Why Should Kids Follow God’s Word? – Teaching Toddlers to Trust the Bible

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In this episode, we explore how to explain the importance of following God’s word to children as young as two and four. Elizabeth Urbanowicz shares practical tips for giving young kids a simple yet lasting foundation for trusting the Bible, preparing them for the many worldviews they'll face as they grow. Join us as we dive deep into helping children understand why God's Word is the ultimate truth.

Transcript

Note: The following is an auto-transcript of the podcast recording.

Today's podcast question says, "How can I explain to my young kids, aged two and four, why it's important to follow God's word in the Bible? They will be faced with many non-biblical worldviews in their future and will need a solid explanation for them." I love this question. I just love the foresight that this parent has, knowing that at the ages of two and four, their child is not faced with too many competing ideas yet and is not questioning yet what the Bible has to say, but knows that in the future they're going to be faced with many, many, many competing ideas and will need a solid understanding of why it's important to stand firm in God's word. So to the parent who wrote this question in kudos to you for understanding what your children will need. Now we're going to dive down deep into this question today on the Foundation Worldview Podcast where we seek to answer your questions so that you can equip the children that God has placed in your care to carefully evaluate every idea they encounter and understand the truth of the biblical worldview. I'm the host of this podcast, Elizabeth Urbanowicz, and I'm so grateful that you've joined me today for this episode. Now, before we dive down deep into answering this question, if you have benefited from the content of this podcast, please invest the few seconds that it takes to rate it. That just helps us get this content out to more people so we can equip more adults to get their kids thinking.

Now, as we think through this question, we know that as our children are young, when they're under the age of seven just in the developmental stage that they're in, they are going to blindly believe whatever we tell them no matter who we are, no matter what we're saying. When children are young, they blindly believe what we tell them. Now, this is so in the developmental process for some very good reasons because as we are raising children when they're in those young stages, they are going to be in many situations where they could get seriously hurt if they did not immediately listen to what we told them. If they ran out in the middle of the road they could get rid of or by a car, if they put their hand on the stove, they could get seriously burned. So in these younger developmental years, God has made it so that our children will trust what we say and it's for a very good reason. However, if we think that we're going to tell them that the Bible is true and therefore they should just believe it, and they're going to continue in that the rest of their days, that is a somewhat faulty assumption because once children reach the age of around eight, they start to develop some critical thinking skills, which are really good to have, and they start to consider perspectives outside of their own, which is also a really good thing. I mean, think about your spouse. Would you want to be married to a spouse who could not consider a perspective outside of his or herself that would make for a really difficult relationship? So again, all of these things are part of the natural developmental process.

So if we want to help our children develop a lasting faith, we need to equip them with an apologetic for why it is that we should trust what God has revealed in the Bible. Now, the person who wrote in this question asked about children who are ages two and four. So there are many great resources out there for looking at why we can trust the Bible for kids who are older. That's what we do in some of our curriculums at Foundation Worldview and our Comparative Worldview curriculum. We're trying to build a case that the biblical worldview aligns with reality in the way that no other worldview does. So if you haven't checked out our Comparative Worldview curriculum, check that out. Also, several years ago I interviewed Detective J. Warner Wallace on a Foundation Worldview webinar to talk about his book "Cold Case Christianity for Kids". That's another great resources for resource for children, probably around seven on up to look at why we can trust the Bible. Then another book that we've recommended in a Foundation Worldview book club before is "How Do I Know That Christianity Is Really True?" by Chris Morphew. That's another great book to go through with kids. So there's some great resources out there that you can check out for kids eight on up. When we're thinking about younger kids, what we're going to want to do is we're going to want to have just a very, very simple explanation of why it is that we look to God's word. And so we're wanting a simple explanation, but we're also wanting it to be something that's going to be sound and is going to last with them as they grow.

Now, those of you who follow the Foundation Worldview ministry know that just recently we launched our sixth curriculum, which is called God's Good Design, and it is a curriculum for children four on up, on the goodness of God's design for gender, sexuality, marriage and family. And as we were developing these resources and we were talking through what the Bible has to say about being male or female, what the Bible has to say about marriage, what the Bible has to say about family, what the Bible has to say about love, all of these different types of things, we realized that before we dove into those things, we actually needed to give little ones a basic understanding of why it is that we should turn to the Bible when we are looking for truth about who we are, what it means to be male or female, what marriage is, what family is, all of these things. And so what we did is in the first unit of that curriculum, we built a systematic argument for why it is that we should look to God's word when answering questions about gender and sexuality.

Now, the person who wrote in this question was not writing in a question about gender and sexuality. They're writing in a question about how we can help our kids understand why it is important to follow God's word. But the argument that we created in that first unit of God's Good Design really applies to all aspects of life. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk you through briefly the eight different truths in the lessons that we have revealed in that God's Good Design curriculum - unit one, and then talk through how you can go through those truths with your little ones to help them understand why it is that we should follow God's word.

So the first truth we cover in God's Good Design is just that design is a purposeful plan. We want our little ones to understand what design is. And so in that first lesson, what we do is we show them pictures of things that were designed that show design. We show them a picture of a bike and we show them a picture of a house, and we show them a picture of Legos and we show them a picture of a refrigerator, and we talk about how there was a purposeful plan to create all of those things that none of those things came to be by accident, that we show them pictures of spilt milk or a mud puddle or rocks scattered in a field, and we talk about how for those things, we don't really see a purposeful plan for their arrangement for rocks that are randomly scattered. We don't see an arrangement for a glass of milk that was knocked off the table. We don't see a purposeful plan and talking about the difference between something that's accidental and something that's designed. So that's the first truth. Recovery is design is a purposeful plan. And so if you're talking about this with your little ones, you can just, as you know, as you're driving in the car, as you're in your backyard, you can talk about the design that you see all around you. You can talk about the design you see in flowers, in trees, in houses, in cars.

