Orders will be processed after the Christmas Holiday.

Podcast: Parents, Your Kids Will Love What You Love—So Love the Bible (William Osborne)

June 19, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Helping Our Kids Love the Bible

In today’s episode, Rusty Osborne explains how he has sought to model a genuine love for God in front of his kids, shares stories of hard moments he’s faced as a parent, and offers advice on how to answer your kids when they say things like “the Bible is boring.”

God, You Are

God, You Are

William R. Osborne

In this book, William R. Osborne uses a clear and warm style to provide a distinct connection between the gospel and God’s goodness, holiness, and mercy as seen in the “You Are” statements found in the Psalms.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:55 - The Role of a Parent

Matt Tully
Rusty, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Rusty Osborne
Yeah, Matt, it’s great to be here. I appreciate you taking the time and getting a chance to talk about some important things.

Matt Tully
As Christian parents—you’re a parent, and I’m a parent—we all want to help our kids come to a saving faith in Christ. We want to help them grow in their love for God, and we want to help them grow in their understanding of God’s word. And yet I think sometimes as parents, especially with young kids but I’m sure this continues as the kids get older, too, we might not always know what that’s going to look like and what that should look like. This can be true especially as our kids are growing and changing all the time and our family lives are getting more full and more busy and maybe even chaotic sometimes. It just seems like sometimes we’re at a loss as parents for how do I actually serve my kids in helping them to understand God’s truth and come to love God for who he is? To start us off, have you ever felt that way as a parent? Is that an experience that you can resonate with?

Rusty Osborne
Absolutely. I think anyone who is raising children in the 21st century has felt the pressure of time and busyness weigh down on your family. As kids get older, they tend to get busier. We currently have four children: sixteen, fifteen, twelve, and eight. And so we’ve kind of walked through a lot. We’re not out of the parenting process yet. We’re still kind of in the throes of it right now.

Matt Tully
In the middle of it.

Rusty Osborne
But with our sixteen-year-old, we remember what it was like to have one child, and looking back on that, things seemed so slow and so peaceful. As our girls have gotten older and have gotten involved in high school events and extracurriculars and sports, and then the boys come along and they have their things, it’s very easy to go from Monday to Friday in today’s family without seeing your children, without engaging with them in any meaningful way, and certainly without talking to them about the importance of the Bible or even thinking about how the Bible impacts their day-to-day life. So, we have definitely felt that, we have wrestled with that, and continue to do so. So, I’m happy to talk about this. It is a topic that’s near and dear to me as a Christian parent, but certainly my comments don’t come from a place of having arrived or figured it all out. We are still evaluating week by week saying, That seemed to work. That was a failure. We’re trying new things as we go along.

Matt Tully
It’s kind of sobering, to be honest, to hear you talk about how busy your kids’ lives get as they get older and into those teen years. I’m a parent of young kids—younger than yours—and sometimes for us it can feel like our whole lives revolve around our kids, conversations with our kids, and helping them get their breakfast and get dressed and get out the door. It can be easy to take for granted all that face-to-face time that we have with them where we are talking to them about all kinds of things. Is that something that you’ve noticed? Is there a sense that you wish you could go back to those earlier years when you had more of their attention?

Rusty Osborne
I think that as I reflect on how I parented my oldest child versus how we’re engaging with our youngest child, there are some significant differences. But I told somebody one time that if I parented my first child the way that I now think about my fourth child, I probably would’ve just been a bad parent, because there’s a process that you go through as a parent. You’re learning how to engage kids, learning how they develop in different ways, and you yourself are developing through that process. And so I look back at the first years that we had kids and I just remember, as I reflect, I feel like I was in a very neurotic space, if that makes any sense. I was very super concerned about messing things up. That was in a way that I think is absolutely natural and in a way that follows what good parents do. Good parents love their kids. They want to do everything right. They don’t want to mess them up. So I think that’s a natural developmental space for young parents to have a little bit of that anxiety built around the thought of I don’t want to mess this kid up. I’ve got this huge role to play. All of that’s true. But as time goes on and you see that kid grow and you see those developmental changes happen, you start to see perhaps I had less and less to do with those developmental changes, and you start to get a little bit better idea of what your actual role is in this relationship in a way that now, four kids later, I feel like we’re much calmer as parents. I don’t feel like that’s attributed to laxity. I don’t think we’ve become lazy. I think we’ve just become more aware of when we need to engage and when we don’t need to engage, and just having different perspectives as those days go on. But there’s a little bit of a mourning process as you see your kids get older. My second daughter is fifteen, and thirteen through fifteen I’ve been a little sad at times. I’m like My buddy’s gone! We’re off to high school and we’re doing volleyball and basketball. She loves sports, and I love that she loves it, but it means I get less time with her, and there’s part of me that’s sad about that. But then also trying to think how do I push into this new stage of life and be a meaningful father? I don’t need to do the same things that I did when she was six. That’s not what she needs. So how do I transition with her into these years in helping her love God, love God’s word, holding her accountable in important ways, but walking with her through the good times and the bad times, and helping both of us grow as she gets older? A lot of those different perspectives I think develop over time as you see your kids grow and you have to think about what role do I have? Do I miss those days? Yes, but you love what they become in the process as well.

