|
|
Post by Cindy on Jun 20, 2015 9:39:12 GMT -5
by John MacArthur
What are your children learning from your example?
Are they learning the joys and blessings of a life submitted to God’s Word and His will, or do they only hear about your frustrations and disappointments? Do they see you resting in the comfort of God’s sovereignty, or consumed with worry and despair? Are they learning the value of righteousness, faithfulness, and hard work? Or are they learning to be liars, cheats, and hypocrites?
Your children might sit under the faithful preaching of the Word, and you may have faithfully trained them to understand the truth of the gospel. But what are they learning by observing your life day in and day out? What is the testimony of your life teaching them about being godly, faithful men and women?
Teaching Your Children Wisdom
Teaching children the gospel by no means exhausts the parents’ teaching responsibility. Also bound up in the principle of Deuteronomy 6:6–7 is the duty of teaching our children wisdom for life. The gospel is the necessary starting-point, because “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalm 111:10, emphasis added). No one is truly wise who rejects or disregards the gospel message.
But beyond the truths of the gospel are also many vital biblical lessons about character, integrity, justice, prudence, discernment, and all the practical issues of life. Parents are charged with the duty of carefully training their children with godly wisdom in all such matters.
The book of Proverbs is an inspired summary of practical wisdom. The sayings recorded there were assembled by Solomon for his son’s sake. Most of them were actually written by Solomon but some are others’ proverbs, collected by Solomon. The best wisdom of several ancient sages is thus compiled in Solomon’s Book of Proverbs with the seal of divine inspiration guaranteeing that these sayings are “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16).
Proverbs is therefore a fitting textbook for parents, and fathers in particular, to teach their children the kind of practical wisdom necessary for successful God-honoring life. It is an inspired book of wisdom from the wisest father who ever lived, a vital compendium of the sort of practical wisdom all parents need to pass on to their children.
Solomon includes an admonition to his own son in the opening verses: “Hear, my son, your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching; indeed, they are a graceful wreath to your head and ornaments about your neck” (Proverbs 1:8–9).
Similar admonitions are repeated elsewhere in Proverbs: “My son . . . receive my words and treasure my commandments within you” (2:1); “My son, do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments” (3:1); “Hear, O sons, the instruction of a father, and give attention that you may gain understanding” (4:1); “Hear, my son, and accept my sayings and the years of your life will be many” (4:10); “My son, give attention to my wisdom, incline your ear to my understanding” (5:1); “My son, observe the commandment of your father and do not forsake the teaching of your mother” (6:20); and many other verses throughout the book. These were Solomon’s tender admonitions to his own son, urging him to pay careful heed to these lessons about life.
Such admonitions also apply to our children, and if we hope to teach well, we too must master the wisdom of Scripture and live consistently so that these principles of wisdom are reflected in our own character.
The Power of Your Example
Solomon himself is an object lesson about the dangers of an inconsistent life. Solomon was, in intellectual terms, the wisest man who ever lived. First Kings 4:29-31 says of him,
God gave Solomon wisdom and very great discernment and breadth of mind, like the sand that is on the seashore. Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the sons of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt. For he was wiser than all men.
God Himself told Solomon, “I have given you a wise and discerning heart, so that there has been no one like you before you, nor shall one like you arise after you” (3:12).
So there was no deficiency whatsoever in the content of Solomon’s instruction to his son. Yet by way of example, Solomon failed, and failed miserably. For example, Solomon included numerous warnings about the dangers of being seduced by the wrong kind of women (Proverbs 2:16–19; 5:3–13, 20; 6:23–29; 7:5–27; 22:14; 31:30). But Scripture says this about Solomon’s own life:
King Solomon loved many foreign women along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women, from the nations concerning which the Lord had said to the sons of Israel, “You shall not associate with them, nor shall they associate with you, for they will surely turn your heart away after their gods.” Solomon held fast to these in love. (1 Kings 11:1–2)
And partly because of Solomon’s failure to live according to the wisdom God had given him, Solomon’s son Rehoboam rejected his father’s teaching (12:6–11).
