Podcast: How to Answer the Hard Questions Your Kids Ask About God (Champ Thornton)

June 23, 2025 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Don't Fake Your Way Through Answers to Your Kids' Tough Questions

In this episode Champ Thornton addresses some of the challenges that come with answering kids' hardest questions and how to approach complex topics like faith and salvation with sincerity to best meet the needs of your kids.

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10 Questions About Salvation

10 Questions About Salvation

Champ Thornton

Presenting 10 questions in 30 readings on one important faith topic, this volume of the 10 Questions series helps middle-grade readers understand salvation and find joy, security, and hope in God’s gracious love.

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:52 - Embracing Kids’ Questions

Matt Tully
Champ Thornton serves as an acquisitions editor and director of children and family resources at Crossway, and is the author of numerous books for kids and families, including his newest book, 10 Questions About Salvation: 30 Devotions for Kids, Teens and Families. Champ, thanks so much for being here today on The Crossway Podcast*.

Champ Thornton
Thanks, Matt. It’s great to be here.

Matt Tully
You and I know each other well through our work together here at Crossway. But you also are an author, and you’ve written a number of books both with Crossway and with other publishers over the years, and many of those have been for kids. So just starting us off, what got you into writing books for children and their families?

Champ Thornton
It’s not what I would’ve expected. When I was in seminary, this was not on my Bingo card. I thought I was going to be pastoring and that’s pretty much it. And then just in God’s providence, he has moved me toward writing and also toward writing for children. When I was twenty-nine years old, I was diagnosed with a blood clot, and it’s one of the kinds that people die from. It became a pulmonary embolism, and it went through my heart and lodged in my lung. That’s pretty scary because when you’re twenty-nine, you just think you’re invincible and you’re going to live forever.

Matt Tully
So you were married, you had young kids at the time.

Champ Thornton
I was married and had no kids yet. And you just think, Okay, what is going on? And you don’t think about death; you think about life. And then all of a sudden you’re faced with your mortality, and everything changed. Maybe in a little bit of a morbid way, but maybe for the next ten years of my life, probably a day didn’t go by when I didn’t think about death, because of the situation that God had put me in. And it was a formative time for me of realizing my life is short, and I need to use the time that I have. I’m not guaranteed my life. I found out through that that I have a genetic blood disorder that makes me inclined to clot. And so it was always there with me in my mind. So then kids come along, and I want to make sure that I am a good dad, but then I’m also thinking about the future, and I want to pass along what God has taught me to my kids. And so that means conversations, it means family Bible time, and it means I was, in God’s kindness, able to put together books and writings to be able to hand on to my kids so that hopefully I can serve them well, whether I’m here or not here.

Matt Tully
And all parents know that kids love to ask questions. I sometimes joke that I think one definition for the word kid would be a small human who asks lots of questions. That’s certainly been my experience as a father of three young kids. And I just love it. There’s something so pure and inquisitive and wonderful about the way that kids like to ask questions. And that’s why I love this new series of books that you’re working on with Crossway. You’ve developed this whole idea and have written the first book in the series called 10 Questions. I wonder if you could just speak a little bit to the big picture: What’s this series all about, and how did you come up with this idea?

Champ Thornton
You’re exactly right. Kids have tons of questions, and that’s good because God made them to want to process how the world works. They’re trying to understand. Paul Tripp talks about how we’re not just giving our kids information, but they’re trying to process the world they live in. When our oldest was very young, I asked him one time, "Hey buddy, what happens to the food when it goes into your stomach?" And he says, "Oh, the mice in my tummy eat it." I was like, "Oh, really? I didn’t know this. Tell me more. How did the mice get into your stomach?" He’s like, "Through my pockets." I’m like, "Oh, I see! I also did not know this!"

Matt Tully
Amazing.

Champ Thornton
What’s he doing? He’s very little and he’s thinking through life—how does it work? And so kids are always asking questions. They’re always trying to figure things out. And a part of our job as parents is to bring good answers to those questions and also give good questions to them as well for them to consider. And of course underneath all of that is the answers to those questions come from God’s word. We want to be able to bring not just what I think but what God says about the questions of life.

Matt Tully
You are a dad, as you’ve said. Tell us a little bit more about your family.

Champ Thornton
My wife and I have been married for twenty-nine years, and we have three kids. I would say they’re all teenagers, but our oldest is now twenty. So where does the time go? And we have fifteen-year-old twins. And so our life right now is kind of on the busy end of the spectrum. They’re not asking as many questions.

