Psalm 127:3 tells us that children are a “heritage” and a “reward” from God. They are not a burden or a problem as the world would have us believe. I repeat: Saying something is a blessing from God does not mean it is without challenge or heartache. My wife and I have experienced the peaks of joy and the valleys of grief in raising our own children. But we can say without question that, at all times and in every way, raising our children has been an unspeakable privilege and blessing from God.
A Whack Between the Eyes
Sometimes it takes a wake-up call from the Lord to realize that, because children are an unspeakable privilege, they deserve our very best efforts from the beginning. God provided that wakeup call for me early in our marriage.
The first church I pastored began in a mobile home in the middle of a four-acre corn field. I was so fearful of failing as a young pastor that I made growing the church my priority. I didn’t mean to, but that’s how it worked out. I was so busy visiting people in the community and sharing the gospel that I was rarely at home to spend time with my wife and our two young children, just thirteen months apart in age. I was the classic “absentee father.”
I would get home late in the evening after having been out visiting people every night and all day Saturday and find my wife exhausted from taking care of our children by herself. And the warning signals began to surface. When she would begin to voice concerns over my absenteeism, I would use the excuse that I was doing “the Lord’s work.” But one morning at breakfast, the wakeup call came from the Lord.
My wife said to me, “I want you to know that I will never again ask you about how you spend your time. I don’t know how to do that in light of what you do. I have been praying about this, and the Lord just told me this. He just said you are the priest in the family, David. And someday you will have to give an account before God for what you have done as the leader of our home. These children are your responsibility, and I am going to hold you responsible to make the right decisions, but I am going to leave it up to you and God.”
I remember later falling to my knees and praying, “God, You didn’t call me to this place to destroy my family in the name of building a church. There is no conflict in Your will. I am a father first, and if You will help me, by the grace of God, I will make my children a priority from this day on. They will come first.”
A Great Day Without Regret
When my son David walked across the stage at his high school graduation I leaned over to my wife and said, “Honey, I’ve got no regrets.” I explained later what I meant—that I had been there for him every way I could. It wasn’t easy, especially as all our four children got involved in sports and other activities in their junior and senior high school years. Looking back, I realize we didn’t see a free Saturday for years, we were attending so many sporting events.
But to get to their graduation day without regrets made it all worthwhile. It’s been often said that no one lies on his deathbed and thinks, “I wish I had spent more time at the office.” But many parents look back with regret and say, “I wish I had spent more time with my children.” The time goes by so quickly. We have to choose at the beginning—or today—to live a life with no regrets when it comes to investing in our children.
We Reap What We Sow
God’s “harvest law” applies to raising children as well as to the rest of life: “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked: for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap” (Galatians 6:7). What we build into our church by precept and by example will eventually be seen in them.
Secular “experts” sometimes say it is wrong for parents to impose their beliefs and values on children—that they should be allowed to develop their own. But this is a direct contradiction of Scripture passages like Ephesians 6:4 and Deuteronomy 6:6–9. The idea is that truth and spirituality are to be passed on from parents to children. Parents are to “sow” biblical values into their children.
If children don’t get values from parents, they will get them from another source. There is no morally neutral environment in which children can be raised.
Parents are stewards (temporary “managers”) of their children, not owners. Stewards always do what the owner would have them do in his absence. Therefore, if our children belong to God (and they do; Ezekiel 18:4), we are to teach them just as He would teach them personally. We are His temporary teachers and trainers, preparing children to enter into a relationship with God Himself. We should have the attitude of Hannah, who promised to give her child back to God if He would give her a son (1 Samuel 1:11).
When our children leave our home as young adults, our parenting changes from “hands-on” to “on our knees.” We’ve hopefully raised them in the Lord, but then we hand them back to Him, continuing to pray diligently for them. If we expect to “reap” godly children, we are going to have to “sow” godly principles and truth into their lives.
Loving in the Hard Times
I have alluded to the fact that parenting is not without its challenges, and we need to face that fact head on—we need to be prepared to love unconditionally in the hard times because they will come. Regardless of how many children you have, whether one or ten, you will go through difficult times as a parent. But God’s expectation of parents is the same in every case: Love your children unconditionally.
I remember holding one of my children by the shoulders and saying (in a not very loving way), “I will never stop loving you!” That child, at that time, was doing some things to test my love, to see if I would stop loving him/her. But I refused to be moved. I wanted that child to know there was nothing he/she could do to drive my love away. I wanted to prove that love was for the hard times as much as for the good times. There may be times when we disapprove of our children’s choices—even their choices as adults—but that doesn’t mean we stop loving them.
Christians are filled with the indwelling Spirit of God who gives us the capacity to love supernaturally—above and beyond what we are capable of ourselves. And we are told by the apostle Paul that “love never fails” (1 Corinthians 13:8). If we find our love failing toward our children, it is because our natural strength is failing and we are not depending on the Holy Spirit to love through us (Galatians 2:20; Ephesians 5:22).
Sometimes It’s a War
Let’s go a step beyond “parenting can be challenging.” Sometimes it’s an all-out war, a war that parents must win. Read these words produced by a secular agency dealing with crime: “Every baby starts life as a little savage. He is completely selfish and self-centered. He wants what he wants when he wants it: his bottle, his mother’s attention, his playmate’s toys, his uncle’s watch, or whatever. Deny him these and he seethes with rage and aggressiveness which would be murderous were he not so helpless. He’s dirty, he has no morals, no knowledge, no developed skills. This means that all children, not just certain children but all children, are born delinquent. If permitted to continue in their self-centered world of infancy, given free rein to their impulsive actions to satisfy each want, every child would grow up a criminal, a thief, a killer, a rapist.”
That’s a secular version of what the Bible calls original sin (Romans 3:23). No one has to teach a child to lie, to rebel, or to yell “No!” when told something by his parents. Children are born with a sinful, rebellious spirit, and it is a parent’s responsibility to bring that spirit under the influence of biblical values until the child can believe in Christ and be indwelt by the Spirit of God. And that is not always easy. Children have a built-in disposition to go toward unrighteousness instead of righteousness, and conflict is often the result: the will of the parent versus the will of the child.
One of the great events that will take place before “that great and dreadful day of the Lord” is that the hearts of fathers and children will be turned toward one another (Malachi 4:5–6)—suggesting that they are not turned toward one another now. Parents who recognize that reality will not shy away from the difficulties that come with fighting and winning the war of wills.
Faith Is the Key
Christian parents must raise their children just like they do everything else in their spiritual life: by faith. I don’t know how non-Christian parents do it—or even Christian parents who do not have a deep and abiding life of prayer and faith. My prayer journal has the names of my children written all over it on the pages representative of their formative years. My wife and I had to trust God for wisdom for our children and for ourselves, wisdom that comes only by faith (James 1:5).
Without Scripture and the promises and presence of God to depend on, where would one turn as a parent? When we have principles to go by from Scripture, we have a target for our faith. We are not left to flounder or to pick a book off the shelf at a bookstore in order to find a parenting philosophy to go by. Rather, we go by God’s words to us—principles for husbands, wives, and children.
God’s truth is the foundation, the bedrock, for the family. Parents humbled before the cross of Christ, filled with the Holy Spirit, are in the best place possible to raise children who grow up to love God. Parents cannot impart to their children what they do not possess themselves. And it takes both parents. Either one abdicating their role as a godly parent will have a profound impact on children. They will be terribly conflicted about what they should believe if both parents are not equally committed to the things of God. God gives grace for single parents, but children need input from both moms and dads as they develop.