The Danger of Hypocrisy
It does no good to teach our children sound wisdom and then live a life that contradicts what we are teaching. In fact, there may be no surer way to provoke your children to despise and discard the wisdom of the Lord. The price of parental hypocrisy is unbearably high.
In Solomon’s case, that sort of hypocrisy not only caused his son to fail, but it also tore apart the entire Israelite nation and led to an apostasy from which Israel never recovered.
Solomon’s instructions to his son were sound. But the example he set nullified his wise counsel. His own life was inconsistent with his teaching. There is no greater mistake a parent can make.
Your household is the most important schoolroom your children will ever know. And the lessons they learn don’t begin and end when you crack open the family Bible. They are always watching and learning from your example—often without even realizing it. That’s a tremendous responsibility and opportunity for Christian parents—one that we must make the most of, for God’s glory and our children’s good.
Epilogue
As we bring this series on God’s design for the family to a close, I want to give you one vital reminder. Whether it’s in your role as a husband, wife, or parent, you will struggle and fail from time to time. Moreover, your spouse and your children will fail you. None of us are perfect, and none of us will perfectly execute the roles and responsibilities God has given us within our families.
In those moments of failure and disappointment, be thankful that you serve a gracious God, and that His grace is sufficient to overcome your shortcomings. You might not have the strength, the wisdom, or the patience for every situation, but by His grace, He will grant you everything you need. In fact, His grace is the reason you enjoy any success at all as a spouse or a parent. And when you fail in those roles, His grace can overcome your failure, or enable you to endure whatever consequences may result.
As Christian husbands, wives, and parents, we need to rest in God’s unfailing grace, and look to Him for strength and restoration when we fall short of His plan.
posted with permission
www.gty.org/blog/B150515/what-are-your-children-learning-from-you
|
|
|
|
Post by Cindy on Jun 20, 2015 9:42:25 GMT -5
Treating the Symptoms, not the Sin
by John MacArthur
Many parents live in fear that any parental misstep might mar their child’s character in some irreparable way. They think if something goes wrong in childhood, the child might begin to drift spiritually or wander morally. But the truth is that our children are already marred by sin from the moment they are conceived. The drive to sin is embedded in their very natures. All that is required for the tragic harvest is that children be allowed to give unrestrained expression to those evil desires.
In hopes of fencing in their children’s depraved natures, many Christian parents have taken various philosophical approaches to parenting. But do these parenting philosophies truly protect children from exploring the full extent of their sinfulness? And more importantly, do they point sinners to the Savior?
Behaviorism Is Not the Answer
Certainly both manners and discipline are necessary aspects of proper parenting. But teaching our kids manners is no solution to the problem of human depravity. Tacking on punishment for wrongdoing won’t solve the problem, either. In fact, parents who concentrate all their energies on correcting external behavior, or staving off misbehavior with threats of discipline, may be doing little more than training hypocrites.
I’ve seen this occur repeatedly. I know Christian parents who think their parenting is successful because they have taught their children to act politely on cue, answer with “Yes, Sir” and “No, Ma’am,” and speak to adults when spoken to. But behind the parents’ backs, those same kids can be the most ill-behaved, unruly kids in the church—especially when unsupervised among peers. And the parents seem blissfully unaware of the children’s true character. Almost every teacher and youth leader knows the frustration of trying to deal with a problem child whose parents simply refuse to believe their child is capable of serious wrongdoing. This is often because the parents have focused exclusively on issues like public behavior, external decorum, and courtesy to other adults, but they have no understanding of the real state of their own child’s heart. Often the child is merely conforming to avoid punishment.
Merely enforcing external behavior with the threat of discipline is sheer behaviorism. The good manners produced by such an approach are nothing more than a conditioned response. While that kind of behavior control may appear to work wonders for a time (especially when the parents are nearby), it does not address the problem of depravity, which is a heart problem.
Isolationism Is Not the Answer
Many Christian parents think they have fulfilled the parenting task if they build a cocoon around their kids to isolate them from bad influences. They restrict their children’s exposure to television, ban popular music from the home, and sometimes even forbid any fraternization with children whose parents may not share their commitment to this kind of isolation.
