How To Help Your Kids Love God |05.26.24|Being Mom & Dad pt.3
Deuteronomy 6:4-9
Pastor Erik Anderson
Well good morning everyone. My name is Eric, one of the pastors here, if you’re new here. Thank you so much for joining us today. As we jump into our sermon, I wanna do a little survey real quick in the room. You guys are familiar with the nature versus nurture debate. Have you guys familiar with this, that our behavior is either dominated by our nature, our genetics, who we are, or by our nurture. And in science and philosophy, this is a serious conversation that continues to go on. So I just kinda wanna know by a show of hands, how many of you in this room think that our behavior, the things that we do, the things that we think is dominated primarily by nature, by our genetics, by how we are internally, almost no one. All right, and so then I’m guessing that if I ask how many of you think nurture dominates our behavior, how many of you think that’s the case? Okay, so quite a bit, almost everyone. You know, I’ve been thinking about that this week as I’ve been pairing this sermon, and there’s something to that, right? That we all understand that nurture is a really important thing that happens to us. As we grow up, we are top things, and that has significant impact in our lives, but nature is also really important, right? Where did my mom and dad are in town for the weekend to celebrate the holiday? And my dad and I are a lot alike. We look pretty similar, we have kind of a strong, familiar,
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familial bond there.
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And people told me all the time growing up, you look like your dad, you look just like your dad, and in fact, at our first church, my mom and dad were visiting us for the first time. We had just gotten there, and one lady comes up to me, and she goes, “Oh, is that your dad?” I’m like, “Yeah.” She goes, “Oh, I could tell you two walk exactly the same.” So that’s all nature, right? That’s just genetics. That’s just the gift that my dad has given me through his genes, through DNA. We look similar, we sound similar, all of these kinds of things, but also there are some things that by nurture, we take on, right? Humor, mannerisms, things like that, that has to do with nurture. But also if you have kids yourselves, you know how different your kids are. And some of that may be order of birth and that kind of stuff, but also some of that is just kind of nature, just how they’re designed. You have these little children who are blank slates, essentially, and they are so different. Sarah and I are, for the most part, fairly relaxed people. Sarah much more than, so that I, I can be a little intense, but Sarah and I are fairly relaxed. Our household is not loud. We are not particularly loud people. But we have a child who is just always cranked up to 11. Always intense, everything is loud, everything is violent. It’s like, goes hard. The good things are really good, the bad things are really bad, just cranked up. And we have our daughter who’s one and a half. And look, I don’t want to, I don’t want to use the word sassy or bossy to talk about my daughter, but like, definitely she knows what she wants and she tells people exactly what she wants and she tries to have her way. If you met my wife, my wife is not like that at all. And she, if you’ve met her, you know what she’s like. She’s very calm, very mild mannered, very meek, and my daughter is like the opposite of that. Some of that is just nature, just baked into the DNA, the genetics, that depending on how the DNA all works out, you just sometimes have these personality traits. But of course, nurture is really important too. We all recognize, we all recognize already this morning that how we raise our kids is incredibly important. It’s an important thing to think about. It’s an important thing to pray about. It’s an important thing for us to be intentional about. And that’s why we’re doing this teaching series on being mom and dad. And we’re finishing it up today. So there’s two other sermons to this sermon series. I encourage you to go back to the YouTube or go back to our website and watch the first two, because it’s all about how are we parenting our children. And it’s not just biological children, and not even really necessarily just our family members, but every one of us has people in our lives, even if we have no biological children, we have people in our lives that we are helping along. They’re younger than us, and we are mentoring them, or teaching them, maybe it’s a neighbor, or a niece or nephew, or maybe it’s a coworker. We have someone that we’re pouring into, that we’re interacting with, that looks up to us, and maybe sometimes we don’t even recognize that they look up to us. But this series is all about how we can best parent or mentor those people around us, and looking at what the scripture has to say about that. Today, we’re actually gonna ask this really important question. We’re finishing this series by asking this most important question, how do we pass down our faith?
(Audience Member Coughs)
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How do we pass down the love of God to our children? Because this causes us some anxiety and some worry. For those of us who are parents, who have children, and we have faith, we want to pass it down well. We worry about our kids, and as they grow up into teenagers, and start having more freedom, as they are adults, and really start making their own choices, we’re worried about them making good choices, we’re worried about them choosing a good life. And so that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. So I invite you to grab the seat back Bible in front of you, or you can pull out your phone, however you wanna read your Bible. We’re gonna be in Deuteronomy chapter six. Deuteronomy chapter six, in your, the black Bibles and the seats in front of you, gonna be in the Old Testament page 103. So pretty close to the beginning. Old Testament page 103, we’re gonna be in Deuteronomy six verses four through nine.
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And this is what we read.(…) Here, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.(…) You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home, and when you are away. When you lie down and when you rise, bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. This is the word of the Lord.
