Your Kids Will Encounter Holy Fire with These Practical Tips
When speaking at events, I am often asked for practical examples about how to help children encounter God.
My response is quite simple—everything we do should flow out of our relationship with the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit will lead you into all truth. John 16:13 says, “However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come.”
In Proverbs 18:21, Solomon states, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit.” In our home, we place great emphasis on speaking life and not death over each other. We emphasize that our words should uplift, encourage, and support rather than discourage, demean, and embarrass. Our words should honor and not put down.
My son has a tender heart. When he was younger, hearing profanity in children’s movies would bother him. It got to a point where he would come to us in tears daily confessing he had used cuss words in his mind. At first, we dismissed his comments by saying things like, “Buddy, you’re not using cuss words, it’s okay, don’t worry about it.” However, he was very worried about it, almost obsessed with it. Although it may sound a little silly to us as adults, these thoughts can easily turn into lies and feelings that say, “You are not good. God can’t use you. You are a really bad person.”
We constantly tried to talk to him about how not all of our thoughts are our own. We would talk to him about how the enemy lies and how to hear the voice of the Lord. Yet the problem seemed to be getting worse. He would continue to come to us distraught and in tears feeling like a terrible person. I remember one morning I came downstairs to find him again on the couch in tears saying, “I said a cuss word in my mind again.” I walked by him into the kitchen and asked the Holy Spirit (partly out of irritation), “Holy Spirit! Help! What do I tell him? How do I help him?” I instantly heard in my spirit, “Tell him this: tell him to remind himself, every time he hears a yucky word in his head, to say over himself, ‘I don’t cuss!’ Get him to say that out loud over himself.”
I walked right back in the living room, sat beside him on the couch, spoke identity and truth over him, and then offered him this simple phrase to say out loud every time he would hear a cuss word in his mind. In the days that followed, I would hear him playing in his room and then stop and say enthusiastically, “I don’t cuss!” And a few days later those lies and the crippling condemnation that came with them were shut down and destroyed. He was set free. The Holy Spirit knew exactly what he needed because the Holy Spirit will lead you into all Truth.
While John 16:13 speaks of revelation and understanding—God’s word for our lives—it also speaks of revelation and wisdom for challenges that arise within our families. We have the solutions of Heaven at our disposal. God did not give these solutions to a select few. They are for every single believer who will call on the name of the Lord. According to Acts 2:38-39, “and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call.” Receiving the Holy Spirit is a gift freely given. After Jesus ascended to Heaven, God specifically sent the Holy Spirit to us to be our Helper. “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you” (John 14:26). Boy, do we need help!
On my own, I would not have come up with such a simple phrase and solution to help my son. I would have spent hours ruminating over how to solve the problem, trying to fix it in my own strength and in my own way. The Holy Spirit always brings simple solutions to problems that seem unfixable or too complicated. “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him! …For the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say” (Luke 11:13; 12:12). We all need the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is for all of us.
Jesus is our example, yet He needed the Holy Spirit too. To fulfill God’s redemptive plan, Jesus had to be filled with the Holy Spirit. In fact, Jesus did not do any ministry without the Holy Spirit. Jesus did not do what He did simply because He was the Son of God. The qualifier for Jesus was not that He was the Son of God; it was that He was the Son of man equipped and empowered by the Holy Spirit fully submitted to the Father. In doing this, He made it possible for us to live like Him, equipped and empowered by the Holy Spirit fully submitted to the Father. What an example we have in Jesus where the impossible becomes possible.
Jesus begins His ministry after He is baptized by John the Baptist in Luke 3:21-22, “And the Holy Spirit descended in bodily form like a dove upon Him, and a voice came from heaven which said, ‘You are My beloved Son; in You I am well pleased.’” Luke 4:1 continues, “Then Jesus, being filled with the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.” To be led by the Spirit, we will need to be filled with the Spirit. Jesus was led into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit. I do not think any of us would go into the wilderness without being led. The Holy Spirit will send us down paths no one wants to go. The Holy Spirit will help you speak life over your marriage when others tell you to give up. The Holy Spirit will say you are well able to take the land when everyone else sees giants. The Holy Spirit will say take the risk when everyone else says play it safe. Oh, how we need to be led by the Holy Spirit!
In Acts, the disciples had to be filled with The Holy Spirit before they were fully ready to demonstrate the Kingdom of God. Jesus tells them in Acts 1:8, “But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” In Acts 4:31 when they finished praying, “the place where they were assembled together was shaken; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spoke the word of God with boldness.” The Holy Spirit equipped and empowered the disciples to bring the Kingdom of Heaven with boldness. In fact, Jesus tells the disciples it is actually better for them if He leaves: “Nevertheless I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you” (John 16:7). What a wild verse, and what a picture of how much we need the Holy Spirit!
If the first disciples of Jesus, who actually knew and learned from Him in the flesh, needed the Holy Spirit, how much more do we need the Holy Spirit! We cannot afford to live without the Holy Spirit. Being filled with the Holy Spirit will resonate through our homes and be infused into our families for future generations. But take heed—the generation that treats the Holy Spirit as optional will pass on to the next generation that Holy Spirit is optional. Living completely dependent on the Holy Spirit on a daily basis should not be optional; it should be a way of life. When we are continually filled with the Holy Spirit, then we are able to learn to be led by the Spirit. No decision in parenting, in business, in relationships, and in giving is made without seeking the Holy Spirit’s help.