Matt Tully
The questions change as kids get older.

Champ Thornton
They do. And sometimes you have to draw it out in life situations. And hard times come up, and then they go like, "Okay, what do I do about this? What do I do about that?" But every season of parenting is just a gift from the Lord. And like you said, the questions change, and we think that God put us here to help raise our kids—to disciple them, to help them grow in godliness. But I think at the end of the day, really, God’s given kids to us to grow us in godliness and to change us. And so sometimes those questions, even if we don’t have the answers, they’re there to help lead us to answers and to make us seek the Lord.

Matt Tully
We’re going to get into this first book in the series, 10 Questions About Salvation, that you’ve written in just a minute. But going to that question of sometimes our kids’ questions can lead us to realize, Oh, I don’t actually have a great answer to that. And I think that could be one way that some listeners, some parents, might respond to this whole topic of the questions that their kids ask about God and about salvation and about our faith is they can feel just intimidated by it because it does feel like often they don’t really have a great answer for their kids. How do you think about that? Have you ever felt intimidated by your kids’ questions, and how should parents engage those feelings of intimidation or fear or just feeling anxious even about them?

Champ Thornton
I think if we try to fake our way along, it communicates that Christianity actually doesn’t have the answers. Because when our fake answer gets exposed as the fraud that it is, then that doesn’t help them at all. So I think just honesty. We need to be honest as parents about our own faults and failures. And when we sin, we say, "I was wrong. Would you forgive me?" But the same thing is true when we have faults and failures in our thinking and our understanding. So when our child asks some really deep question, and they always seem to have their finger on that pulse, like they just go right to the heart.

Matt Tully
They cut to the heart.

Champ Thornton
They do. And you just sit there and go, "That is an excellent question. Did you know that hundreds of people over the last couple thousand years have asked that exact question? And men and women who are three times as smart as I am have looked at that question and come up with different answers. I don’t know that I’m going to have a great answer for you, but let me think about this. I’m going to pray about it, I’m going to talk to your mom, and let’s have a further discussion about this, because I don’t know that I have a great answer off the top of my head." So I feel like those kinds of "let me punt and come back to it" can be really helpful.

Matt Tully
But ironically, and we’ve worked together for a long time now, and I’ve heard you say that so many times, "That is a good question," and really mean it. I think sometimes even that statement and the willingness to pause and not try to fake it actually goes a long way to making people feel seen, making their questions feel respected, rather than it feeling like there’s some kind of quick, pat answer.

Champ Thornton
Yeah, for sure. And it is also an opportunity to encourage our kids to see what God is doing. "God’s given you an amazing mind, and the ability to come up with that question is really special. God’s given you a gift here in this way. You’re thinking clearly, you’re thinking analytically. You put your finger on a problem that is significant and you didn’t even know it. Let’s see what God’s gonna continue to do here. He’s giving you a gift, and you need to steward that gift and continue to use your mind when you go to Scripture and be thinking about these things." So there are ways not only to just have an honest moment with our kids but also to have an encouraging moment with them as well.

Matt Tully
One more question before we get into this particular book.

Champ Thornton
Well, no promise on the answers though.

Matt Tully
That’s right. The first book in this series is called 10 Questions About Salvation, and I wonder if you could just start off by explaining a little bit of how these books are constructed. How do they actually work? And then what was it about this particular topic that made you want to start here?

Champ Thornton
The bone structure of this series is every book has one major topic, like salvation. The next one we’re doing is on pain and suffering. There’s another one after that on the Bible. There’s one coming on growing in Christ and Christian identity, and hopefully others after that. So there’s one topic, and then each topic has ten questions. Then the author and I and a team work on trying to identify and narrow down to the ten most vital and helpful questions that either a child or a teenager might have or they should have and maybe wouldn’t think of something like that. We want it to be maximally useful. And then those ten questions get answers from God’s word, and those answers come into the form of three short devotional readings. And so it’s one topic through ten questions, and each each question gets three devotionals. So it’s one topic, ten questions, thirty days of devotions. And it’s for kids 8–14 years old, so tweens, preteens, teenagers, families can use this in their devotional time together. And so that’s kind of the way the whole series works.

Matt Tully
Going back to the issue of questions, so obviously, let’s take a topic like salvation, it’s a huge topic. There are so many facets of salvation that we could talk about with our kids. How did you and this team of people narrow the questions down to just ten?

