How Childhood and Our Relationship With God Are Connected
We have spent some time exploring what I call “ideas in the air,” those powerful cultural assumptions we usually accept without stopping to examine them. One of the most influential is the idea that Jesus’ primary goal was simply to save us from our sins, which can reduce the Christian life to accepting Jesus, cleaning up our behavior, and persuading other people to do the same.
Strahan Coleman offers a helpful correction:
“Now I want to be careful here, because of course the Scriptures do tell us that Jesus died for our sins…But they’re also clear that this wasn’t the main reason He came. Forgiveness wasn’t Christ’s ultimate goal on the cross. Reconciliation was. And there’s an important difference. Reconciliation literally means the restoration of friendship. So many of us are like children who feel as though God has forgiven us, but that He doesn’t like us. It’s entirely possible to believe you’re forgiven but not that you’re liked.”
That transactional version of the Gospel can have serious downstream consequences. Coleman continues:
“Because if forgiveness is the pinnacle of the gospel, then behavior modification, mission, and repentance are the most important threads. Sometimes I wonder if this is all the world has seen or learned from us over the years: a transactional spirituality more obsessed with the evil in the world and our personal sin than with the wonder of divine friendship that God’s love came to give us.”
Coleman’s point connects directly to the central question of spiritual formation: How does one person become more like another? If the purpose of discipleship is to become increasingly attuned to God, others, and ourselves, and to think, act, relate, and love more like Jesus, then we need to understand how relationships and friendship actually form us.
Missed It by That Much
Human beings intuitively create formative ecosystems all the time, and those environments almost always include five key elements: time, habits, community, intimacy, and instruction. These five elements are present in healthy families, schools, military units, marriages, sports teams, recovery groups, and many other settings designed to shape people over time.
Modern Western Christianity often functions from the assumption that instruction is the primary, and sometimes nearly the only, influence on our formation. Sermons, Bible studies, conferences, books, podcasts, and classes dominate our approach, while the other formative elements receive far less attention.
The modern Christian spiritual formation movement, which is only several decades old in its current form, has rightly recovered the importance of habits. It encourages people to experiment with practices such as silence, solitude, simplicity, frugality, contemplative prayer, and fasting.
Unfortunately, the instructional camp and the spiritual formation camp sometimes view one another with suspicion. The instructional side may accuse the formation movement of being too experiential or insufficiently biblical, while people drawn to spiritual formation often arrive there because they have experienced the relational and character failures of highly instructional environments.
Perhaps both groups are focusing on only part of the picture. One emphasizes instruction, another emphasizes habits, but healthy formation requires all five elements working together.
Childhood and Our Relationship With God
When is the human heart most supple, open, and susceptible to ideas and desires? Most of us would probably agree that childhood is one of the most formative seasons of life.
Our earliest years shape how we experience love, authority, trust, safety, conflict, belonging, and intimacy. Long before we possess sophisticated language or theological categories, our hearts are absorbing ideas about ourselves, other people, and the world.
This is one reason marketers, advertisers, media companies, governments, influencers, and churches are so interested in gaining the attention of children. Young hearts are impressionable, tender, curious, and deeply hungry for connection.
Childhood and our relationship with God are connected because our earliest relationships begin forming the emotional and relational categories through which we will later understand Him.
The First Formative Ecosystem
The five elements of formation are already present before a child is born.
A mother spends continuous time with her child and often communicates through speech, humming, singing, movement, and touch. Mother and child experience a kind of physical and emotional intimacy unlike any other relationship.
A father, siblings, grandparents, and friends may also speak to the child or, with permission, feel the baby kick. Before the child sees a single face, a community may already be gathering around them.
After birth, these elements intensify. The baby is held, comforted, cuddled, fed, changed, soothed, and adored through repeated acts of intimacy and community.
Habits form immediately around sleeping, eating, burping, play, comfort, and care. Some of these habits are established before the child can understand a single spoken instruction.
Jessica and I taught both of our boys a few hand signs before they could speak. They learned “I want more,” “All done,” and “Please,” which allowed them to communicate desire, satisfaction, and gratitude before they possessed the words.