There is certainly much on television and in other entertainment media from which our kids should be shielded. And since the standards are deteriorating so rapidly, it is essential for Christian parents to provide some kind of insulation for their kids. It is simply reckless parenting to permit your kids to surf the Web unsupervised, listen to whatever popular music they choose, or watch television and see movies without any parental oversight. Parents who blithely forfeit control over what their kids see and hear in a culture like this are guilty of appalling malfeasance.
But total isolation is not the answer, either. Naiveté is not a trait to be cultivated in our children. Prudishness is foolish immaturity. It leaves our children gullible and vulnerable. The naïve are the easiest targets for the seductive wiles of temptation. Throughout the book of Proverbs, the naïve (“simple” in many translations) are held up as negative examples:
• “How long, O naive ones, will you love being simple-minded?” (Proverbs 1:22)
• “The waywardness of the naive will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them.” (1:32)
• “The naive believes everything, but the sensible man considers his steps. . . . The naive inherit foolishness, but the sensible are crowned with knowledge.” (14:15, 18)
• “The prudent sees the evil and hides himself, but the naive go on, and are punished for it.” (22:3; cf. 27:12)
Please do not misunderstand; there is a kind of holy innocence that we must cultivate not only in our children but also in ourselves. The apostle Paul wrote, “I want you to be wise in what is good and innocent in what is evil” (Romans 16:19). But in that context he was speaking of knowledge that comes from personal experience. This verse came at the end of several chapters of practical instruction from the apostle. He was saying he wanted the Romans to be well-practiced in good behavior, but inexperienced when it came to evil.
Inexperience and naiveté are not the same thing. Paul did not mean he wanted them oblivious to the existence of evil. He was certainly not advocating deliberate ignorance or a willful blindness to the reality of evil. He wanted them to be prudent, not prudish. The difference is significant.
Parents cannot—and should not—try to isolate their children totally from the truth about sin and the subtleties of temptation. We should not cultivate the kind of “innocence” in our children that leaves them exposed and vulnerable to temptations they never even imagined existed. Our task is to teach them discernment, not raise them to be prudes.
I know of one Christian parenting course that encourages moms and dads to avoid giving their children any kind of detailed instruction whatsoever about sexual matters, not only during childhood and adolescence, but up to and including the son or daughter’s wedding night. The child’s inevitable questions about anatomy and bodily development during puberty are supposed to be deflected with vague answers, making it clear that the very topic of sex is taboo. If questions about reproduction need to be addressed, they should be dealt with using the parts of a flower, for fear that anything more explicit will take away the child’s innocence. According to this program, mere exposure to the facts about human reproduction jeopardizes your child’s moral innocence. This particular course goes as far as cautioning parents not to expose their kids to classical art exhibits because they include statues and paintings that portray nude figures.
That sort of isolationism is a recipe for disaster. It is a wholly unbiblical perspective. Sex is not portrayed in Scripture as inherently evil, nor is it treated as taboo. Sex outside of marriage is certainly sinful, but within marriage, the union of husband and wife is holy and honorable (Hebrews 13:4). The subject per se poses no threat to a proper, godly, moral innocence. How can our children hope to have a proper and biblical understanding of these things if we treat the subject itself as a threat to their innocence? Scripture certainly does not do that. An entire book of the Old Testament—the Song of Solomon—was written to celebrate the joy and the purity of marital intimacy. There is certainly no command or principle in Scripture that would make such matters off limits for parental instruction.
On the contrary, instructing children properly in such matters lies at the heart of the parents’ responsibility. Abdicate this responsibility and you practically ensure that your children will be more influenced by the values they learn from schoolteachers and peers. It is nearly impossible, and certainly a wrong-headed approach to parenting, to keep children totally isolated from all influences outside the family. So in all likelihood they will learn about these things from other sources, no matter how they have been sheltered. If the parents have declined to foster a godly knowledge of sex and human reproduction, the likelihood that the child will develop ungodly attitudes toward the subject are multiplied.
