Parents: Share This Encouragement from Tim Tebow With You Kids

Published: May 14, 2025

By Mallory Mattingly

Former NFL star Tim Tebow has some advice for Christian kids facing challenges in “today’s school system”: it’s your mission field.

“I would encourage them and challenge them to not just think about showing up as an opposition. Show up thinking [of it] as a ministry. This is also their mission field,” Tebow told them on “The Shawn Ryan Show.”

“One of the things my dad always encouraged me when I was young — and I know I ignored it many times — was nobody is too young for God to use them,” he added. “And for those young boys and girls that are going to school, this is an opportunity for them to stand up for their classmates, to love their classmates.”

His practical advice? “Those that are being bullied, invite them to sit at their table. Those that are are hurting show them how much you care about them. You don’t have to wait one day till you grow up and you go on a mission trip or you do all these other things. Like, this is a chance for you.”

“School can be an amazing place. It can also be a hard place,” he continued. “School can be a place of of learning and discipleship and growing and a renewing of your mind. But it can also be a place where people experience a lot of hardship, being left out and being bullied and and being treated as less than.”

Tebow believes school gives kids the opportunity to show those struggling that they’re “not less than.”

“And maybe they have chances to share their faith verbally, but they always have chances to share their faith with their kindness and their love and their compassion and the hope that they bring every day. And so instead of looking at it as, ‘Hey man, this is an opposition.’ No, this is an opportunity. There’s a big difference.”

Tebow also fights to end human trafficking and is working to help the Renewed Hope Act get passed.

“He urges listeners to stand up, speak out, and contact their representatives to help pass this crucial bill, aimed at rescuing and restoring tens of thousands of unidentified and exploited children,” Ryan posted on Instagram.

Last year, Tebow brought the fight to Congress and testified “about all the children who are being abused and are waiting for rescue. Lawmakers have drafted the Renewed Hope Act to help build a bigger rescue team of analysts, and investigators to rescue these children, but getting a federal bill passed through Congress is incredibly difficult.”

“The biblical form of Hope means to look forward with confidence, expectation, and anticipation,” Tebow wrote in a post on social media. “I believe the ‘Renewed Hope Act of 2024,’ to combat child sexual exploitation is going to do just that: give hope to kids, to protect them, to love them, and to show them Faith, Hope and Love in their darkest hour of need.”