There is something emotional, experiential, and even mysterious about the formation of a child’s heart within this kind of environment. Healthy development forms the child into a joyful, curious, relational human being who is deeply interconnected with and dependent upon flourishing relationships.
Just a Theory?
Attachment theory proposes that our earliest relationships with caregivers significantly influence emotional development and future relationships. Whether or not someone accepts every dimension of the theory, the basic premise is difficult to dispute.
Our capacity to form secure, healthy, lasting relationships with God, others, and ourselves is deeply affected by what we experienced with our first caregivers. Those relationships form ideas, the underlying assumptions and conclusions that quietly govern us, about trust, authority, safety, value, and love.
Ideas are not merely intellectual conclusions. They are experienced realities.
If someone grew up with an emotionally detached, unpredictable, or abusive father, they may later find it difficult to experience God as a trustworthy Father. They may affirm that God is loving while remaining guarded, anxious, and suspicious in prayer.
Time and instruction may have been present in that childhood environment, but intimacy, healthy community, and life-giving habits may have been absent or harmful. The heart therefore learned one thing through experience even if the mind learned something else through instruction.
By contrast, someone whose father was emotionally attuned, affectionate, trustworthy, and consistently present may find it easier to experience God’s fatherly care. The person already possesses a relational category for safe authority and loving attention.
What Families Teach Without Saying
Children are formed not only by what adults tell them but by what families repeatedly embody.
A family may operate under an unspoken rule that certain topics are never discussed. A child may rarely see caregivers argue honestly, cry openly, apologize sincerely, or repair conflict.
The child may learn that authority figures are to be obeyed but not trusted with emotional reality. They may conclude that difficult feelings should remain hidden, disagreement threatens belonging, or vulnerability creates danger.
As that child grows older, those ideas may become attached to God. They may experience Him as someone who expects obedience but is not particularly interested in their inner life.
Their beliefs may affirm that God is loving and present, while their formative experience tells another story.
This is why hidden ideas about God shape our spiritual lives so powerfully. The heart continues operating from what it experienced, even when the mind has learned better theology.
Looking for Someone Looking for Us
Neuroscientist Curt Thompson writes:
“When each one of us comes into the world, we enter it looking for someone looking for us. Our greatest need as human beings is to be known, and to know that the person who knows us will be there for us.”
This kind of knowing goes far beyond physical presence or material provision.
Thompson also writes:
“We can grow up in homes in which the food finds the table, the money finds the college funds, and the family even finds church each Sunday; but somehow our hearts remain undiscovered by the two people we most need to know—our parents.”
A child may be housed, fed, educated, protected, and taken to church while remaining emotionally unknown. All the visible necessities may be provided, but the child’s inner world remains largely unexplored.
Human beings need more than provision. We need to experience that someone is curious about us, attentive to us, and committed to discovering who we are.
Our capacity to experience security in God, other people, and ourselves is connected to these earliest years. Were we gently and lovingly formed in a culture where someone wanted to discover and know our hearts, and if not, are we aware of how that absence still affects us?
Forgiven but Not Enjoyed
This brings us back to Coleman’s distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation.
A person may believe that God has forgiven them while still struggling to experience friendship with Him. They may assume that Jesus solved the legal problem of sin while remaining unsure whether He genuinely enjoys their company.
This is the difference between a transactional and relational Gospel.
A transaction asks whether the debt has been paid and the record cleared. A relationship asks whether two persons are becoming known, trusted, enjoyed, and united.
The Christian story certainly includes forgiveness, but forgiveness serves reconciliation. Jesus does not merely clear a record; He restores friendship.
That friendship involves more than believing accurate things about Him. It includes the experience of being known, received, enjoyed, corrected, accompanied, and loved.
How Does Jesus Experience You?
A friend once asked me how I experienced Jesus in prayer. I gave him an answer, and then he asked a question I had never considered.
“How do you think Jesus experiences you?”
My immediate response was, “What do you mean? Why would Jesus experience me?”
That answer uncovered a transactional idea of Jesus. I assumed prayer was primarily about my experience of Him, my requests, my thoughts, and my response.
Of course Jesus experiences me, and He experiences you. He is not a theological abstraction or a distant mechanism for forgiveness.
He delights in our presence. God not only loves us; He likes us.
