One of the most challenging issues in a spiritually mismatched home is how to go about keeping peace in our marriage while raising our kids to know God. There are so many every day things we can do as the believing parent to influence our children toward faith in Christ. The scripture that springs to my mind is this:
Deuteronomy 6:8 These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
Such amazing wisdom rests in these few sentences. Talk to your kids when you sit at home, or in the car, or when at a ball game, or when tucking them in bed. We may not tie scripture on our hands or foreheads but I have scripture on the walls of my kitchen. I have it hanging in a picture frame on the wall. Don’t even try to guess how many verses I have hanging, push pinned, or stuck in my bulletin board over my computer and around my office.
As our kids get older, the time arrives when they will choose to follow or depart from the faith of their parent and choose to make it their own. A scary time indeed but today as I was talking to my mother on the phone she said, “Lynn, I always trusted in the scripture, Proverbs 22:6 Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it. I prayed everyday asking the Lord to honor this promise. I told him, I’m doing the best I can to help them know you, so you draw them to you Lord.”
I found this to become very real in my own life and now I see how the Lord is working this in my teen daughter’s life. At 14 years old, she started public high school here in California. Within the first few weeks at school, she was exposed to a friend who was on drugs, hit on by a girl, discovered the bizarre fashions of teenaged kids and she grew up very fast.
I am so proud of her. She would tell me about all this stuff and I would ask her how she felt and what she did with each situation. I discovered she has a giant heart for her hurting fellow students.
I want to shelter her and take her far away from public school but she is exactly where the Lord wants her. She is light, not perfect, but light in a strange world, which is vastly different now from how I grew up in public High School.
But I have been worried of late about her faith becoming luke warm. I wish church started at three in the afternoon. That is about when she would like to go. However, it doesn’t and with her hectic schedule, she hasn’t been attending but sporadically.
I knew she needed to read the Bible on her own. I encouraged her for months, but….
She didn’t. I purchased a teen Bible from the bookstore, “Mom, this Bible is ugly and boyish looking.” I returned it after is sat unused for a month.
I DID NOT GIVE UP.
I ordered a girly Bible from Christianbook.com and behold, it arrived this week, and she has read it every evening since it arrive. Go figure.
It needed to have some pink.
“Mom, where are the stories?’
“Start with the book of John”
“Mom, what is a Centurion?”
“A Roman soldier.”
“Mom, why is it kinda sing songy in this part?”
“Because it is likely a song. There are many songs in God’s word.”
“Mom, give me the back story, who are the Pharisees?”
Such great questions.
To talk about my favorite book with my baby girl, is a joy that fills my heart. I don’t force my faith on my girl, just as forcing my faith on my husband doesn’t work. But, I pray every day for them both and I seize the moment to share when they arrive.
So seize the moment, never stop praying, and cling to the promises in God’s Word. He will not fail you or your kids. As this passage says, when they are old they will not turn from it. They may not return until they are 50, 60, 70 years old, but trust our Lord to work it out.
Be blessed, Lynn
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