Good night!” The unfortunate consequence of its overuse can be the dilution of its meaning when heard in a biblical context. We tried hard as parents to avoid trivializing the goodness of God and to give it a bigger canvas in our children’s minds than just a dinner blessing or a worship song. Our desire as a family has never been only to give verbal assent to God’s goodness but to exemplify it in our lives. After all, Paul also reminds us that goodness is a fruit of the Holy Spirit in our lives. As our children heard these kinds of words, their hearts were formed to value God’s goodness.

Beauty is our last lasting word, but perhaps the best. In our home, we valued all kinds of beauty—music, artwork, literature, poetry, table settings, candles, flowers, colors, creation, and so much more. We intentionally found ways to talk about beauty that would give our children words to understand and express how and why beauty is a testimony to the beautiful God who created it.

It is in your power to say the kinds of loving, believing, and lasting words that will enrich and inflame your child’s rapidly developing heart and mind with truth and grace. As parents, may we all have children who will be able to say, slightly paraphrasing John Wesley, eighteenth-century Anglican pastor, “I learned more about Christianity from my parents than from all the theologians in England.”

We adapted this plan from another resource. Learn more at http://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/giving-your-words/402853