It is difficult to anticipate, on any given day, the challenges our children face. While we can often see exterior hardships — sickness, physical limitations, arguments with friends, and academic struggles — it is difficult to detect our kids’ inward battles. So much of what happens in their minds is a mystery. At times, inward struggles exhibit themselves in outward behavior or symptoms. But how much might we be missing of our childrens’ battles?

Thankfully, there are universal truths and unchanging, timeless promises from God’s Word that are sufficient to meet our children in whatever they encounter. Walking with our kids through difficult circumstances, we can often remind them of what God’s Word says about His love. Further, we can model to them how we depend upon God’s love in our own hard times.

3 Attributes of God’s Love to Teach Our Children

1. God’s Love is Bigger Than Our Troubles

It can be easy for a child to assume the challenges they’re up against are new. It is, after all, the first time they have encountered them. In the past couple of years, our kids have observed us as parents facing hardships we never anticipated, which felt new and unknown to society. And yet, as we point our kids to our heavenly Father, who is timeless and all-knowing, we can assure them that God’s love is bigger than anything we’ll ever face on earth!

He exists outside of time. He is not surprised by what happens because He’s already present in the future. Before Jesus left His followers and ascended back to Heaven, He assured them with these words from John 16:33, “I have told you these things, so that in Me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

His words remain just as true today. Everything we are up against, He has already overcome, and He wants to guide us into His victory!

Listen to “Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled” from “Hidden In My Heart, Volume III”

2. God’s Love is Always With Us

When children are young, they’re often taught to identify specific emotions, whether by intentional lessons or passive observance. They learn what it is to be sad, angry, happy, or excited. They also discover, over time, what might cause these emotions inside of them. While it’s important to identify what we are feeling and triggers for certain emotions, we can also use these lessons to contrast emotions with God’s love. His love does not fluctuate like feelings. Instead, His love is constant. Whether we feel it or not on any given day, His love is at hand and ready to comfort, strengthen, and help us. A powerful passage to help our children memorize is Romans 8:38-39, which reads:

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

We can help our children think through what each of these statements means:

• “Death nor life”: Nothing our bodies go through, including sickness or pain, can separate us from God’s love.
• “angels nor demons”: Nothing in the spiritual realm, where Satan’s workers go about their business of trying to trip us up and distract us from God’s ways, can separate us from God’s love. They cannot keep God from us.
• “the present nor the future”: Nothing we are struggling with right now, nor the hard things we’ll face down the road — whatever they might be — will be more powerful than God’s love. His love is fully able to help us in everything, forever.
• “nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation”: Because God made all things in creation, He knows the abilities of everything in the universe. He’s also well aware of Satan’s tricks. But, God’s love extends past all that. His love covers us entirely, like armor, and nothing can penetrate through.

Listen to “Nothing Can Separate Me” from “Hidden In My Heart, Volume II”

3. God’s Love Strengthens Us

There is a beautiful passage we can point our children to when they feel weak. Ephesians 3:16-20 makes an undeniable connection between God’s love and His promise to strengthen us. Because His love for us is perfect, it will fully equip us for all we need. In His love, we lack nothing! Notice in this short passage parallel themes of love and power:

“I pray that out of His glorious riches He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us.”

As we learn to grasp how wide, long, high, and deep the love of Christ is, we are strengthened by His power which is actively at work within us! We can teach our children this truth through the concept of a battery. God’s love is the energy stored within a battery, and it empowers us! However, unlike human-made batteries, His love never runs out!

This passage acts as a conclusion to the one we read above in Romans 8:39, which declares, “neither height nor depth … will be able to separate us from the love of God.” No lofty height nor gaping depth can reroute us away from God’s love because His love is wider, longer, higher, and deeper than we’ll ever comprehend. It always reaches us.

Listen to “I Can Do All Things” from “Hidden In My Heart, Volume I”

Although we cannot prepare our kids for every unique battle, we can equip them with God’s promises and His all-powerful love. In every circumstance, they can declare, along with 1 Corinthians 15:57, “But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”