You cannot force anyone to be a Christian.
This truth goes against the grain of our desires, but it’s foundational for thinking and acting as a Christian. We are all controllers by nature, after all. We want to control things, in the simplest terms. Applied to unbelief and sin, we want in our own strength to convert our children, convert our neighbor, and “convert” our society. But God gives his blessing to none of this. As Psalm 3:8 confesses, salvation belongs to the Lord. (People, furthermore, get saved through justifying faith; communities and nations do not.)
Think about fatherhood and motherhood in this category. As Christians, we are rightly burdened for our children to know Christ as their Lord and Savior. It’s good to want our kids to cross the line of faith—very good. But we are not in control of our kids. We cannot pressure them into redemption; we cannot yell at them such that they snap into a state of faith; we cannot manipulate them into conversion.
All these things we might be tempted to do (and we are, necessitating repentance). But none of these things work. Of course, you can pressure people into external conformity. You can bring your force of will to bear on others, and some of them may in fact line up where you want them to stand. But at no point are you actually saving another person’s soul. In truth, you may be working against the trajectory of redemption.
What do I mean? Well, for salvation to occur, God has to work in a person’s heart. The Spirit has to quicken them (John 3:1-17). That means that God must regenerate the individual, opening their eyes to the glory of Christ’s atonement and resurrection. We cannot do this. We cannot help the process along, either. We cannot half-save our kids, nor can we half-redeem them. It is all God working in them to make them trust Christ, or it is nothing: it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure (Philippians 2:13).
Fathers and mothers have the responsibility to raise their kids in the context of discipleship, yes. We surely seek to point our kids to the wonder and gladness of the biblical worldview. We strive to raise them according to holy standards, training them to walk the good paths. Proverbs 22:6 is a cornerstone verse for such efforts: Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.
This verse helps set the course for our fatherhood and motherhood. It is foundational. By way of application, it entails that we cannot fail to give our kids boundaries and prohibitions and commands. Further, we teach our children to obey us as God-constituted authorities underneath the authority of God himself. In terms of the cause-and-effect system of the universe, our kids also learn that there are benefits for obedience, and there are consequences (serious ones) for disobedience.
But there is a subtle yet explosive distinction at play here. We are not training our kids to obey so that they “pray a prayer” and then never embarrass us. We are training our kids to obey so that they know God’s will and see the joy that comes from following it. Our motive here is not to keep our kids from shaming us by wild living; our motive here is to glorify God by teaching and modeling godly faith.
All such training comes out of warmth, not coldness. Here I mean that all our day-to-day investment in our children is driven by love, not severity. Severity is just about the best way to turn children into voluntary heathens. Severity does not draw children to earthly authorities; severity repels them. Severity in the home in particular communicates a disastrously wrong theology of God. It says that God is all truth and all justice, with no love and no grace.
Our God is a God of perfect justice (Isaiah 30:18). Yet this same God delights to love sinners, and in fact has loved sinners before the foundation of the earth (Ephesians 1:4-6). This love is not thrown off by our sin in real-time; God knew our sin before anything existed, and yet chose to love us nonetheless. We can say this even stronger: God delights to magnify his love in light of our real failings. Our sins are not good in any form, but God uses them to show just how great his forgiving love truly is.
This means that God does not love those who help themselves. God loves those who cannot help themselves. God loves people who regularly turn from both the help and love God freely gives. True Christianity, then, is not an exercise in performative righteousness. True Christianity yields a generally obedient disciple, yes, but it is grounded in love that necessarily forgives that disciple on a regular basis.
To put this another way, the love of God is not based in our loveliness. The love of God is based in the desire of God to create a people for his own possession (1 Peter 2:9). In all our discipleship of our children, this is ultimately what we point them to: redeeming love. But we fathers and mothers don’t just talk about it; we seek to model the Christian faith as an existence saturated with joy, gladness, hope, steadiness, forgiveness, kindness, truthfulness, and persevering faith.
This has challenging—and humbling—implications for fathers and mothers. We don’t want to hide every trace of our imperfection from our kids; we actually want our kids to see us repent of our sins. We don’t want to pretend that we have it all figured out and don’t have to walk by faith; we actually want our kids to see us depending on God in hard seasons. We don’t want to command joy in our kids from a hypocritical place; we actually want our kids to see genuine joy in God in the way we laugh, love, have fun, and enjoy the freedom for which God set us free (Galatians 5:1).
In this way of living, we show above all that we are not in control. We show that we know that we cannot force our children to convert. Beyond this, we avoid the error of acting as if we can make our communities Christian, or compel a given nation to bend the knee to Christ. We can seek to build a good public order, yes; we can and must be salt and light (Matthew 5:13-16). But our witness honors the God-given conscience, does not in any way force people into religious action, and like the apostles in the book of Acts, seeks to win people through preaching, persuading, and appealing to the individual.
True Christianity, in sum, rejects strong-arming coercion in both discipleship and public engagement. We seek to teach kids obedience and to promote justice in a society, absolutely. But we always seek such ends under the banner of our grand Christ-given mission, that which is paramount for the church. We are not here, ultimately, to enforce the law or win control of nations; that may providentially happen or it may not, but our greatest charge, ultimately, is to make disciples (Matthew 28:16-20).
The tools God has given us for this greatest of tasks are not worldly, ordered to coercion and conformity. The tools God has given us are heavenly, dealing with the heart and the soul. In faith, we proclaim Christ; we pray much; we live in humility; we seek to bear the Spirit’s fruit; we speak the truth in love; we pray still more; we try to persuade others with sound arguments and godly zeal and joyful compassion; we model Christian faith imperfectly but authentically; we pray yet again. All this is trust, trust expressed in action.
As I am at pains to say, you and I can’t control anyone. Nor should we try. But here is some great news: God is sovereign. Accordingly, God alone is in control. God alone saves. God alone transforms. This is a long-term work for many of us, but take heart: God takes we who are tight-fisted, high-twitch controllers, striving to bend the cosmos (or even just one person) to our will, and turns us into trusters.
There is something way better, it turns out, than coercion: it’s freedom, the freedom of Christ.