Matt Tully
You mentioned the word “role” a couple times and the challenge that we can feel as parents in discerning what our role should be in our kids’ lives and in their development on all kinds of fronts. I want to ask that question in regards to when it comes to helping them develop a love for the Bible. Big picture speaking, how do you view our role as parents when it comes to teaching them to love God’s word and to then actually want to develop habits related to God’s word?

Rusty Osborne
The one thing that has been true in our family, with regard to everything, is that our kids, by and large, love what my wife and I love. I grew up in North Carolina. I’m a Duke basketball fan. My kids love Duke basketball. We did not go through a discipleship program in how to teach them to love Duke basketball. I have been a fly fisherman my whole life. All four of my kids fly fish. I love working with and training pointing dogs. My boys are walking right beside me in the field, and they love the dogs as much as I do. There are so many things about our family that my kids love, and we never made them do it. It was never a regimented exercise, but they went, Mom and dad love this, and I want to know why they love it, and I want to explore this more fully, and I want to get to the bottom of this. But all that to say is that I think there’s an element of that that ties into how we introduce them to the Bible and introduce them to the Lord. First and foremost, our role as parents, I think, is to love God and to love God’s word. Eugene Peterson says, in talking about teenagers, he says they’re hypocrite alarms. They can smell a hypocrite a mile away, and the alarm goes off. And so there’s a part of parenting that just ups the ante on us as Christians that says Are you in love with the Lord? Do you love Scripture? That’s the big part. And I think that when I think about the parents that I witness and the friends and the relationships I have where I see parents who have parented well—not perfectly, but parented well—I think these are people who love the Lord deeply, and they love his word. And that, I think, is the first place that we begin as parents is we have to say, This starts with me. What are the deep desires of my heart? My kids are going to see that and they’re going to love those things. But I think as parents, we have to always begin to say, Are we leading by loving, or are we leading by instructing? It’s not that they’re either/or, but both have to be present, I think, for our kids to genuinely follow us in a real encounter with the living God.

Matt Tully
When it comes to this topic of discipling our kids and helping them read the Bible and all of this, so often our mind does go to I need the didactic program. I need the materials, the training resources, the books. All of these can be so helpful and good, but we think in terms of teaching them rather than modeling it. Would you say it’s fair to say that what you’re getting at is that maybe a love for the Bible is more often caught than it’s taught? Is that a way to think about this?

Rusty Osborne
Yeah, I think so. I am a college professor by trade, so I think about pedagogy, I think about learning strategies, and I think about teaching strategies a lot. Over the last few years I’ve been highly influenced by works like James K. A. Smith and others’ thinking about how we learn and how we process and how we’re formed spiritually and intellectually. And that’s impacted the way that I parent. I think about things like liturgy and structure, not just what’s the content that I’m giving my kids, but what are the inherent rhythms and liturgies of our home that are also communicating values to my children? What are the things that we repeat over and over again, and what is that telling them? I think that moves us more toward the language of caught, not taught. Now, again, I don’t think it’s an either/or. In thinking about the program and the method, the 20th century was the century of method. Everyone wanted the strategy and method: Give me the program. But programs exercised without wisdom can do just as much damage as not even having a program. When you develop a strategy or a program and you’re not being observant as to Is it working? Does it need to be tweaked? When do we stop? When do we start?—a program doesn’t substitute wisdom. I think sometimes that can happen if we go, Well, if I just get the right strategy from the right person, then I can put this parenting thing on autopilot, and my kid’s going to turn out great. And that’s just not how human beings work. Developing a human being is a very inefficient process. We’re not making widgets when we are raising kids; we’re engaging with complex image bearers with all kinds of capacities, with different skills, different abilities, different responses; and thank the Lord that God has equipped us with the ability to react and observe and respond to those things. So, I think a lot of parenting for me has moved away from trying to find just the right tool or the right method or the right strategy, but to start saying How do I engage in this moment? How do we respond in this situation? How do we steer toward wisdom and righteousness in this situation?*

