Risk Your Kids for

the Kingdom?
On Taking Children to Unreached Peoples

Article by
John Piper
Founder & Teacher, desiringGod.org

Should a Christian couple take their children into danger as part of their mission to
take the gospel to the unreached peoples of the world? Short answer: Yes.
Why? Because the cause is worth the risk, and the children are more likely to
become Christ-exalting, comfort-renouncing, misery-lessening exiles and
sojourners in this way than by being protected from risk in the safety of this world.

Provide for Their Greatest Good

When Paul said that anyone [who] does not provide for . . . his household has
denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever (1 Timothy 5:8), he was talking
about world-idolizing slackers, not self-denying emissaries of Christ. But even that
observation is not the main point.

Perhaps we lose too many of our children because

they werent trained as soldiers.
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The question raised by this text, and many others, is this: What is the greatest good
you can do for your children? What does a real, countercultural, Christian
ambassador and exile from heaven think when he is told, Provide for your
household? Provide what? Culture-conforming comforts and security? Really?

I dont think so. He is thinking, How can I breed a radical, risk-taking envoy of
King Jesus? How can I raise a dolphin cutting through schools of sharks, rather
than a bloated jellyfish floating with the plankton into the mouth of the whale
called the world? How can I raise offspring who hear Jesus say, The Son of Man
has nowhere to lay his head (Luke 9:58) and respond, Lets go?

Discipline of the Lord

By all means, provide for your household. But what are we to provide? Paul says,
The discipline and instruction of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4). Where might they
taste the Lords discipline? Why should we think only in terms of spankings, time-
outs, and family devotions? Why not the challenges and hardships implied
in Hebrews 12:311?
Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you
may not grow weary or fainthearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet
resisted to the point of shedding your blood. (Hebrews 12:34)

Not yet! It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons
(Hebrews 12:7).

Train Up a Child
Or when you think about providing for your household, what about providing
practice in self-denial and risk? After all, doesnt Proverbs say, Train up a child in
the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it (Proverbs
22:6)? Perhaps we lose too many of our children because they werent trained as
soldiers. Maybe we trained them in comfort and security, and now they wont leave
it.

Wasting your life is worse than losing it.

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Or what about providing for the young ones the way Deuteronomy 11:19 says?
Teach them the wartime manual of life when you are walking among the hostile
hearers, and when you lie down under the mosquito nets, and when you rise in the
95-degree heat. Come, my precious children, learn from mommy and daddy what it
means to live with joy in the service of the King.
No matter how many Western, comfort-assuming, security-demanding, risk-
avoiding Christians think otherwise, the truth is that there are worse risks for our
children than death. This is simple Bible-reality. Not easy. Just simple. It is not
complex or hard to grasp. There are things vastly worse than death. Wasting your
life is worse than losing it.

Great Struggles Produce Great Citizens

One of the great ironies of history is that sometimes non-Christians see more
clearly than Christians that the aims of family life are greater than safety. John
Adams, who would become the second President of the United States, was sent as a
Commissioner to France in 1778. His 10-year-old son, John Quincy (who would
become the sixth President), went with him. Abigail, John Quincys mother, was
totally behind this venture.
Here is David McCulloughs description of the mind-set behind this way of
parenting. The boy would be away from his mother and his home for most of the
next seven years. McCullough describes what this meant:

The boy was being taken across the North Atlantic in the midst of winter, in the
midst of war. Just outside Boston Harbor, British ships were waiting to capture
somebody like John Adams and take him to London, where most likely he would
be hanged as a traitor. But the boy went, too, his mother knowing that she probably
wouldnt see him for a year or more, maybe never.

Why? Because she and his father wanted John Quincy to be in association with
Franklin and the great political philosophers of France, to learn to speak French, to
travel in Europe, to be able to soak it all up. And they risked his life for that for
his education. . . .

It was a horrendous voyage. Everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong.
And when the boy came back, he said he didnt ever want to go across the Atlantic
again as long as he lived. And then his father was called back, and his mother said
youre going back. And here is what she wrote to him. And please keep in mind
this is being written to an 11-year-old boy and listen to how different it is from how
we talk to our children in our time. Its as if she were addressing a grown-up. Shes
talking to someone they want to bring along quickly because theres work to do and
survival is essential:

These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm
of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits
of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call
out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the
heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and
form the character of the hero and the statesman.
Well, of course he went, and the history of our country is different because of it.
John Quincy Adams, in my view, was the most superbly educated and maybe the
most brilliant human being who ever occupied the executive office. (American
Spirit, 115116)

They risked his life for that for his education. To be with Franklin. To be with
the French philosophers. To be at the heart of the great doings of the day! Because,
in their mind, that is what life is for. A life not given to great things is not worth
living. So, risk your life and the life of your children to be part of greatness.

Made for More

We are not about establishing a mere countrylike

America. We are about serving the King who is over
all countries.
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But ours is not the same calling. Ours is infinitely greater. We are not about
establishing a mere country like America. We are about serving the King who is
over allcountries. We are not about building a temporary, fallible, historical nation,
but an eternal people a holy nation, a people for [Gods] own possession (1
Peter 2:9). We are not about rescuing people from earthly tyranny, but from
totalitarian oppression and suffering in hell forever. We are not about maximal
education in the ways of this world, but maximum insight and involvement into the
saving paths and power of God. Our aim for our children is not historical influence,
but eternal impact.
If John and Abigail Adams thought that their comparatively small aims for their
children were worth the risk of death, are not our aims worth just as much risk?
But we have more reason to risk. We have a promise: If God is for us, no one can
be successfully against us (Romans 8:31). If they take our lives, our spouses, and
our children, they cannot succeed. In all these things, we are more than conquerors.
How better can we show our children this truth than to take them with us to the
nations?
John Piper (@JohnPiper) is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of
Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist
Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Reading the
Bible Supernaturally.