ICS Daily Devotions
Bring Up Your Children in the Lord
Ephesians 6:4 (NKJV) And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord.
As Christians, we need to have the right priorities in order to fully live our lives based on the Christian values that we profess. We need to put God first in our lives, and then prioritise our family and children over our work. As parents, we are stewards of the children that God has given to us. We have a unique role to play and God has entrusted us with a responsibility to bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
Quiet time with our children during the formative years of their lives is so precious. Not only will it build them up emotionally, but they will also have a sense of security that can only be provided through their parents, which nobody else—not their teachers, grandparents or caretakers—and no amount of money can replace. Once they are gone, those formative days of their childhood will never come back. These are the golden days when we get the opportunity to sow into their lives and build our relationships with them so that we can have the right to speak into their lives later on, especially when they are teenagers.
We all live very busy lives these days. If it is not work, there are always other activities which compete for our time, but it is important that we give priority to our children and deny ourselves those less important activities so that we can invest our time in what is truly important. There are always urgent matters to deal with, but what is urgent is not necessarily important, and we need to distinguish between the two! Parenting belongs to the important category and it cannot be outsourced.
Sending our children to Sunday School or a Christian school are good, but ultimately, parents are the ones that God wants to educate their own children with Christian values. Scripture assures us that if we do that, they will not depart from them when they are old.
Proverbs 22:6 (NKJV) Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.
Sermon Series: Affluenza