Matt Tully
You’ve painted a big picture about the heart disposition of us as parents and how that is going to then influence how we lead our children to love God’s word as well. Maybe answer the opposite side of that question: What should we not do in an effort to try to teach our kids to love the Bible?

Rusty Osborne
That’s a great question, and I’m still learning answers to this question. I think some things that we have to be careful about are, like I said, I think we need to first off be careful about comparing our parental strategy and game plan to the people around us. Hopefully, if you’re a Christian then you’re living in Christian community and there are other parents doing things. I think there’s a real temptation for young parents to look around and try to go, Okay, well they’re doing this and they’re doing this and they’re doing this . . . and to begin to evaluate whether my parenting is doing the right thing or the wrong thing based on what I see from other people. I think that can be very problematic and very discouraging and unhelpful. Comparison is always going to be a problem, but also comparison can lead you to start being unkind to your own children, because it encourages you to stop seeing your child as a unique individual, as someone who’s going to have different ways of learning, different modes of responding, and different experiences that, frankly, other children may not have. We’ve seen that with our four kids. We only have four children, but within those four children we have a very broad range of learning ability, of reading ability, of emotional responses. I think we’ve had to adjust as parents to go, Okay, what was effective in helping our oldest child grow in understanding the knowledge of the Bible is highly ineffective in helping our third child grow in understanding and knowing God through the Bible. So, I think the first thing we have to be careful of is to not short circuit parenting by just looking around and comparing to what everybody else is doing. I think another thing we need to be careful about doing with the Bible is I think we need to be careful how we incorporate the Bible into discipline scenarios. I know that there are a lot of people who would encourage that if a child does something wrong, then we sit them down and then we point them to the the Bible verse where it explains what they’ve done wrong and walk them through that. And I think there certainly can be a place for that, but I think we also need to be really careful not to create this very negative association with a young child who thinks, Every time I get in trouble, I get sat down, then here comes the Bible. The end. It doesn’t take long for a young mind and heart to begin to associate this book with a heavy-handed punishment. And I’m not saying that we don’t talk about it, but maybe we just try to evaluate Am I allowing distance between addressing a behavior or a problem, and then talking about it from a biblical framework? Maybe it’s a five year old who has colored on the wall or something. It’s addressing the behavior, and then maybe a few hours later after the tears have been shed, after the hard work of parenting has been done, maybe it’s coming back and talking about Is that the way that God wants us to live? When we were doing that, do you think that’s the desire? Maybe allowing some distance between that, because it is easy for kids to begin to make that association, to start to see God as the one who’s the justification for my punishments in a way that perhaps we just need to be careful about how we incorporate the Bible into discipline. Not that judgment is not a reality, but I also would hate to think that I’ve taught my children to see the Bible and go Oh, that’s the book that comes with the gavel. That’s the book that comes with the punishment. I would say No, this is the book that comes with the remedy. This is the book that comes with the solution and the healing. And so trying to think about how to engage in those ways. And likewise, I think also being careful with how we force the Bible into the lives of our children. I think there are places where we want to encourage accountability. We can build structure into a kid’s life, but I think this is where we have to, as parents, start to read Am I beginning to push so hard that I’m starting to see a negative response to the Bible and no longer a positive one? And that can come with saying Well, we have these Bible verses and we’re going to memorize them and if you don’t get it done, then you’re not going to summer camp. Or If you don’t get these Bible verses memorized, no basketball practice. I think that can start to backfire in cultivating a love for the Bible. At the end of the day, we want our children to love God’s word. We don’t want them to read a Bible verse and make a face like they were just given a cup full of medicine. We want them to cherish it because the day is quickly coming when you’re not be there to spoonfeed for them what’s good for them. As one who is already looking at colleges for my oldest, it’s mind blowing. I’m going In a year and a half, she’s going to read her Bible because she wants to, not because of me. How, oh God, can I help cultivate that desire that when she’s nineteen and life’s falling apart in her first semester of college, she goes, ’I want to turn to my Bible’ instead of a podcast, instead of a friend, instead of all of these other voices in the culture that will tell her what to do? How can I encourage her to say, ’This is a word that’s good for you’—so that she spends the rest of her life pursuing it?