Champ Thornton
I sent out an email with a list of questions, and then the team members contributed other ones, and we voted and weighed. "How do you like this one or that one?" There was back and forth and good collaboration, and then eventually we settled on those ten. And I’ve got to tell you, a lot of those ten are coming out of my own experience. When I was in middle school and even into high school, there were things about salvation that troubled me. Things that I didn’t understand. Things that I wondered, Am I really a Christian? How do I know? Can I lose my salvation? And then over the years, through conversations with other people who are further along in their faith—teachers, pastors—to be able to have conversations and have God’s truth brought into that situation. That question was incredibly helpful to me. And so in many ways, I feel like this book is a way of sharing the things that God has taught me over the years, things that I wish I had known when I was in middle school and even in high school. And so these questions are not just academic questions. Really, they’re questions that flow out of the struggle we have as humans to understand who God is and who we are before him.

Matt Tully
My guess is that any parent who would read through all the questions in this book would probably quickly say, "I’ve asked myself all of those or most of those." And I know me as a parent, I’ve heard my kids ask a number of the questions explicitly that you hit on in the book, so I definitely think you’re right. These are real questions that kids really do have and wrestle with, and it is amazing, as we already said, the depth and the nuance that some of these questions can often take on. They can really penetrate to the heart of some tricky things about our faith at times and things that we all wrestle with even as adults. How did you think about that balance of being accessible to a young reader, being appropriate for a young reader, and also not dumbing things down—being willing to go to some of the tricky areas of our faith when it comes to salvation?

Champ Thornton
By and large, kids are just way smarter than we give them credit. And if we communicate clearly and simply and accurately to them, they’re going to follow, even on those deep topics. And then even sometimes in those deep topics, you just kind of go, "If we went any further, it’d be way more complicated." So sometimes you still punt the ball down the field. But if you want to communicate with a kid, the best way is to understand it well yourself. This is what Deuteronomy 6 is all about, right? So when we get to that famous parenting section of Deuteronomy 6 and it says, "Teach these to your children . . . when you’re walking down the road, and when you’re in the store, and when you’re tucking them in." In any phase of life, be talking about these things. That’s not where the passage starts. Where it starts is, "Hear O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one. And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and your soul, and your mind and your strength." And then it says, "And then you shall teach them diligently to your children." And then it says you should talk about them in all these different phases of everyday life. And so it doesn’t start with, How do we have conversations? It starts with our own hearts before the Lord. It starts with who he is and that we should love him with everything we have. And then we pass these things along. So I feel like as we’re thinking about books and we’re thinking about using books with our kids, we can never get past the fact that it’s not just something we’re communicating. It doesn’t just come from us. These truths always must come through us. We cannot pass along to our children what we’re not first benefiting from ourselves. And so in many ways with this book, I wanted to communicate things that God has taught me. But then we also have to meet our children where they are. We don’t start off by talking about a complicated topic. Maybe we start off talking about Legos or a Disney movie or getting ice cream on a hot day. And then, okay, there’s an analogy here. That topic is kind of like what goes on in this very complex thing related to salvation. And so if we can understand just talking to them in normal ways, by God’s grace, they’re going to be able to follow.

Matt Tully
And that’s one of the things I love about the book is how you do have these very earthy, very accessible connection points to kids’ lives. This doesn’t feel like a book where you’ve got to clear away normal life, and then we’re going to have our intense Bible time. It’s much more accessible than that, much more everyday-life feeling than that. So I want to go back to something you said about parents and how important it’s for us as parents, first and foremost, to be connected to the Lord, to be learning from him. And then it’s what we learn from God that we can then pass on to our kids in these different areas. As you think about conversations you’ve had with parents over the years about what it means to disciple our kids and what it means to answer their questions, what are some of the other stumbling blocks or hindrances that you think are common for us as parents?

