September 29, 2026
Early discipleship is crucial as it lays a foundation for lifelong faith, even before children can reason or read. Involve your whole family and use everyday moments to teach them about God.
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
Discipling your child doesn’t have to wait until they can read or have deep conversations. Here’s what Moses and his mother, Jochebed, teach us about the power of early discipleship.
Does discipleship even matter when your child is too young to talk? When the days overflow with diaper changes, messy meals, boo-boos to kiss, toddler tantrums, and those oh-so-crucial nap times, does any of the extra effort it takes to disciple your little person make a difference? Wouldn’t it be easier to wait until they can reason more? Or read the Bible for themselves? Or at least carry on a decent conversation?
While discipleship in the early years may not look like having long theological conversations or deep study of the Bible, discipleship during the early years of your child’s life is not only possible, but imperative. Early discipleship matters because these years lay the foundation for a lifetime of faith. Long before a child can reason through theology, they can absorb who God is through interactions with their parents in the course of everyday life. The mundane moments of parenting in the early years provide the fertile ground in which to plant the seeds for an abundant faith. When parents choose to use those moments to intentionally teach their children about the Lord, they are planting the seeds that will shape the child’s heart.
We can see this illustrated in the story of Moses in the Bible. Pharaoh had issued an order to kill all the Hebrew baby boys, and Jochebed gave birth to a son. After hiding her baby for three months, Jochebed realized she could no longer keep her little boy hidden and fashioned a basket for him to float among the reeds of the Nile. It was in this basket that Pharaoh’s daughter found the little Hebrew baby and had compassion on him. The baby’s sister offered to take the baby to a woman who could nurse him, his own mother. For the next few years, Jochebed had her son in her home to disciple. But once he was older, he was sent to live with Pharaoh’s daughter.
Only a few years, and yet, Moses knew who God was and who he was, and became the one God used to lead the Hebrews out of slavery, encounter Him on the mountain, do miracles, and write the first five books of the Bible. Knowing that Moses’ parents only had the first few years of his life to instruct him in the ways of the Lord, we can learn from Jochebed and Moses four lessons for early discipleship: Be intentional in the early years, help your child establish their identity, involve others, and trust God with the results.
You can make the most of your child’s early years by using the countless everyday moments you already share with them to teach who God is. The early years may be short, but they are ripe with opportunities to disciple your children because you have their time and attention. At this age and stage, your children are dependent on you for almost everything, which means the time spent caring for them provides ample time for discipling them as you go about your days. Whether changing a baby’s diaper or pausing to study a bug with your toddler, you can use the mundane moments together to impart God’s truth to your children.
Jochebed seems to have understood this well. Exodus 2:9-10 tells us that when Moses was older, Jochebed took him to Pharaoh’s daughter. From the time of his birth until Jochebed had to return Moses to Pharaoh’s daughter, she had only a few short years to instruct him. A handful of years to teach him who God was and the story of God’s faithfulness to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. A few years to teach him to love and fear the One True God. After that point, Moses was no longer Jochebed’s to teach. Instead, he would be given an Egyptian education as a member of Egyptian royalty. He would learn about the false gods and religious rituals of the Egyptians as well as their language, customs, history, and scientific advances. But the teaching and training Moses’ parents did in those first few years stayed with him through it all.
Here are some ideas to help you make the most of the early years:
You can help your child know who they are in Christ by speaking their identity over them consistently, long before they can grasp it fully on their own. Even a few years of hearing who God says they are can plant roots deep enough to hold for a lifetime. We see evidence of Moses’ strong sense of identity in Exodus 2:11-12. Though Scripture is silent about his years in Pharaoh’s household, we get a glimpse of what had taken root in his heart once he was grown. When Moses saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, he didn’t hesitate to defend his own Hebrew people, even though his method was wrong. Despite having only a few years under his parents’ tutelage, Moses knew exactly who he was.
In the same way, you can give your children a foundation for who they are both in your family and in God’s eyes. Here are some practical ways you can help your child establish that sense of identity:
You can involve your whole family in discipling your child by inviting siblings, grandparents, and your church family to each play a part that builds on what you are doing as the parent. We see this play out in Moses’ own family. Miriam played a role by standing watch on the banks of the Nile, then bravely approaching Pharaoh’s daughter to offer a nurse for the baby (Exodus 2:4, 7-8). We don’t know much about their home life in those early years, but we do know that later in his life, Moses’ brother Aaron became his spokesperson before Pharaoh as Moses pleaded with Pharaoh to let the Hebrew people go (Exodus 4:14-16). As parents disciple their children in the early years, the children in turn offer support to one another as they grow older.
Miriam and Aaron show us what siblings can offer, but the circle can be even wider than that. While dads and moms hold the major role in discipling their children, siblings, grandparents, and church family can also play a role in the early discipleship of children. As people live together or interact regularly, their faith being lived out in front of the little children becomes a way of teaching. Just as the adage says, “More is caught than taught.”
Some practical ideas for bringing the whole family into early discipleship of your children include:
You let go and trust God with your child by remembering that your job is to point them to the Lord rather than to control the outcome of their life. We see Jochebed do this twice. First, she placed Moses in a basket and let it float along the bank of the Nile, trusting God with his very survival (Exodus 2:3-4). Then, a few years later, she had to give him over to palace life with Pharaoh’s daughter, trusting God with his future all over again (Exodus 2:10). Both times, she had to release what she couldn’t control and trust that God would take care of her son even when she couldn’t.
We can’t control our children’s future, but we can point our children to the Lord, and we can trust God to take care of them. Our job is to nurture them in His truth and teach them His ways, while allowing Him to grow their faith.
Here are some ways you can practice trusting God:
It absolutely does because early discipleship was never about what your child remembers. It’s about what gets planted. Even if they can’t recall the specific prayer you prayed over them or the Bible story you read at bedtime, the truth you spoke and the faith you modeled are seeds planted in the soil of their hearts.
Even though your children are little, what you do today matters for eternity. You are laying a foundation for lifelong faith when you choose to disciple from the beginning. God uses our everyday faithful acts of discipling our children. Each prayer you pray, every Bible story you read, and each conversation you have is a seed you are planting. God can use each and every seed you plant to grow your young child’s faith so that as he or she grows, so does his or her faith. The harvest may seem to be a long way off, but those seeds planted today are what make that harvest possible.
Jochebed and Moses remind us what those seeds can grow into. In just a few short years, she planted the truths that would shape one of the most well-known figures in the Bible. From her example, we learn four lessons for making the early years count: use the early years wisely, teach your children who they are, involve your whole family, and trust God with the results. Your child’s early years are short, but they are fertile soil for planting seeds of faith. Pick one idea from the lists above, and plant a seed today.
Amy Juett is a homeschooling mother of seven living on a cattle ranch in Nebraska. She writes and speaks on Christian homemaking, parenting, homeschooling, and discipleship, and is the author of the upcoming book Building Heart & Home: Discipling Your Children While Managing Your Home. When she’s not writing, she loves to be lost in a good book, but more often can be found loading the dishwasher for the second time today or hunting down the one missing shoe someone needs right now.
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