20:03 - What If My Kid Says That the Bible Is Boring?

Matt Tully
That’s so good and so helpful. I’m just struck by how, as we’ve said before, there’s not a program here. There’s not a “five tips to success” kind of dynamic to this. This is years of cultivating a way of thinking, a way of living—hopefully primarily through seeing it in us as parents that has this effect. I wonder if now you could respond to a few more specific kinds of statements that we would hear from our kids. I kind of view this as a bunch of what if statements that parents might sometimes worry about. They’re waiting for their kid to come back to them with something like this related to the Bible, and they just feel like I don’t know how I would respond to these things. The first one would be What if my kid says that the Bible is boring? How would you counsel parents, briefly, to respond to that?

Rusty Osborne
That’s a great point, and it’s certainly something I have heard in my life as a dad. I get that about church. It’s not uncommon for us to have a conversation about how church is just boring. One of the things that we have tried to encourage with our kids—first off, let me make a statement about that word “boring.” I think that in many ways, the missing ingredient of childhood today is boredom. We frequently tell our kids, if they say they’re bored, we’ll say That’s completely fine. Your life—

Matt Tully
I’m sure they love to hear that!

Rusty Osborne
Your life is going to be just fine. You have a good mind. You have lots of resources in this house. Go not be bored. You’re going to be just fine. Boredom leads to creativity. Figure it out. and so they’ve heard us multiple times say Boredom’s not that big of a deal. And so when they come to me and they go, Oh, reading the Bible’s boring or church is boring, I’ll come back to them and say, Well, that’s okay. There are a lot of important things that we do in life that we don’t do for the sake of entertainment. We are in this community and we’re in this room gathered with these people because something very important is happening. It’s okay that you don’t register the importance of that now. That’s perfectly fine, and if you’re a little bored, I’m okay with that and you’re going to be okay with that. And I think what we try to do is point them to the transcendent importance of what they’re doing in that moment. That helps them begin to cultivate a spirit that goes I’m not a Christian because it’s meeting my immediate need right now. I’m building a sense of the Christian faith that flows out of ideas that are more like loyalty and allegiance and faithfulness than immediate satisfaction. I don’t just read my Bible because it makes me feel better. I read my Bible because it’s good for me, and that’s the way that I respond to the God of the universe who has spoken. And so I think in those moments, and again, that’s not a heavy-handed discussion. We’re just trying to gently guide them into saying, Hey, it’s okay if you’re bored. I think we need to try to create a positive environment around the Bible. If a kid comes to me in a family worship context or a Bible-reading context like that in my house, I’m going Okay, am I maybe pushing too hard? Am I asking them to perhaps do more than they’re ready to do? So if I tell my eight year old that over summer vacation you can’t go play outside until you’ve read your Bible for twenty minutes, and he comes in and goes It’s so boring! I hate that! Part of me might step back and go Okay. Am I pushing that too hard? Do I need to reevaluate? How can I navigate that? So I think depending on the context we can think about how we might want to adjust or shepherd them through that feeling. But at the end of the day, it’s completely fine if they’re bored, and it’s completely fine if they don’t see the importance of what’s going on, as long as they know that we know why it’s important and what’s going on.

24:10 - What If My Kid Says That the Bible Is Confusing?

Matt Tully
Here’s another what if statement that we might receive: What if my kid says the Bible is confusing?