Then the next thing we go through, the next truth that we cover is our bodies and minds show design. And so we talk about so many of the amazing things that our bodies do. We talk about how we breathe in oxygen and how that oxygen then goes to our lungs and travels throughout our blood to go to every place in our body that needs it. We talk about how our heart beats. We talk about, we talk about how our mind thinks, and then we say all of these things show that there is design in our bodies and our minds that they did not come to be by accident. Okay? So again, number one, design is a purposeful plan. Number two, our bodies and minds show design.

After that, the next truth we cover is design always comes from a designer. And so we go back through some of those same pictures that we looked at in the first lesson of a bike and a house and Legos and a refrigerator, and we talk about did any of these things come to be by accident? Could there have just been materials that were just tossed up in the air and they landed and oh my goodness, there's a bike. And then we say, no, design always comes from a designer. And we look at lots of objects that were designed and we identify who was the designer. You can do this in your own house. You can hold up a toy and then say, who is the designer of this? Someone at the stuffed animal factory or someone at the Lego factory? You can talk about this in your house, who designed this house? An architect designed this house, and you can talk about the design and who the designer is.

The next truth that we cover is that God is our designer. And so we talk about how every object that was designed has a designer and God who is above us, who is in control of all. He is the one who has designed us, and we go through different Scripture verses that talk about how God designed us. Okay?

So again, those first four things are design is a purposeful plan, our bodies and minds show design, design always comes from a designer and God is our designer. So I hope you can see how this is just step-by-step incrementally showing our kids that there is a design for them and that that design is from God.

The next truth that we cover is designers understand their design best. And so again, we go through pictures again of things that were designed and we say, who understands the design of this object best? Who understands the design of this bike best? Well, the person who designed it because they were involved in every part of the creation of this bike. So they understand the design best, who understands the design of our house best, while the architect who designed it understands little things that even we as people who live in this house don't understand.

Then the next truth we cover is God understands our design best because designers understand their design best. And because God is our designer, he is the one who understands us best. So sometimes there might be things about our design that we don't even understand, things about our bodies, thinks about our minds, things about our feelings that we don't fully understand, but God does because he is our designer.

Then the next truth we cover is knowing and following the designer's design is best. And so we give a couple different examples in that lesson on what would happen if we didn't know or follow the designer's design. And so one of the examples we give is we show a picture of a kite and a beautiful kite blowing in the wind. And then I say, what would happen if I took this kite and I used it to dry my hair after I washed it, I took this kite and I wrapped my hair up and it, what would happen? Would this kite do a good job of soaking up all the water like a towel would? No. Kites aren't as thick as towels. They weren't designed to absorb water and then say, well, what would happen to my hair? Well, my hair would still be wet. It'd probably be dripping all down. The water would probably all be dripping down my face because the kites not going to absorb the water. And then say, well, what would happen to the kite? Well, the kite would be all soggy, and would it be able to fly in the wind when it was all soggy like that? No. And then we give other examples of designers and their designs and talk about, okay, what is this designer's design? And then what would happen if someone didn't follow it? So that they just see that knowing and following the design designer's design is best, and we connect that to us. So knowing and following our designer's design is best.

And then the final truth that we reveal in that unit is we learn God's design for us in the Bible, that the Bible is God's self revelation. And so if we want to know his design, we go to his word. So again, those truths are design is a purposeful plan, our bodies and minds show design, design always comes from a designer, God is our designer, designers understand their design best, God understands our design best, knowing and following the designer's design is best, and we learn God's design for us in the Bible. Now, this is not a slam dunk case for the existence of God, for the proof that the Bible is God's word, but what this is is these are truths that are easy enough for a four-year-old to grasp, and they lay the foundation for understanding that we see design in the world around us. And when we see design, we know that that design always comes from a designer. We know that design does not come about haphazardly or by accident or without intelligence. So when we see such intricate details of design in our bodies and our mind, we know that we were designed.

So in order to disprove this, someone would either need to show that there is no design or that design comes from some other designer other than the God of the Bible. Okay? Again, this is not a slam dunk case. This is not saying that this is all our children will ever need, but this is saying for children around the age of four, this is a great way to just help them understand why we go to God's word and why we follow God's word.

Then again, at the beginning of this podcast, I recommended some of the other resources for if you have older children, for helping them understand why it is that we can trust the Bible. Again, talking about our Comparative Worldview curriculum here at Foundation Worldview, that goes through how Christianity lines up with reality in a way that no other worldview does. The book, "Cold Case Christianity" by J. Warner Wallace, and the book, "How Do We Know Christianity is Really True?" by Chris Morphew. And then the argument that I just took you through those eight different truths, those are all of the lessons in our first unit, in our God's Good Design curriculum. So again, that curriculum is the laying the Biblical foundation for understanding gender and sexuality and marriage and family. And even if you are not at a place yet in your children's development where you're interested in teaching them about those things, I highly recommend that you check out those materials and go through unit one with them just to lay this foundation for understanding design and why it is that we should go to God's word and trust what it says.

If you have a question that you would like for me to answer on a future Foundation Worldview podcast, you can submit that question by going to FoundationWorldview.com/podcast. As we leave our time together, my prayer for you is that no matter the situation in which you and the children God has placed in your care, find yourselves, you would trust that God is working all things together for your good. By using all things to conform you more into the image of His Son. I'll see you next time.