This is why God’s settled posture is not disappointment. The Christian life becomes profoundly different when we begin to experience Jesus not merely as the One who forgives us but as the One who enjoys knowing us.
Why Childhood Matters to Discipleship
You may now think this is one of the strangest articles about discipleship you have ever read, but hear me out.
The goal is to love more like Jesus, who is the most emotionally stable and relationally secure person in history. If we want to become more like Him, secure attachment to God, others, and ourselves is central to our formation.
Our earliest relationships formed our initial understanding of safety, value, authority, affection, and belonging. Those ideas continue influencing our relationship with God long after childhood has ended.
This does not mean we are permanently trapped by our early experiences. It means our discipleship should take those experiences seriously.
If childhood shaped harmful ideas about love, trust, authority, or intimacy, those ideas can be gently uncovered and progressively reformed through life with Jesus and trusted people.
The Five Elements in Friendship
There is no rocket science here. Think about one of the healthiest friendships you have experienced, and you will probably find the five elements.
You made time for one another and developed repeated habits. You participated in a shared community, became vulnerable, and learned from each other.
Over time, the friendship formed you. Perhaps the other person made you kinder, gentler, more courageous, more honest, or a better listener.
The relationship changed you because you did more than exchange information. You shared life.
What if God desires that kind of friendship with us, only in an infinitely deeper, more compassionate, and more secure way?
Re-Formation Through Relationship
If harmful ideas are formed through relationships and experience, they are often reformed in the same way.
A person whose heart learned that everyone eventually leaves may need the repeated experience of someone staying. Someone formed by criticism may need to experience correction without rejection.
A person who learned that love must be earned may need relationships where affection does not depend on performance. Someone whose inner life was ignored may need another person who is genuinely curious about their story.
This is why presence is essential to spiritual formation. The heart often needs to experience what the mind already believes.
Truth is important, but the truth of God’s character becomes more believable when it is embodied by people who are patient, attentive, safe, and faithful.
The Formation Gap Begins Early
Healthy childhood development offers a vivid picture of why all five formative elements matter.
Children need time, habits, community, intimacy, and instruction operating together. No single element can carry the entire weight of formation.
The same is true of discipleship.
If modern Christian communities emphasize teaching while providing little time, intimacy, community, or shared habits, they should not be surprised when people remain informed but relationally underdeveloped.
This is the heart of the Formation Gap. We long to become more like Jesus but often lack access to environments that bring all five elements together.
Childhood reveals that human beings have always required more than instruction to flourish.
From Childhood to Christian Community
People who want to become more like Jesus for the good of humanity and creation should think creatively about the communities in which formation happens.
Healthy spiritual formation communities may have something to learn from families with young children, college communities, recovery groups, deeply bonded teams, and enduring friendships.
These environments understand that formation takes time. They involve repeated habits, shared stories, emotional risk, embodied presence, and relationships strong enough to carry challenge and repair.
If the human heart is best formed through a rich and wonderful combination of time, habits, community, intimacy, and instruction, then communities organized around all five may appear strange in an age that prizes efficiency, scale, content, and speed.
They may become some of the most radical and puzzling groups in town.
They may resemble Jesus and His unusual followers, or those strange people in Acts 2 who shared meals, prayers, possessions, homes, teaching, and everyday life.
The Invitation to Friendship
A faith centered only on forgiveness does not require all five elements. It may require attendance, repentance, instruction, and perhaps telling others about Jesus.
A faith centered on reconciliation and friendship requires much more.
It requires enough time to become known, habits that make us attentive, community in which we belong, intimacy that allows the heart to emerge, and instruction that guides us toward truth.
If the goal is to think, act, relate, and love more like Jesus, we should examine the most formative season of our lives and ask what it teaches us about how people are shaped.
Childhood reminds us that we are formed in relationship.
God does not merely want to forgive us from a distance. He invites us to become secure, joyful, relationally whole people who live in friendship with Him and extend that friendship to others.
Duc in altum.
Brian Fisher is the founder of Soil & Roots and the author of Soil & Roots: Cultivating Deep Discipleship. He writes and speaks about spiritual formation, the inner life, and how people become more like Jesus from the inside out.
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