Raising Children Who Hope in the Triumph of God

Ephesians 6:4 ""Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord."

What then should we do? Well, sometimes it helps just to remind ourselves of the obvious things we so easily neglect. That's what I want to do. And I hope that it stirs us all up to be really radical Christians.

1. To raise children who hope in the triumph of God is to make all of life God-saturated.

If life is not God-saturated, kids of course know this. And they draw from it the obvious conclusion -- God is nothing very relevant to my life, and the cause of Christ is nothing great and all-consuming. God is not exciting enough to build your whole life around. He is a kind of necessary evil to be tolerated on Sunday but a dispensable drag on Monday through Friday. You can read this pretty easily from the kids that come from such homes.

Be radical Christians -- or I should say, simply, real Christians. We should saturate all our daily life with God. He should be the source and goal of all our acts.

"Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." (1 Cor. 10:31)

The children will see it and by God's grace will believe that the triumph of God is the greatest thing in the world.

2. Triumph comes only by grace and only in answer to prayer.

Prayer is the first and fundamental way that we join forces with God in his victory over sin and evil and unbelief. And so the second thing we must do as parents is pray for our children and teach them to pray.

We need to pour our hearts out in secret where none but God knows what we say, pleading for the salvation and holiness and perseverance of our children. And our Father who sees in secret will reward us.

We need to pray in the presence of our children so that they can hear our longings and read our hearts and learn themselves to pray. And we need to pray with our children so that they have a chance to pray in a loving environment.

How many great men have testified to the power of their fathers and their mother's prayers. Augustus Strong, who was a Baptist seminary president at the end of the nineteenth century and who wrote a Systematic Theology still in print wrote in his auto biography,

3. Raise up children who hope in the triumph of God is make the Bible the most important book in their lives.

- a little article by William Frankena who teaches philosophy in the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He said that when he was a boy his father read at least one chapter from the Bible after every meal and that they finished the Bible every year for 16 years.

We need to help our children feel what Eugene Nida, just wrote this month in a summary of his life as a Bible consultant for Bible translating around the world. He said,

Another important privilege (of this work) was to realize that the message of the Holy Scriptures is certainly the most important and meaningful message for the modern day. [Do our kids see this conviction in our use of the Bible?] To see how an intelligible, clear translation of the Scriptures could have a transforming effect upon a psychologically distraught hippie, upon a self-satisfied and smug intellectual, and upon a depressed and oppressed Indian community in the Andes made me realize that there is no real substitute for this good news. ("My Pilgrimage in Mission" in IBMR, April, 1988, p 62)

We must show our children that this book is the most important book in our lives and that it contains the answers to life’s greatest questions and that it is the battle plan for the triumph of God.

4. The need to be living examples of faith and hope for our children in very practical ways.

5. The need to be happy lest our children get the impression that the triumph of God would be the triumph of gloom.

6. The need for firm, no-nonsense corporal discipline and recall what it did in the life of Amy Carmichael to fit her, as Elizabeth Elliot says, "for the buffettings she would have to endure" on the way to the triumph of God.

7. Humility and the willingness to apologize to our children, and show them that the cross can triumph even over a dad's mistakes.

8. The need to worship together so that the children can see mom and dad praise God and bow in reverence and cherish the preaching of God's word, and get a foretaste of what it will be when the Lord comes in triumph at the end of the age.

9. Standards of everyday holiness without which no one will see the Lord. Standards of sexual purity, and financial integrity, and rigorous truthfulness, and self-control and hard work -- what it means in practical everyday terms to be on the side of the justice and grace that will someday triumph over all evil.

10. Love. Parents loving children and children learning to love -- learning that in the end everything is in vain without love, that in the world love is the visible expression of faith in the triumph of God, that in the soul love no matter what it costs is the way of joy.
Our great challenge from family week is to be the kind of church and the kind of parents that raise up children -- old and young -- who hope in the triumph of God.