Champ Thornton
Well, the nice thing about it is because we believe in Jesus Christ, who’s our Lord and our Savior, we have hope that the best days of our parenting can be useful, and the worst days of our parenting can be useful. And so these stumbling blocks are no problem for Jesus. That’s what he came for. So I think as parents sometimes we think we’ve got to bring our A-game. Personally, I hate long road trips. They always bring out the worst in me. I get grumpy, and my kids know it, and so now we even laugh at the possibility that dad’s got a long trip and so it’s going to bring out the best in him. But the reality is as I’m getting ready for this trip, I’m thinking, Okay, I need to have my head in the right space. I need to put up with inconveniences and annoyances because I want to be the best dad I can be. And that’s great. And then we have a stumbling block of dad got frustrated because of traffic and construction and bad drivers and whatever. That can be just as much a teachable moment. So there are no stumbling blocks like this with Jesus. So on our good days, what do we know? On our good parenting days, we know that it’s Jesus who takes his word and brings it into someone’s heart and does a good work. It’s not that we create this wonderful soil and that we’ve put the seed in just the right place. This is something that Jesus does. And on our bad days, we get to showcase his grace as well. And so, "Hey guys, is everybody listening in the back of the car? Can you put your phones down for a minute? All right. Hey, when I was going through traffic a minute ago (or an hour ago or whatever), I was grumpy and I was not controlling my emotions. Would you forgive me for that? That just doesn’t please Jesus. Thankfully, he died to forgive me for that sin, and I’m going to ask you to forgive me as well." I’m teaching them. Not well. That’s not how I wanted to teach them that day, but hopefully they’re learning about confession, the sufficiency of Jesus’s sacrifice for our sin, maybe humility and owning the frustration and sin that was mine. So I feel like there are no stumbling blocks when it comes to parenting.

18:05 - Is Jesus the Only Way to Salvation?

Matt Tully
Let’s jump into a few of the questions from this first book, 10 Questions About Salvation, that you’ve written. And as I said before, it’s amazing how deep some of these questions go, and yet they’re totally the kinds of questions that kids are going to ask. And I do love how there’s a progression to the questions. Where you start with question one, they build on each other and by the end you’re getting into some maybe deeper water, but it nevertheless is sort of where the questions naturally go. So the first one I want to look at is question number two: Is Jesus the only way to salvation? And that’s certainly a topic and question that probably a lot of believers would struggle to answer if they were asked by a non-Christian friend. We know the right answer. The right answer is yes, but to then explain that in a way that makes sense and that feels loving can be a little bit more tricky. And so how did you go about trying to answer that question for a young kid?

Champ Thornton
I think whenever we go to apologetics-type questions, there’s always a bunch of data, a bunch of information, whether it’s archeology or manuscript evidence, or scientific data and theories and things we can bring to the table. All the big books on apologetics give us all the reasons why we should believe. Those are great. I love those books. And yet I think the best place to go—the simplest place to go and maybe the first place to go—is always to go to who Jesus is. And so if we’re looking at the question, Is he the only way to salvation? Let’s first of all just consider who he is. And so then I just go straight to what C. S. Lewis talked about in Mere Christianity where he presented a very simple argument. And there are complex arguments against what he said, but on a very straightforward level, it works. And that is Jesus claimed extraordinary things about himself. And so then what do you do with that? "Son, your sins are forgiven." That’s extraordinary. "I and the Father are one." That’s extraordinary. So what do we make of that? So as C. S. Lewis said, he’s either a liar—being deceitful and just making this stuff up out of thin air. What about that? Is he lying? And if you look at the rest of his life, does it give evidence that he’s a liar? And you have all this data that says no, he’s not lying. You see his integrity. You see how people are not making accusations against him to have any kind of staying power at all. And then you go, okay, well if he’s not lying, well maybe he’s just off his rocker. People say lots of crazy things. And then you ask, Is he mentally unstable? And you look at the amount of the Old Testament he had memorized, you look at the way he had logical questions for his enemies, and you look at like all these things in his life and you see he’s not crazy. He’s genius. Incredibly sane. If he’s not lying, and if he’s not a lunatic, and he’s not some legend that his disciples made up, then what we’re left with is he is who he says he is. He’s Lord. And so I feel like that is some of the most stable ground to start on when we’re talking about is Jesus the only way to salvation. We just consider honestly the data of the Gospels. How do you put all this together in a way that takes into account all the pieces? And when you do that, you realize he’s every bit of who he said he is.

Matt Tully
In each of these devotions, as you answer all of these questions, you obviously only have so much space. How long was each devotion roughly?

Champ Thornton
Four hundred something words.

Matt Tully
You don’t have a ton of time to go into every little nook and cranny of a question that someone might ask, but you’re giving enough to help a kid start to formulate an answer, start to have a little sense for what the answer would be. How did you know when to cut it off, how to boil it down to just these 400 words that you had versus getting sucked into these little rabbit trails that are all over the place when it comes to these questions?

Champ Thornton
Well, it’s kind of interesting. When you’re teaching kids, they ask great questions and they make you bring your A-game, because they’re not going to put up with just whatever you happen to throw at them.

