You cannot give your children a faith you do not have. You can teach them the words, the practices, the outward forms of belief, and they may carry those forms for years without the substance behind them. But a living, trusting faith that holds in difficulty, that calls out to God in the dark, that has evidence of being real, that is something that is caught more than it is taught.
Psalm 22 is a psalm of distress. It opens with the words that Jesus would later speak from the cross: my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It is honest about anguish in a way that makes some readers uncomfortable. But inside that honesty, the psalmist does something deliberate. He turns to what the generations before him knew about God, and he tells it.
What the Psalmist Is Doing in Psalm 22
The psalm moves between present suffering and historical testimony. The psalmist is in pain, but he is not only in his pain. He reaches back to what his ancestors experienced and speaks it as evidence: they trusted and you delivered them. They cried out and were saved. They trusted and were not put to shame.
This is not optimism. It is testimony. The psalmist is building a case from the record of what God has done, because the present moment does not yet have evidence. He is teaching himself to trust by rehearsing what trust has produced in the lives of the people who came before him.
What He Is Telling His Children
Embedded in Psalm 22 is the intention to pass this on. The psalmist speaks of declaring the name of the Lord to his brothers, of telling the congregation what God has done. He is not keeping the testimony private. He is making it available to the next generation.
When a parent tells their child about a time God answered prayer, a time God came through in a crisis, a time when everything looked impossible and something shifted, they are doing exactly what the psalmist is doing. They are building the record from which their child can draw in the moment when their own faith is thin.
The Testimony as a Teaching Tool
The testimony of a parent is one of the most underused tools in the spiritual formation of a child. Most parents teach their children what to believe. Fewer tell them what they have experienced. But the experience carries weight that the instruction alone cannot. A child who hears their parent say “I prayed about this and God answered” has received something that a theological statement about the nature of prayer cannot fully replicate.
The testimony is personal. It is specific. It happened to someone the child knows and trusts. And it creates a template: this is what it looks like to bring something to God and watch him respond. That template becomes the child’s starting point for their own prayers.
What Children Learn From Watching
Children learn to trust by watching trusted people trust. If the parents in a home never mention God in connection with actual decisions, actual fears, actual needs, the child learns that God is relevant to Sunday mornings but not to the rest of life. If the parents pray openly about real things and then report back on what happened, the child learns that prayer is a live wire, not a ritual.
The faith that survives into adulthood is rarely built on doctrine alone. It is built on testimony. On having seen, or heard from someone credible, that God is real and present and responsive. Your life is the most credible source your child has for that testimony.
How to Speak It Into Them
It does not need to be formal. It does not need to be a scheduled lesson. It needs to be honest. Tell them what you were afraid of and what you prayed. Tell them what you did not understand and how God met you in the middle of not understanding. Tell them about the times your faith was thin and what you did with it anyway.
You are building a record. Your child will one day face something that tests them past what they knew to believe. In that moment, the testimony they heard from you is one of the things that can hold them.
“In you our ancestors put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them. To you they cried out and were saved; in you they trusted and were not put to shame.”
Psalm 22:4-5
Your testimony is not just your story. It is the foundation on which your child will build theirs.
