"If Satan can't keep Christian women from bearing children, he will do his best to deceive them as to how their children ought to be brought up. He uses the same tactics with parents that he used with Eve. He convinced her that by eating the forbidden fruit, she would learn something she needed to know: "When you eat of it your eyes will be opened... knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:5). Satan was right--when Eve ate, her eyes were opened (v.7): she did learn something she had not known before -- the experience of evil. The result of this knowledge was shame, guilt, and alienation from God and her husband.
God never intended that you and I should know evil by experiencing it for ourselves. His desire is that we should be "wise about what is good, and innocent about what is evil" (Romans 16:19). But Satan says, "You need to taste for yourself." He says to parents, "Your children need to taste for themselves. If you shelter them from the 'real world,' they will never be able to fit in and survive in it."
The Truth is, our task is not to rear children who can "fit in" or merely "survive" in this world. The challenge of every Christian parent is to bring up children who love God with all their hearts, souls, minds, and strength: who have a vibrant, personal relationship with the Lord Jesus: and whose lives will be bright and shining lights, penetrating the darkness around them. Christian parents ought to be seeking to raise up not just "good" children, but children who enthusiastically embrace the Truth, children who love righteousness and hate evil, children who will be used by God to change this world.
... Children will cultivate an appetite for whatever they are fed in their earliest, formative years. I have known young people from "committed" Christian homes who know more about movie stars and rock groups than they do about the patriarchs or the disciples. They can sing along with all the top hit songs but do not know the great hymns of the faith. I can only assume that they have an appetite for what they have been exposed to.
If we allow our children to listen to music, attend movies, read books and magazines, and hang out with friends that promote profanity, negative attitudes, illicit sex, rebellion, and violence, we should not be surprised when they adopt the world's philosophies.
... The apostle Paul warns believers of every era and every culture, "Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould" (Romans 12:2). Rather, he says, we are to "make a decisive dedication of our bodies as a living sacrifice" (Romans 12:1) and to be "transformed by the renewing of our minds" (Romans 12:2). We are not to be molded by the culture, as so many believers are today but, rather, are to be so filled with the Spirit and the Word of God that our lives will penetrate and convict the culture around us. That is the challenge facing Christian parents -- to raise up a generation of young people who are not conformers but transformers." (p. 173-176)
1 comment:
Amen! that is so good! I have been wanting to read that book, I should! I hope you are feeling well as you get to the end of your pregnancy.
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