Besides, the notion that parents are preserving a child’s innocence by isolating them ignores the reality that many of our sinful desires are inborn. Sinful appetites are inherent in our fallen nature. They are not merely learned behaviors. Refuse to teach your children anything about sex and you may set loose the child’s own evil imagination to work overtime.
A similar principle holds true for those who attempt to isolate their children from awareness of secular culture. Extreme isolationism costs parents valuable opportunities to teach their kids discernment. For example, it may well be more profitable to watch Star Wars with your kids and teach them how to identify and refute its erroneous New Age philosophies, rather than trying to keep your children spiritually quarantined, completely unaware of what they will face in the future.
In the first place, parents will not be able to isolate their children forever. The day will come when they are exposed to the real world, and they had better be prepared with discernment skills and wisdom to perceive and resist the wiles of the devil and the enticements of the world.
But in the second place, it is simply a mistake to think that shutting our kids off from outside influences will somehow keep them from any temptation to evil. The most persistent source of temptation is not the world or the devil, but the flesh. You can often elude the influence of the world and the devil, but you cannot escape the influence of your own flesh. The flesh is a constant source of temptation from which you cannot sequester your children.
It is a grave mistake to think of our children as little angels who need to be handled delicately so they don’t get corrupted. Rather, they are corrupt little sinners who need to be led to righteousness.
Scripture’s Solution
There is only one biblical answer to the problem of depravity: regeneration. Next time we’ll look at how to lead your child to Christ.
posted with permission
www.gty.org/blog/B150508/treating-the-symptoms-not-the-sin
|
|
|
|
Post by Cindy on Jun 20, 2015 9:46:24 GMT -5
Good News for Your Kids
by John MacArthur
There’s only one remedy for a child’s inborn depravity: The new birth. Regeneration. As Jesus said to Nicodemus, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. . . . [Therefore,] you must be born again” (John 3:6–7).
Elsewhere Scripture describes the unregenerate as “dead in [their] trespasses and sins . . . [conducting themselves] in the lusts of [their] flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind . . . by nature children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:1, 3). Like it or not, that is an apt description of your children—until they are born again.
Evangelism at Home
Your top-priority job as a parent, then, is to be an evangelist in your home. You need to teach your children the law of God; teach them the gospel of divine grace; show them their need for a Savior; and point them to Jesus Christ as the only One who can save them. If they grow up without a keen awareness of their need for salvation, you as a parent will have failed in your primary task as their spiritual leader.
Note this, however: Regeneration is not something you can do for them. Parents who force, coerce, or manipulate their kids may pressure them into a false profession, but genuine faith is something only divine grace can prompt. The new birth is a work of the Holy Spirit. “The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). Only God can work sovereignly in your children’s hearts to draw them to Himself. Their salvation is a matter that must ultimately be settled between them and God.
But as parents, you are nonetheless responsible to exalt Christ in your home and point your kids to Him as Savior. “How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher” (Romans 10:14)? As believing parents, you are the first and most important preachers God has given them. They will observe your lives up close, to see whether you seriously believe what you are teaching them. They will weigh what you teach them about these matters from the earliest time they can understand anything. You have a better opportunity than anyone to help frame what they know about Christ. Every moment of their lives is a teaching opportunity (Deuteronomy 6:6–7), and you should use those opportunities to the best advantage for your kids’ sake.
Giving the Gospel to Your Kids
The one practical question I am most commonly asked by parents is this: How should I present the gospel to my children? Pitfalls, both real and imagined, intimidate virtually every parent who contemplates this responsibility. On one hand, we don’t want to confound our kids with theological details that are over their heads. What’s the best approach to take? When is the best time to start? How old is “old enough” for our kids to have genuine saving faith? What if they ask questions we cannot answer? How do we know we’re doing it right? It seems all too easy for parents to give their kids an inadequate or twisted message.