My husband is the shopper of the family. I am not a shopper at all. When he goes into a store, my children and I have a game we play while we wait in the car for him. We ask the Holy Spirit to highlight someone in the parking lot walking to his or her car. We will then pray and declare over that person what God reveals to us, whether it is healing, breakthrough, salvation, or blessing. This game is good training for our children in listening to the Holy Spirit and a good reminder to me—we want to see what and how God sees. We want to train our spiritual eyes to see with God’s eyes. Seeing others in this way is only possible through a relationship with the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit is our best friend. When in relationship with Holy Spirit, all these things just naturally flow out of my relationship. When you have a best friend, you know their personality, their nature, their heart, their humor, and their lens of seeing the world. Same here. We can have that kind of relationship with the Holy Spirit. Not because I do but because the Bible says you can. In fact, look to Jesus because He is our greatest example in this. Smith Wigglesworth (1859–1947) said it this way, “Enter into the promises of God. It is your inheritance. You will do more in one year if you are really filled with the Holy Ghost than you could do in fifty years apart from Him.” Imagine what could change in our families if we fully yielded and were filled with the Holy Spirit.
Fire
If we are to have revival in our homes, we need to encounter God and be filled with the Holy Spirit. However, the fullness of the Holy Spirit in our lives should set us on fire. When the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit in the upper room, Acts 2:3 says tongues of fire rested on them. Fire is fearsome. Fire burns and destroys, but it also renews and revives. In other words, it yields holiness through creative destruction. The fire of the Holy Spirit will burn and consume those things contrary to God’s design for us while purifying and consecrating those things He desires to remain. It will mold us like glass and clay into who God wants us to be. It sets us apart as God’s holy ones. It marks us.
Although God’s power is available, it is not automatic. Many people believe God’s word in scripture, but they do not believe they can live it out now. However, we are living in an era of change. The days are coming when we break the rules of religion and small thinking because revival always demands a change. The only way to change dysfunction is to disrupt it. We are in an era of Holy Spirit disruption. We need the fire of God in our lives to disrupt and to consume all wrong thinking we have grown accustomed to. We need this fire to burn up our opinions, our egos, our preferences, and our agendas so the only thing left is God’s opinion and His agenda. We need the fire of God to envelop, rest upon us, and mark us. Too often in churches, the Holy Spirit has been made to take a back seat or pushed to the side or kicked out altogether. Thus, confusion has been created. But the truth is for families to be revived, they need not only the Holy Spirit, but also the fire of the Holy Spirit.
The word fire is used in the Bible hundreds of times and is considered a distinct aspect of God’s nature as expressed in the following passages:
Do you see what we’ve got? An unshakable kingdom! And do you see how thankful we must be? Not only thankful, but brimming with worship, deeply reverent before God. For God is not an indifferent bystander. He’s actively cleaning house, torching all that needs to burn, and he won’t quit until it’s all cleansed. God himself is Fire! (Hebrews 12:28-29 MSG)
And the God who answers by fire… (1 Kings 18:24).
Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt sacrifice (1 Kings 18:38).
And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them (Acts 2:3 ESV).
For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God (Deuteronomy 4:24).
He makes His angels winds, and His ministers a flame of fire (Hebrews 1:7 ESV).
Is not my word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces? (Jeremiah 23:29 ESV)
And I will be to her a wall of fire all around, declares the Lord, and I will be the glory in her midst (Zechariah 2:5).
Holy Spirit fire is normal Christianity. What does it look like to create a home where the fire of God and His manifest presence rests and resides? A home of encounter. Encountering God in our homes lights a fire in us—an internal hunger, desire, and determination to be moldable and teachable, creating a willingness to put it all on the table to cultivate revival in our homes. Creating a home of encounter is vital to operating with the authority and power God has given us. After all, we are called to be set apart and to live with Holy Spirit distinction.
In 1 Corinthians 2:5, Paul says, “Your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” How often do we elevate the wisdom of men and explain away the power and authority the disciples carried in the gospels? My husband and I prayed with our children when they were very young to be filled with the Holy Spirit. This was important to us to teach and explain as we took the familiar quote to heart: “Children do not have a junior Holy Spirit.” Praying in the Spirit is normal family culture in our home. In fact, if my daughter or son is having a hard time or bad day, I will find them singing over themselves in the Spirit. Romans 8:26 (NIV) reads, “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.” Joel 2 tells us encounter is coming and is for everyone:
So I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten…And it shall come to pass after- ward that I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. And also on my menservants and on my maidservants I will pour out My Spirit in those days (Joel 2:25, 28-29).
True encounter brings such revelation that we cannot stay the same. The fire of God will bring such a shift in perspective that redemption and restoration become natural byproducts of encounter. It may be painful and will take determination—a determination to yield. A determination to go after the deep things of God, a determination to be completely led by the Holy Spirit, and a determination to not stop in our pursuit until only He remains. We need the fire of God. Our families need the fire of God.
Go after it. It is worth it. And the whole world will see it.