Matt Tully
It’s amazing. I’ve realized this. Sometimes adults, and maybe it’s just the relational sensibilities that can grow in maturity, but with adults it’s often easier to sort of get by and flub your way through an answer that has maybe some platitudes or some nice phrases. But kids often won’t let you get away with that. They will dial in on, "Well, that doesn’t make sense," or "That’s circular." They’ll call you on it.

Champ Thornton
That’s so true. They keep you honest. They’re also a lot of fun. In God’s providence, I have been teaching little kids in junior church or a Sunday school context since I was in high school. In high school some of that was probably because I just wanted to get out of the main service of the church, if I remember right. When I was wrapping up seminary, my pastor and I were at some young adult event, and he said, "I want to talk to you." I was like, "Oh, okay." He’s like, "I want to ask you about coming and being a part of a ministry." And I’m thinking, This is great. I just finished up second-year Hebrew. This is great! I get to be involved in church ministry. And he says, "We need someone to teach our fourth through sixth grade Sunday school class. Would you be willing to do that?" Which is not what I was expecting him to ask me. And so I said, "Okay, yeah. I can do that." And so for the next two and a half years, I taught fourth through sixth grade boys and girls basically every Sunday. And it was one of the best experiences of my life. It was so great spending that time with them, understanding where they’re coming from, hearing their questions and where their learning levels are. And we had a blast studying God’s word together. So I think part of knowing where to pitch this book is just I’ve been talking to kids for a long time.

23:50 - If God Is Loving and Powerful, Why Doesn’t He Just Save Everyone?

Matt Tully
Let’s look at question number eight: If God is loving and powerful, why doesn’t he just save everyone? That’s a question that I know my kids have asked me directly. I’ve had that question. How do you go about starting to formulate an answer for that?

Champ Thornton
There are two things I want to say here on that, Matt. One of them is if I asked you how does Google work (this is exactly what I explain in the book), you might say that you pull up the app or the webpage and you type in what you want and you hit enter, and that’s how it works. No, no, no, no. I want to know how it works with coding.

Matt Tully
Under the hood

Champ Thornton
Under the hood. And that’s a whole different story. And so a lot of things in the Bible are written from a user perspective. Or, if you will, like in a car, it’s behind the wheel. It’s what we experience. It’s looking through the windshield of life, and our hands are on the steering wheel. There are places in God’s word where he does pop the hood and say, "See this engine? Look how complex that is." And then he shuts the hood again. And so there are certain passages that we would say, if we’re being real technical, are very phenomenological. This is how we observe it. And then we pop the hood and there’s a whole other level of coding and complexity in the engine. And so the way I try to answer the question in the book is more on that phenomenological level, like behind the steering wheel as a user, rather than trying to take kids through the ins and outs and complexities of what’s under the hood. So having said that, I think what the Bible will say—and it says a lot of things, and there are some pop the hood moments, and a little bit of that is in the book too—but behind the wheel we often get worked up about the question, Why would God send anyone to hell? And when we go to the Bible, the thing that blows the angels’ minds that they can’t figure out and that they long to look into is why would God send sinners to heaven? Saved sinners. It’s not an an intellectual problem that we have. We just forget what is really true and real in our experience behind the wheel. That is the actual issue that should cause us to be surprised.

26:03 - Can I Ever Lose My Salvation?

Matt Tully
That’s where these things do start to connect to so many other big picture worldview things, other core Christian doctrines that we kind of have to start putting the pieces in place to help kids have a framework for understanding some of these questions. Let’s look at one last question, question number ten, from the book: Can I ever lose my salvation? And I think this falls into the category of some of these "what if" questions that kids will start to wonder about as they get older. And this one is, What if I do something really, really bad? Is God going to stop loving me? What if I stop believing in him? Will I lose my salvation? So how do you think about addressing a question like this for kids, especially when this is a kind of question that can have an emotionally distressing part of it for the kid. It’s not just intellectual. Maybe the kid’s feeling anxious or worried about something happening.