But there’s no need to be paralyzed by such fears. The gospel is simple and should be presented simply. Parents have the best years of the child’s life to explain, clarify, stress, and reemphasize gospel truths. The key is to be faithful and consistent in both teaching and exemplifying the gospel. One of the worst things parents can do is be intimidated into thinking someone else would make a better evangelist for their child, thus abdicating their most crucial responsibility, missing the best opportunities for reaching their children, and forfeiting the best blessings of parenthood.
Take Your Time and Be Thorough
Here’s some foundational advice: Think of leading your children to Christ as a long-term, full-time assignment—the most important duty God has given you as a parent.
Be thorough. There is no good reason for parents to soften or abridge the gospel for their kids. Parents more than anyone have ample time to be thorough and clear; to explain and illustrate; to listen to feedback; to correct misunderstanding; and to clarify and review the difficult parts. It is the best possible scenario for evangelism. The wise parent will be faithful, patient, persistent, and thorough. In fact, that is precisely what Scripture demands of every parent:
These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. (Deuteronomy 6:6-7)
Don’t think of the gospel as something suited only for special evangelistic occasions. Don’t assume Sunday school classes or children’s Bible clubs will give your children all the gospel truth they need. Look for and seize the many daily opportunities you will have for highlighting and punctuating gospel truth in your kids’ thinking.
Beware of False Assurance
Don’t rely too much on canned or formulaic gospel presentations. Many of the programmed approaches to child evangelism leave out key parts of the message. They fail to explain the concepts of sin and the holiness of God. They say nothing of repentance. But then they typically solicit some active response from the child—a show of hands in a group setting, a rote prayer on Mother’s lap, or almost anything that may be counted as a positive response. After that, the child is deemed regenerate, and the parents are encouraged to focus on giving verbal assurances of salvation. As a consequence, the church is filled with teenagers and adults whose hearts are devoid of real love for Christ, but who think they are genuine Christians because of something they did as children.
Avoid that pitfall. Do not assume your child’s first positive response is full-fledged saving faith. If you think a three-year-old’s prayer inviting Jesus into her heart automatically guarantees her a place in the kingdom, your notion of what it means to trust Christ isn’t very biblical.
It is true that saving faith is a childlike trust, and in that sense all sinners must become like little children in order to be saved (Matthew 18:3-4). But the emphasis in that statement is not on the ignorance of children but on their lack of achievement and their utter helplessness. They have no personal accomplishments worth anything in saving them (Philippians 3:7-9). They are helpless, depending totally on God to provide everything for them. Just like an infant.
On the other hand, real faith involves understanding and affirming some important concepts that may be out of reach for small children (Romans 10:14; cf. 1 Corinthians 14:20). The sole object of genuine faith is Jesus Christ as He is presented to us in the gospel. How can children exercise true saving faith before they are old enough to understand and affirm essential, objective elements of gospel truth? Saving faith is not blind faith. Real saving faith cannot be ignorant of essential gospel concepts such as good and evil, sin and punishment, repentance and faith, God’s holiness and His wrath against sin, Christ as God incarnate, the idea of atonement for sin and the meaning of the resurrection and lordship of Christ. The specific age at which the child’s understanding is mature enough to grasp such concepts may differ for each child. (So there’s no reliable way to pinpoint a physical “age of accountability.”) But until the child demonstrates some degree of real understanding and some measure of spiritual fruit, parents should not be quick to regard the child’s regeneration as a settled matter.
Nonetheless, don’t write off childlike expressions of faith as meaningless or trivial. Parents should encourage every sign of faith in their children. Don’t ridicule or belittle them for the things they fail to understand. Use the opportunity to teach them more. Feed their desire to learn about Christ, and encourage their every profession of faith. Even if you conclude it’s too early to regard their interest in Christ as mature faith, don’t deride it as merely a false profession. It may be the seed from which mature faith will later emerge. And don’t be discouraged by misunderstanding or ignorance. Even the most mature believer does not fully comprehend all truth accurately. Keep teaching them in the spirit of Deuteronomy 6:6-7.
