Trusting the Lord with Our Children's Salvation - By Lara d'Entremont

Neither of my parents are believers or ever have been. Yet my mother believed it was important for me to go to Sunday school, and so she faithfully sent me each week to the basement of the nearest church in my frilly white socks and itchy dress. While my father feared for me being “indoctrinated,” my mother believed I needed to be informed of the Christian faith to make my own decision. When the decision became mine, I still wanted to go to Sunday school, and eventually I added Sunday morning church and Tuesday night youth group to my list as well. 

Twenty-seven years later, the Lord has continued to carry my faith through. I can’t define one moment in my life when I turned to the Lord in repentance and faith. Rather, my faith has resembled the slow peeling back of layers, of God revealing more and more of himself to me as I grew and deepening my faith in him and my knowledge of his Word.

My story would seem to say that church and other related events will draw any person to believe in Jesus, and how much more for a child raised in a Christian home? Yet I can count beyond one hand’s worth of people I know who grew up in believing homes, whose parents took them to every church-related event possible, and yet have since left the faith behind. They knew their Bibles, performed well in “sword drills”, heard the purity talk a thousand times over, memorized a treasure’s worth of verses, and could likely still do all the actions to every worship song. Yet they still abandoned Christ.  

I often find myself thinking of memories with these very friends—the faith conversations we had, the youth rallies we attended together, and all the Christian songs we sang hip-to-hip—and ask God, Why me? Why am I still here in this pew with my Bible, and they have no thoughts of you? How did they experience such graces of mealtime prayers, Sundays with family flanked around them, and a parent to ask Bible questions of, yet still have chosen the way of this world? 

I feel haunted at times, like the old version of them lingers around me, poking and prodding, demanding how it could be fair. Some of them attended Bible college with me. We sat in the same classes and wrote the same assignments—yet they rejected it all and I still cling to the old, rugged cross. I fear their parents regard me with the same frustration.

I don’t write this story to shame those parents or to frighten Christian parents today. I don’t write this as an apologetic for better Christian parenting (as a mom to three under six, I am in no place to do such a thing). I don’t write this as a boasting of my faith; my faith has teetered plenty close to doubt and abandon.

This is a testimony of God—that he is God and we are not, and that only he can save and sustain a soul to salvation. I don’t mean to shake my hand at family discipleship; God calls us to raise our children in the gospel (Deut. 11:19; Prov. 22:6; Eph. 6:4). Rather, it’s a reminder that we can use the best Bible storybooks, attend every faith-based event, homeschool our children in our homes cloistered away from the world, only allow Christian music in our minivans, send our children to Bible college, and it will never be enough to save them. 

Don’t forget: Adam and Eve committed the first sin, broke the one and only commandment, within the perfection of the Garden of Eden. They stood the best chance at earning their salvation, and they could not. They walked with God in the Garden and heard his very voice speak that command. Yet they failed. They gave way to the serpent’s hiss. 

Is our work as Christian parents futile then? Not at all. This is a call to rest in the sovereignty and power of God. This kind of rest is illustrated in the Old Testament commands on sabbath days.

God called the Israelites to a weekly Sabbath and annual sabbaths in combination with certain feasts. On these sabbaths, he required them to do no work (aside from works of mercy) but to trust him to care for their needs while they ceased working. Passover in particular called them into a deeper trust: It took place right before the harvest, meaning that last year’s stores had grown low and they needed those very crops to feed them in the near future. This was also the time that scorching winds that could destroy entire crops ran through the land. Yet rather than protecting and toiling over these precious crops, the people of Israel were to come to God in worship.

In a similar way, God calls us to both “raise our children in the Lord” but to also rest, knowing the results of our labors are in his hands. We will not be able to control our children’s faith, and they are not God’s robots that he programs once we perform our parenting duties. Rather, we must be faithful with what we are given and lay what is outside of our control before him. Our child may become a Timothy or a prodigal, a Peter or a Judas, but we must entrust those results to God, not our parenting. 

Our faithfulness is not based on who our children become, but what we did with what we were given, and our salvation is judged not on who our children lay their trust with but who we do. Are we trusting in our own efforts or the mighty work of a Savior who draws his sheep and promises to not lose a single one the Father has given him?