A More Excellent Way

Teaching Our Children to Love, Not Just Conform

There's a profound difference between teaching someone to conform to a standard and teaching them to love it. This distinction shapes everything—from how we raise our children to how we practice our faith to how we engage with the world around us.

Consider the church at Corinth. They had all the right pieces in place. They were exercising spiritual gifts, pursuing knowledge, engaging in worship. Yet something was fundamentally broken. They were divided, confused, and missing the point entirely. Everyone wanted the flashy gifts—the ones that put them on stage with a microphone. Nobody wanted the behind-the-scenes service that actually made the body function.

Sound familiar?

The Hallmark Card We've Made of Love

First Corinthians 13 has become something of a cliché in our culture. We read it at weddings, print it on Valentine's Day cards, and nod approvingly at its beautiful poetry. But in doing so, we've stripped it of its revolutionary power.

Paul wasn't writing a greeting card. He was confronting a church that had all the right theology and all the right practices but was missing the entire point. They were speaking in tongues without love—creating nothing but noise. They were exercising prophetic gifts without love—amounting to nothing. They were giving sacrificially without love—gaining nothing.

The tragedy is that we've done the same thing in modern Christianity. We've turned love into a checklist: Be patient. Check. Be kind. Check. Don't be rude. Check. Don't be selfish. Check.

But that's just scrubbing the outside of the cup while the inside remains filthy.

The Gospel of Behavior Modification

Here's an uncomfortable truth: children raised in church engage in drugs and premarital sex at the same rate as those raised outside the church. There's no discernible difference. Why? Because we've taught them a gospel of behavior modification rather than introducing them to a Person worth loving.

We drill down on the rules. We expect cooperation even without understanding. We want good grades, clean noses, and kids who stay out of trouble. And we get exactly that—good kids who are passionless and directionless. Kids who grow up in church but not in Christ.

The greatest truth, spoken in the most eloquent way, falls on deaf ears without love. You can use your powers of reason and intellect to communicate every theological nuance of the gospel. You should. But without love, it's just racket. Clatter. Indistinguishable noise.

Three Dangerous Separations

First, there's the separation between the gospel and love. When we push conformity by teaching a gospel without love, we create religious robots who know all the right answers but don't know Jesus. They can find any verse in the Bible. They know what the Bible says. But they don't know Christ. That's a travesty that has created three or four generations of children who, as soon as they left home, never returned to church.

Second, there's the separation between doctrine and life. Some of the angriest, most miserable people are also the best-trained theologians. They can dot every theological "i" and cross every doctrinal "t," but their doctrine doesn't impact their lives. What they believe doesn't change how they act. Orthodoxy without love produces knowledge for knowledge's sake—which accomplishes nothing if it doesn't deepen our love and loyalty to Christ.

Third, there's the separation between sacrifice and love. We can teach our children to tithe, serve at homeless shelters, and even lay down their lives for others. But if we force it rigidly and callously, we produce self-congratulating hypocrites. Jesus addressed the Pharisees who loved to perform their giving publicly, saying they already had their reward—the applause of others was all they would get.

The More Excellent Way

So what's the alternative? How do we teach our children—and ourselves—to love the standard rather than merely conform to it?

It starts with Deuteronomy 6:5-6: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might." This isn't about loving an abstract concept or a moral code. It's about loving a Person—a self-giving, sacrificing, loving Person whose name is Jesus.

Wholehearted, whole-person love for God looks like faithfulness to His covenant and obedience to His commands. Jesus said it plainly: "If you love me, keep my commandments." No hyperbole. No metaphor. Direct, soul-searching truth.

And here's the key: you cannot lead anyone, especially your children, to love something you don't love yourself. You cannot lead them to love Christ in a way you don't love Him yourself. If it's important to you, it will be important to them. If it's not a priority to you, it will become irrelevant to them.

Living It Out

This means our conversations at home must intentionally weave in two things: who God is and what He has done, and what His Word reveals and expects from us. God's Word isn't just something we reference on Sunday mornings. It becomes part of our identity, governing what we do, how we think, and how we feel. It rules in our homes.

When this becomes who we are, it's perfectly reasonable to expect our children to imitate us. But—and this is crucial—it's equally unreasonable to expect them to develop this desire or wisdom on their own. The Western church's obsession with individual rights and personal liberties has led us to raise children under covenant blessings and then watch them walk into the world at eighteen, expecting them to "figure it out."

That's not biblical parenting. That's abandonment dressed up as respect for autonomy.

"Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it" implies that you actually trained them. You expected them to imitate you as you imitated Christ. You honored something specific, and you got what you honored.

The Heart of the Matter

The standard isn't patience, kindness, or selflessness—as noble as those qualities are. The standard is love. Loving Christ above all else. Loving our neighbors as ourselves.

When we imitate Jesus and imitate those who are imitating Him, transformation happens from the inside out. When families imitate and love Jesus together, they laugh together, play together, pray together, go to church together, and go to heaven together.

That's what we're after—not well-behaved children who know the right answers, but children who love the Lord with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength. Not because they were forced to conform, but because they fell in love with the One who is love itself.

The more excellent way isn't through stricter rules or better systems. It's through the heart. And it starts with us.