By
Brian Mitchell
Raise Your Hand If You Have Ever Had
questions or Doubts about Raising Your Children? I am sure we all have and
there are good reasons why this is the case. If you haven’t had any problems
you are probably doing something wrong. We all have doubts and questions,
because we all want to make sure that we raise our children in the best way
possible, providing them with the opportunity to truly be successful in life in
all aspects. Raising children is one of the greatest responsibilities any
person could take upon themselves.
Yet despite that great responsibility, the
Bible says that the truly happy, are those who have been blessed of God to
parent children—Ps.127:3-5. The Psalmist is saying that children are our
inheritance from God and the lives they go on to live after we are gone will be
our true legacy (lasting impression). Whether or not they achieve these goals
will depend largely upon how we as parents raise our children.
It is up to us as parents to teach our
children about God, His Son, His Word, and His church. To encourage our
children to make the right decisions and to teach the standard by which these
decisions can be made. To teach our children respect for their fellow man and
respect for authority and to discipline them when they fail to show proper
respect for either. To show our children what a biblical marriage looks like so
that they can seek a mate that will help them to have one. To teach our
children what true success is and how true fulfillment and happiness is found.
Thus, if we do not do our jobs as parents,
we should not be surprised if our children do not turn out to be the adults we
hoped they would be. Fulfilling our role as parents is not something we can
start doing when our children are teenagers, by then it is too late. We must
teach them right and expect them to abide by those teachings from their
earliest years.
“Train up a child in the way he should go,
and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Prov.22:6). This verse has been
widely abused for years and pressed to teach something it was never intended to
teach. Proverbs—are not absolutes, they are general truths or wise sayings
which if followed will generally come true. So it is true that if we teach our
children the right way to live they will do so, however, it does not mean that
they always will.
If our children turn out to not be what we
and God wanted them to be, it might very well be because in part we did not do
our jobs as parents, but it might not be because of that at all. We can do
everything right for our children and they can still turn out wrong. If we
wanted to find a child that would serve as a model for how all children should
develop; who would that child be? We could not do better than to look at what
we know about the childhood development of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
The childhood of
Jesus presents a 4-fold model for the development of children. Jesus grew in:
Wisdom—knowledge—intellect, stature—physically—in control of His body, in favor
with God—spiritually and in favor with man—socially. Surely we would all admit
that if we can help our children to fully develop in these areas we will have
done an excellent job as parents. Thus, our lessons will focus of how we can
help our children develop in these 4 areas of child growth.
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