Rusty Osborne
Well, I think as a parent I would say You’re right. At times it is difficult. I don’t think there’s anything to hide as a parent. We don’t have to go to our kids assuming that we have all of the answers, and I think they’ll see through us pretty quickly if we try to have all of the answers. I would immediately follow up and go, Well, help me understand: What are you talking about? What part are you struggling with? I would try to steer that from just an overarching kind of emotional dismissal. To say Help me understand. What are you talking about? Is there a passage that you read that you were struggling with? What do you mean? And then that way you begin having a conversation about a specific issue that you might be able to address. But a kid who just goes The Bible’s confusing is just emotionally saying I don’t know what to do. I don’t like this. It’s not fun. So as a parent, I’m asking how do we push through that to identify a real problem? I remember one conversation with my youngest. One time I was tucking him in, he was pretty young at the time, and he said I want my brother to sleep in the room with me. I don’t want to be alone! And classic pastor-Bible professor that I am, I’m like Buddy, you’re never alone. You’re never alone. God is always with you. And then just on the mark he just goes But I want someone with a body! I need somebody with a body. And in this kind of moment of just truth-telling and honesty of a kid, he’s like Yeah, God’s here, but I want a body! I want a person that I can see! In that moment of honesty, I walked over to him, I gave him a hug, and I said I’ve got a body. Let’s talk about that. What does it mean that God has a body? The Bible tells us that God actually took on a body. And so in that moment of him being really frustrated that God was not in the room with him and he couldn’t see him, we were able to think about what does it mean that God came and dwelled among us and took on a body that we might know who he is more fully? So I think in those moments where kids are confused or frustrated, start to ask specific questions: What is it that you’re talking about? Is there a specific issue here that we can get at?

26:50 - What If My Kid Says That the Bible Seems Unbelievable?

Matt Tully
Here’s one more what if statement that maybe is more relevant for slightly older kids who are thinking on a deeper level about God’s word and what it says. That’s the question What if my kid says that the Bible seems unbelievable? They’re reading through it themselves (maybe for the first time) or they’re reading some of the miracles or they’re reading about Christ’s resurrection, and they’re kind of wondering how do I know this actually happened? How would you respond to something like that?

Rusty Osborne
That’s a great question, and I think it’s a great question to ask in this venue because I think that’s a question that’s every Christian parent’s nightmare—the moment that this cloud breaks over your head and you go, Oh my gosh! What if my kid isn’t a Christian? What I think immediately follows is this theological panic. There’s this real disorientation, and I think in that disorientation there’s a lot of temptation for us to react in rash ways. So, all of a sudden I’ve never thought that my kid couldn’t be a believer, and they’re asking questions about the faith, so we give a We don’t ask that question kind of response. Like We’re not going there. We shut it down. I think there’s a lot of temptation to go there out of this fear that goes Oh my gosh! What if my kid doesn’t believe like I’ve wanted them to and I’ve prayed for them to and like I do? I think the best response to that is to remember your own theology as a parent and to go I did not make this kid. I am not going to save this kid. This kid is a creation by God, who is going to be saved by God, and I have a role to shepherd and to steer and to instruct, but I can’t make them love the Lord and believe in the resurrection and believe in the virgin birth. I cannot produce that in my child. And I think once we remind ourselves what we already believe, it helps us respond in a much more loving, peaceful way to that person and say The Bible does call us to faith. It calls us to receive by faith things that we cannot explain. I have embraced those. Your mother has embraced those. This is part of what we believe life is centered around. I’ve told my children I can’t make you believe the things that I believe. That’s not God’s design for me as a father. My role as a father is not to force you to believe things and force you to love things. My role is to point you toward them, to steer you toward them, to shepherd you toward them, to show you the glories of the gospel. But you have to believe and receive this message of hope that comes in Scripture. And as a parent, I think that interaction, obviously, should drive us to prayer. It should be a wake up call. We immediately feel the limitations of what it means to be a parent—I can’t save my own kid. Oh God, have mercy! But also, I would say take a step back and think about your own spiritual journey. I think as a parent we’re so often tempted to hold our kids to a higher spiritual standard than we held for ourselves as we were being sanctified and growing in the gospel. I guarantee every person listening to this has had a moment where you have wrestled with the reality of God, with life after death, with is the gospel real? That is the stuff of Christianity. That’s the stuff of being an apostle, looking at Jesus with your own eyes. And so let’s be careful not to apply a spiritual pressure to our children that we have not even held ourselves to, and let them wrestle—that’s an important part of the Christian life—and know that our job as a parent is to walk with them through the wrestling and not try to give them answers to have them go around it or to sidestep it, but to look at them and go Sometimes this is tough. I will pray for you. Can I pray for you right now? Are there other things I can pray for you about? As your kids get older, you really do have to take more of a pastoral role that looks at that teenage daughter or that teenage son and goes I’m not here to fix you. I’m here to love you, I’m here to pray for you, and I’m here to walk with you through the hard things that life is going to bring. But I’m also here to point you to the hope that is in the gospel. And just trying to be proactive and pushing into that relationship when there’s a lot of life stage issues that are wanting the door shut, wanting the parent to stay out. But be willing to engage and go It’s okay if you’re wrestling. I’ve told my children I don’t want them to ever feel like they can’t talk to me about their theological questions. My heart would be broken if I felt like my teenagers couldn’t come to me and say, I’m having a hard time believing this. I would feel like I’ve done the wrong thing. I want them to feel Dad cares about me, and that if there’s any place I can go and talk about the struggles of my faith, it’s with him.

