| The FISHERS Magazine (Issue 195)
Since our son Linus came back from London after he completed his engineering course at Imperial College he has been worshipping the Lord at Pilgrim Covenant Church and we do not get to see him and his family on Sundays until the evening when we gather for dinner and Family Worship. I enjoy seeing the grandchildren on Sunday evenings and they have been, amongst other things, quite a ‘spiritual stimulus’ to me at times. One evening when Rebekah, our granddaughter was barely 3 and was still sitting on the highchair being fed by her mother, she said something which was quite remarkable for her age. Looking at me across the table she asked her mother, “Does grandma love God?” Shan Shan, my daughter-in-law replied with another question, “Why don’t you ask her?” The little girl was too shy to ask me so I gave her my answer, “Of course I love God and your grandpa loves Him too!” The little ‘theologian’ frowned and said, “Grandma, you really should go to church!” Her mother quickly explained to her that grandma and grandpa did attend church regularly except that they went to a different church. I understood what her concern was all about: if you claim that you love God, why don’t you obey His commandment by keeping the Lord’s Day holy? What a deep spiritual perception this little girl had! A misconception among some Christian parents is that their young children cannot perceive anything spiritual and therefore bringing them to church on Sundays is a chore and a waste of time. Children who come from Christian families often hear about God from their parents: God loves them, cares about their welfare, protects them from danger and blesses them each day with provisions. In many ways they truly believe all they have heard from dad and mom but the conscious intellectual aspect of faith only comes with maturing understanding. Faith is the gift of God and not the work of man. God grants this grace not only to adults who can respond to it at the level of intellectual understanding but also to little ones who receive it at the level of feeling and intuitive response. One can respond to God in faith long before he can understand or describe the process in intellectual terms. The problem with children is not a lack of faith but a lack of experience. Parents have the responsibility to help a child to recognise the love of God in concrete and practical ways in everyday affairs of life through showing the child their love, concern, care and comfort. The parents’ lives must display the reality of God through their attitudes, words and actions. The best example is in the way they use their time and money. If God is so real to you, do you spend time with Him each day? If you have time for everything else but do not spend time reading His Word and praying to Him everyday, how can God be important to you? On the Lord’s Day, you drag your feet and grumble all the way to church to worship Him. How can He be real and dear to you? What about your attitude towards the use of money? Have you been tithing faithfully and regularly to Him? When you need to cut back on spending why is it that the Lord’s portion has to be axed first? Have you taught your children to honour God by giving back a part of their pocket money to Him and cultivating the habit of offering to God what rightfully belongs to Him? Parents have the responsibility as priests in their families. They must first present God to their children by example, through His Word and through various forms of family worship and then they have to present their children to God through intercessory prayers. Presenting God to your children 1. By your example. Moses in the book of Deuteronomy gives us some practical teachings on how to present God to our children for their spiritual benefits. “Therefore you shall lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes” (Deut 11:18). Parents must first let God’s Word fill their hearts and souls and then live out what God has commanded through their actions, attitudes and words. Your children are watching you all the time and they know whether you truly love God and are devoted to Him or not. Are you presenting to them a dry and dead religion which has no relevance to your own daily life or are you showing them that Christianity is full of joy, anticipation, love and hope? They hate to follow a certain set of rules or rituals which parents ask them to adhere, but parents themselves ignore. Why do some children refuse to go to church with their parents? They are not rebelling against you but against a dead religion and formalism that you have imposed upon them when they see that you do not really love the God you worship and are completely out of touch with Him. You must be able to present the reality of God by living out His Word in your life. 2. Through His Word. “You shall teach them to your children, speaking to them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deut 11:19-20). The verbs ‘sit, walk, lie and rise’ denote things you do daily. Therefore in whatever you do, you can impart a lesson about God to the children. One must not teach God’s Word in a harsh and oppressive spirit, making it hard for children to swallow. God’s Word can be taught in a quiet and gentle manner by threading it through the fabric of family life – sitting down, walking around, going to bed and getting up. Everything you do can be a natural point-of-reference to God for the children. Your home should be so filled with the presence of God that the members of your family can encounter Him at every turn. If the hearts of your children are not filled with God and excited about Him, they will be filled with sins and excited about them! 3. Through various forms of family worship. Family Worship is the best way to have communion with God as a family. We impress upon the children’s minds that we gather together in His presence, assemble under His Lordship, reach out to receive His grace, listen to His Word, submit ourselves to His will and God is truly the centre of our home. It is a living encounter with God in which every member of the family can participate. Here are some suggestions:
Presenting your children to God Parents are also given the responsibility to be priests of the family interceding for our children. Present each child to God by name just like Job in the Old Testament presenting his children to God regularly. When children know that dad and mom are praying for them, they will be encouraged and more open to tell you their problems, desires, difficulties encountered in school etc. We must pray that our children will grow up to love God and serve Him more fervently than ourselves. Let us examine our own lives to see if we have become stumbling-blocks to our children’s spiritual growth by presenting Christianity as a dull and lifeless religion to them. If we do not live out our faith by good works at home, our children will never think that God is real and relevant in their lives. In their hearts they ask, “Do my parents really love God?”, though they might not be as vocal as my granddaughter Rebekah in asking her mother, “Does grandma love God?”
Dixie Chua |
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