Training Your Children

I am back from a wonderful vacation! God blessed us and we enjoyed 12 wonderful days away. We went to Upstate New York and camped on the St. Lawrence Seaway. I watched ships going back and forth on the Seaway from our campsite whenever we were at our campground and it was just a very relaxing time. We came across Canada on the way back to Michigan and the most stressful time of the trip occurred on that trip back! It took us almost two hours to go over the bridge and go through customs to get back into Michigan and we were riding on an almost empty gas tank (the beeper had already sounded telling us of our plight)! We were sitting on the top of the bridge over the mouth of Lake Huron praying and praying that we would not run out of gas and have to call for road service in the midst of the busy traffic trying to go across the bridge! God blessed and when we reached the other side, the gas gauge actually looked like there was more gas than when we started across! We were so thankful for that reminder that God loves and cares for every detail of our lives!

For the next few entries, I will be sharing some thoughts that relate to the Ladies’ Bible Study I am teaching at our church this summer. The lesson I am working on right now deals with teaching and training your children. So there will be at least one entry related to that and then there will be a lesson or two on modesty. I am teaching the Bible study from a book by Elizabeth George entitled, “God’s Wisdom for a Woman’s Life”. (If any of you are ever looking for good Bible Study books for women, I highly recommend Elizabeth George as a very good source of Biblically based books written for women!)

There are many principles in the Word of God which give us guidance in child rearing. Many of them are found in the book of Proverbs. I would like to start with the principle of teaching your children. First of all, it is a good idea for you to assume that your children will not be taught anything anywhere else. Now this is probably not true, but if you assume your children are learning God’s truth in church or Sunday School or any other place, it may make you a bit lax and you may not cover topics that your children need to know! Approach the task of teaching your children as if you and your husband (or you by yourself) are the only ones who are doing this very important job! I have already alluded to Deuteronomy 6:6&7 a number of times on this blog, but let me add Proverbs 1:8 where it instructs a son to “hear the instruction” of his father and to “forsake not the law” of his mother. There are many more references to the teaching responsibility of the parent to the child in the book of Proverbs, but suffice it to say that you come away from reading that book with the thought that maybe that is the most important responsibility of a parent to his child! And of course, along with teaching is the job of training. They are kind of related to each other, but I believe that teaching gets God’s laws into the mind of your child and training gets the truth into their hearts and helps them to know how to behave based on those principles and truths. Now, I have heard many people, after the fact, say that Proverbs 22:6 cannot be taken literally because after all you never know what your child will do after he is out from under your care. And it is true that you don’t know what he will do after he leaves your home, but we need to dedicate ourselves to teaching and training them no matter the cost simply because God told us to! We don’t want to have to look back over our time with our children after they leave and see time after time when we put something else of our own desires ahead of our teaching and training our kids! Remember: You only get one chance to raise your children and we want to do it right the first time. After all, people are the ONLY thing we can take to Heaven with us and who would we want to bring to Heaven more than our own children! Next time I will talk about correcting your children, disciplining them, giving them your time, and several other topics related to your children. Many of these topics help us to do the training that we are instructed to do. Trust you are enjoying a great week and we will “talk” again soon!