Champ Thornton
That’s a great question, and there are lots of helpful ways to answer it. There’s one answer. One part of it—and I talk about this in the book, along with other truths from God’s word—is when we go to what Peter wrote, he says that we are protected by faith in the power of God. God’s power protects us. And so we see what is protecting us and what’s guarding our salvation is God’s power. And then it says "by faith." So is it God’s power that protects us, or is it our believing that protects us? Which keeps us saved, God’s power or our faith? And the answer is yes. But the answer isn’t that simple because it’s not a matter of that my faith is on par with God’s power. I’m just relying on what he is doing. And so I love the illustration that Richard Sibbes, the Puritan preacher, said. I’m going to mangle this quote, but he says, "This is what we say of the mother and the child. The mother and the child both hold, but the safety and security of the child is in that the mother holds him." I don’t use that quote, but I use that analogy of here’s a parent holding a baby. The baby’s grabbing the mom, but the reason the baby doesn’t fall to the ground is because of the strong arms of the mother. And so what I try to say in the book is, okay, yes, you need to hold onto Jesus. Yes, of course, the Bible says we must believe. So trust. Don’t worry whether you’ve lost your salvation. Just hold onto Jesus. Don’t focus on your baby arms. Did you believe enough? Is it strong faith? Did you let go for a minute? Don’t worry about your baby arms. Jesus holds you, so hold onto him. He’s got you.

28:46 - Using the 10 Questions Series in a Ministry Context

Matt Tully
And we all know as parents with kids that sometimes these simple little analogies, these little metaphors that kids can grab a hold of can be so helpful as they think about these things. I’ve seen my kids latch onto throw away little analogies that I had that were useful in the moment, and they’re meditating on those things. Sometimes for weeks or even months they’ll bring that back up and I’ll realize, wow, that was really helpful for you. So I love that this book has some of those as well. One question for church leaders, pastors, or children’s ministry workers, how might they use this series in a ministry context?

Champ Thornton
It’s a great question. When I wrote this book, I thought the main way it might be used is here’s a nine-year-old, an eight-year-old, a fourteen-year-old, or whatever, and they’re having their Bible time several days a week before school. And this would be something that they could have a short time in the word. Every day has got a passage of Scripture along with devotional thoughts. But what I’m hearing more and more as the book is now out there and it’s being used is that families are using this in their time in the word together. Maybe in the morning before breakfast or in the evening after dinner. And churches can do the same thing. This could be something that a youth pastor or a children’s director could give out to families in the church, and they could use it together as families during the week. Or it’s something that the teens or the preteens could use during the week, and then the youth director, or whoever’s leading that discussion, could talk about it on Sunday. What did you learn? Let’s talk about this topic, this question for this week. So I don’t know exactly how all the churches might use it, but I think there are ways that families could use it and churches can use it, as well as just kids.

Matt Tully
That’s what’s so nice is that, as you said, it’s broken up into these thirty small devotional tidbits, and so they are very flexible. They could be read in just a few minutes and used in a variety of contexts. And you can pick and choose too. You can jump around to different questions if there’s more that would be relevant for a certain context than others.

Champ Thornton
And the discussion question is there to hopefully continue the conversation after the reading is done. Each day has one of those.

Matt Tully
Highlight again for us what are some of the other topics that you’re hoping to address as this series unfolds?

Champ Thornton
We are hoping to come out with ten questions about pain and suffering. How do we deal with the problem of evil in the world, but not on a philosophical level as much as just sort of, again, behind the wheel. Let’s say there’s a death in the family, or there’s a maybe emotional struggle that’s going on, or a friend moves away, or some other disappointments in life, how do we process this from a biblical perspective? And then also ten questions about the Bible. What is the Bible? How does it work? Why should I believe it? And other ways of thinking and questions about God’s word. And then growing in Christ and our Christian identity in him.

Matt Tully
Champ, thank you so much for helping us think through this important calling as parents and as people who love children, helping them to answer these questions they have about their faith, about Christianity. And this resource is such a valuable tool for us as we seek to do that well. I wonder if you could help us close by just saying a brief prayer today for parents or other caregivers who might be listening as we think about navigating these important questions with our kids.

Champ Thornton
Thanks, Matt. It’s been great to be with you. I’m glad to pray for all of us. Our gracious Father, we come to you through Jesus Christ, and we ask that you would be very near to parents today who are feeling the burden of their parenting. They feel the responsibility to care for the children that you’ve entrusted to them. Lord, we pray that you would give them strength in their weakness, that you would give them grace in their failings. We pray that you would give them patience and a sense of the long view of the discipleship and growth of their children. Give them patience. We pray, Lord, that you would continue to grow their knowledge of you and their rest in you, as they are spending time in your word, even if it’s for a short amount of time. Lord, we just pray that each day you would nourish their soul and prepare them for the challenges ahead of them that day. And we ask all this in Christ’s name. Amen.

Matt Tully
Amen.

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