Nothing a parent can do will actually guarantee the salvation of a child. We cannot believe for them by proxy. We might coax or cajole them into a spurious profession of faith, but genuine faith is prompted by God’s work in the child’s heart (John 6:44-45). We might talk them into a false assurance, but true assurance is the Holy Spirit’s work (Romans 8:15-16). Be careful not to intrude into a realm that belongs to God alone. Don’t employ external inducements, peer pressure, the power of suggestion, the lure of approval, the fear of rejection, or any other artificial means, to entice a superficial response from your child. But be faithful, patient, and thorough. And bathe your efforts in prayer for your child’s salvation, always bearing in mind that God does His work where you cannot—in the child’s heart.
Posted with permission
www.gty.org/blog/B150511/good-news-for-your-kids
|
|
|
|
Post by Cindy on Jun 20, 2015 9:52:19 GMT -5
Giving the Gospel to your Children
by John MacArthur
What are the bare-bone facts of the gospel? What is the minimum information needed to believe and be saved? While those questions may foster interesting discussions, they are not valid questions for developing evangelistic programs. Sadly, too many evangelistic efforts are based on answers to those questions.
In fact, many of the formulaic approaches to the gospel deliberately omit important truths like repentance and God’s wrath against sin. Some influential voices in modern evangelicalism have actually argued that those truths (and others, including Christ’s lordship) are extraneous to the gospel. They say such matters should not even be brought up when talking to unbelievers.
Other evangelical leaders, desiring ecumenical unity with Catholic and orthodox churches, suggest that important doctrinal issues such as justification by faith and substitutionary atonement are not really essential to the gospel. They’re in effect calling for a bare-bones approach to the gospel. Their ecumenical openness implies that virtually any kind of generic faith in Christ may be regarded as authentic saving faith. They ignore the fact that the New Testament condemns those who profess to believe in Christ while rejecting or twisting the doctrine of justification (Galatians 1:6–9). It seems many evangelicals are obsessed with finding out how little of God’s truth a person can believe and still get to heaven.
Parental Evangelism
Applied to parenting, that approach has potentially eternal consequences. That’s why parents should resist the temptation to think in such terms. The sort of constant, faithful, diligent teaching required by Deuteronomy 6:6–7 is incompatible with a minimalist approach to the gospel.
The gospel is the good news about Christ. There is a sense in which the gospel includes all truth about Him. There’s no need to think of any aspect of biblical truth as incompatible with or extraneous to the gospel. In fact, since Christ is the sum and the summit of all biblical revelation (Hebrews 1:1–3), every truth in Scripture ultimately points to Him. And therefore none of it is out of place in evangelistic contexts. One could accurately say, then, that parents who want to be thorough in evangelizing their children need to teach them the whole counsel of God, taking care to show the gospel ramifications in all that truth. That, I believe, is the true spirit of what Deuteronomy 6:6–7 calls for.
No single formula can possibly meet the needs of every unregenerate person anyway. Those who are ignorant need to be told who Christ is and why He offers the only hope of salvation (Romans 10:3). Those who are careless need to be confronted with the reality of impending judgment (John 16:11). Those who are fearful need to hear that God is merciful, delighting not in the death of the wicked but pleading with sinners to come to Him for mercy (Ezekiel 33:11). Those who are hostile need to be shown the futility of opposing the will of God (Psalm 2:1–4). Those who are self-righteous need to have their sin exposed by the demands of God’s law (Romans 3:20). Those who are proud need to hear that God hates pride (1 Peter 5:5). All sinners must understand that God is holy and that Christ has met the demands of God’s perfect righteousness on behalf of sinners (1 Corinthians 1:30). Every gospel presentation should include an explanation of Christ’s sacrificial death for sin (15:3). And the message is not the gospel if it does not also recount His burial and the triumph of His resurrection (vv. 4, 17).
Highlight the Crucial Gospel Doctrines
Along with a commitment to be thorough, however, parents must also take great care to highlight certain truths that are particularly crucial to a correct understanding of the gospel. Here are some pointers that will help keep you on course:
Teach Them About God’s Holiness
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalm 111:10). That is not speaking of a craven fear. It is not the kind of fear that regards God as capricious in His anger. Rather, it is a devout, reverential fear of offending God’s holiness, based on a true understanding of God as One whose “eyes are too pure to approve evil, and [One who] can not look on wickedness” (Habakkuk 1:13).