Matt Tully
How do you balance giving your kid’s space to wrestle and encouraging that even to some extent, because we do want their faith to be their own? We don’t want them to believe just because we believe, but how do you balance that space with, on the other hand, being proactive as a parent, with pointing them towards the truth, pointing them towards the answers that we have come to and that we embrace as true? How do you that?

Rusty Osborne
That’s a great question. The question throws you into the question of what method do we do. I’m a big proponent of classical education pedagogy. I think that there is a real reality to how children learn—moving from grammar to logic to rhetoric stages in development. I think that in the early years catechism is huge. I guess somebody could hear me and be like Man, this guy’s just like anything goes. That’s actually not true. In the early stages, we were very much intentional. We’ve read cover to cover as many children’s Bibles as we can get our hands on, our kids are doing catechism at school and at home, and they’re memorizing Scripture. So I think all of those things are extremely important. But it’s also much easier when they’re younger. Again, it’s just not as hard to get a six-year-old kid and say, Let’s do this! Let’s have fun! And they’re like Yeah! Time with dad! Time with mom! Let’s do it! And it’s fun then, but eventually that relationship does begin to change. And so that’s where I’m talking about that as they get older, forcing a thirteen-year-old to do catechism is now entering into a different parental space where we have to go Is that beneficial? Are we now still accomplishing the same thing with Suzanne sitting on the couch just shooting daggers with her eyes at dad the whole time while reciting ’To glorify God and enjoy him forever’? There’s some disconnect there that I think can be detrimental. But I think in those early stages, it’s definitely where we try to lay the foundation of Scripture memory, of just filling their life with the Bible in multiple ways. One of the things that I’ve come to love is our house is filled with animals. We have dogs, we have cats, we have chickens, we have pigeons. We’re regularly engaged with the animal world, and one of the things that I love talking with my boys about is I love to pray with them as we’re working with animals and to say things like, Hey guys, let’s just stop and let’s just thank God for puppies. Aren’t they just so fun? And they’re like, Yes! I think I’ve just helped them see that God is not the God of adults, that God is not the God of big, fancy things, but God loves puppies just like they do, that God loves their chickens just like they do, that God cares. I’m not getting into theological discourse here. There’s obviously a distinction in the way that God relates to the created world, but I think it helps my children come to know God as Creator, as God, as one who gives life, who gives good gifts. I want my children to grow up going, All of the good things that we have in life are from my heavenly Father, and I know how to stop periodically and just go, ’Thank you, God, for these good things that we had today.’ And so I think trying to build the Bible and build prayer into everyday activities becomes so important in those early days and in those early years. As life changes and kids grow into teenagers and they become more aware of everybody else around them, you now have laid a foundation that you can look at your twelve-year-old or your fourteen-year-old and stop and say, Hey, you know what? Let’s pray. Let’s pray about this. Let’s get our focus. I know there’s a lot of pressure. I know it’s a hard day. I know you’re getting ready to go into a tough situation. Let’s ask God to be with us here. And there’s context for that. There’s context for that, and that’s meaningful to them. That isn’t just an Okay, here’s a dad praying thing. They’ve grown in their ability to bring God into—and see God at work—in the everyday life that they’re living.

Matt Tully
Rusty, thank you so much for helping us as parents and maybe as those who aren’t parents but nevertheless have young people in their life that they have an influence on—that they’re mentoring or working with in some way—helping us see how we can think about what it looks like to help kids come to love God and love his word in a deeper way. We appreciate it.

Rusty Osborne
Absolutely. It’s been a joy.

Popular Articles in This Series

View All

Podcast: Help! I Hate My Job (Jim Hamilton)

January 06, 2020

Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.

Crossway is a not-for-profit Christian ministry that exists solely for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel through publishing gospel-centered, Bible-centered content. Learn more or donate today at crossway.org/about.