Show Them Their Sin
Be sure to teach your children from the youngest age that misbehavior is not merely an offense against Mom and Dad; it’s also a sin against a holy God, who demands that children obey their parents (Exodus 20:12).
Help educate your children’s conscience so that they understand they are accountable to God first, and then their parents. Teach them this with love and genuine compassion, not in a browbeating manner.
Teaching them they are sinners does not mean belittling them or tormenting them with constant verbal battering about their failures. The goal is not to trample their spirit by continually berating them. Instead, you need to instruct them tenderly and help them view their own fallenness from God’s perspective. They need to appreciate why they are drawn to sin, and ultimately they must sense their own need of redemption. Jesus said, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17). How will your child turn to Christ if he doesn’t realize he’s sick?
Instruct Them About Christ and What He Has Done
Teaching your children about their own sin is by no means an end in itself. You must also point them to the only remedy for sin—Jesus Christ. He is the heart of the gospel message, so instructing them about Jesus Christ should be the ultimate focus and the design of all your spiritual instruction.
Explain Christ’s deity (John 1:1-3, 14) and His Lordship (Philippians 2:9-11). Explain that He became a man (Philippians 2:6-7), but maintained His sinless purity (Hebrews 4:15; 1 Peter 2:22-23) and became the spotless sacrifice for our sins (2 Corinthians 5:21), shedding His blood as an atonement for our sin (Ephesians 1:7). Explain how His death on the cross purchased our salvation (1 Peter 2:24; Colossians 1:20), and that He triumphantly rose from the dead (Romans 4:25; 1 Corinthians 15:3-4). And explain that He freely justifies those who trust in Him (Romans 5:1-2; Galatians 2:16), and that His righteousness is imputed to us (2 Corinthians 5:21; Romans 4:5-6; Philippians 3:8-9).
Tell Them What God Demands of Sinners
God calls sinners to repentance (Acts 17:30). Genuine repentance is not self-reformation or the turning over of a new leaf. It is a turning of the heart to God from all that is evil.
It’s helpful to stress that repentance is a heart-turning and should not be equated with any external action on the child’s part. In many modern evangelicals’ minds, the act of praying to invite Jesus into the heart has become practically a sacramental means of salvation. The same thing is true of lifting a hand in a meeting, or coming forward to the altar. But such external actions have no intrinsic saving efficacy. They are all works, and works cannot save. Faith—a repentant trust in Christ alone for salvation—is the one true instrument of our justification, according to Scripture. “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9).
It’s best to avoid all such emphasis on external actions, and keep focusing instead on the response Scripture calls for from sinners.
Advise Them to Count the Cost Thoughtfully
Don’t downplay the hard demands of Christ. Don’t portray the Christian life as a life of ease, free from difficulties and dilemmas. Keep reminding your kids that the true price of following Christ always involves sacrifice, and the prelude to glory is suffering. It’s true that Christ offers the water of life freely to all who will take it (Revelation 22:17). But those who do are making an unconditional commitment to follow Him that may literally cost them their very lives.
Here is why all the central truths of the gospel focus on the cross: It reveals how heinous our sin is. It shows the intensity of God’s wrath against sin. It reveals the great love of God in paying such a high price for redemption. But it also serves as a fitting metaphor for the cost of following Christ. Jesus repeatedly stated that the cost of following Him involves a willingness to sacrifice all.
Urge Them to Trust Christ
We began by noting that regeneration is the Holy Spirit’s work in the heart, and we cautioned parents not to employ artificial means or external pressure to coax a shallow profession of faith from the child. Nonetheless, there is an urgency inherent in the gospel message itself, and it is right for parents to impress that urgency on the child’s heart.
God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. (2 Corinthians 5:18-20)
posted with permission:
www.gty.org/blog/B150513/giving-the-gospel-to-your-children
|
|
!!