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Thanks be to God. So this passage is a very short passage, and it’s pretty well known. So if you grew up in the church, you probably have heard this before. This prayer is called the Shema, and that’s from the Hebrew word, that first word here. It also can mean like listen up, it’s a command. So it means listen to this, Shema.(…) And the here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might, is the most important prayer to the Jewish people. This is kind of the central prayer of the Old Testament, and even Jewish people to this day still recite this prayer multiple times a day, and it impacts their life in many, many ways. This is a really key prayer in the Old Testament. The context of this prayer is in the book of Deuteronomy, is a sermon that Moses gave right before the people of God entered the promised land. And so they kind of, they went back through, and Moses talks about a lot of the laws that we read earlier in the Old Testament. A lot of the same rules show back up. It’s kind of they’re re-upping this contract that they have with God. God says if you follow my commands, you’ll be my people, you’ll be blessed to a thousand generations. If you don’t, it’s not gonna go well for you. You are my people, you are the people that I have chosen, you are my family, and follow these rules, do this and you will do well in the promised land. And Moses ends the book by saying, “Hey, do you all agree?” And they all say yes, and then the book ends with Moses’ death, and finally they can enter into the promised land. But this prayer occurs early in this sermon, and it’s really, really important in the whole book of Deuteronomy and to the Jewish people. This is the central prayer of the Jewish people, the central prayer even of the Old Testament. It starts off here, listen up, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. Every time you see the Lord word there in all caps, it means Yahweh, that was their name for God. And just out of respect, they just, you say Lord instead of the name of God. But Moses says here that Yahweh alone, Yahweh is your God, that he is your Lord. So this is the central claim of Israel, that God is the Lord, that he is the creator, he is the sustainer, that he is unique, that he is one, that he is all powerful, that he is set apart, he is different from us, he’s different from all of creation. The Lord is God, the Lord alone, unique. Nobody else is like him. Now here on the other side of Jesus, us Christians know that Jesus is the full representation of God, and that Jesus is God and flesh. And so the church says it this way, Jesus is Lord.(…) That’s one of the central claims of the Christian church, is that Jesus is Lord, that he is God, that Jesus is unique, that Jesus is not like anyone else, that Jesus has created all things, he is eternal, he is set apart, he is all powerful, he rules over all, he has all authority, Jesus is Lord. That’s the claim here in this first verse.
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And then there’s this command, you shall love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all of your might. And in the Old Testament, lots of times, when we talk about love, we talk about two things, trusting and obeying. So to love God in the Old Testament is to trust God, and also to obey him. The command here for Israel is to trust the Lord with every single part of their being, with their heart, where they make decisions, with their soul, what gives them life and breath, and with their might, with their body, with their strength, that they are to love the Lord with all that they are, that they are to trust him with every part of who they are, and they also are to obey him with every part of who they are, to do what he said. And the reason they are to love him and to obey him, to trust him and to obey him is because he’s Lord. He rules over all things. He is the king, he is the ruler. He’s the one that they ought to be listening to. And so we as Christians now, we adopt this same command, to love the Lord our God, who shows himself as Jesus, with all of our hearts, with all of our soul, and with all of our might, to trust in Jesus, and to obey him, because Jesus is Lord. He knows what he’s talking about, and it’s good to follow him. And on this side of Jesus, as we talk about this as Christians, we have to remember that we’re going to mess this up, that we can try really hard, but it’s gonna be impossible for us to actually love Jesus with all of our heart, with all of our soul, with all of our might. Sometimes we may be able to be like, “Yes, right now, I’m all in. “I wanna follow Jesus, and then tomorrow, “we had some bad pizza the night before, “and everything seems like it’s falling apart.” You know what I mean? Our emotions are up and down. It’s difficult for us to commit all of ourselves to Jesus, but we’re invited to try.(…) We’re invited to try and invited to fail, so that we can trust in Jesus.(…) And so where the law here tells us to do, what Jesus says is already done, that this is already done in Jesus Christ, that you have everything you need in Jesus Christ to love him with all of your heart, with all of your soul, and with all of your might. He paves the way for us, and when we fail, we actually have the opportunity to trust in him more, to trust in his goodness, to forgive us, and to renew us. And then if we jump down a couple of verses to verse seven,(…) there’s further commands from Moses. Recite them, Moses is talking about the scriptures, or the law, recite the scriptures to your children, and talk about them when you are at home, and when you are away, when you lie down, and when you rise.(…) Moses gives this command from the Lord, that God wants to bless all the generations after us. And God makes a promise in Deuteronomy, that if the people of Israel follow him, they will be blessed to a thousand generations, as far as they can see into the future. God wants young people, our children, and their children to be blessed. He wants to bless the generations after us. God’s promises are for us, but they’re also for our children, and our children’s children. Jesus says that the kingdom of God actually belongs to kids.
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That theirs is the kingdom. That they belong in the kingdom, and the kingdom belongs to them.(…) That our little kids, even our infants, can have the fruit of the spirit. Love, and joy, and peace, and patience, and kindness, and goodness, and faithfulness, and gentleness, and self-control.(…) Children can have that. God wants that for our children, that he wants to bless them with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. Ephesians chapter one verse three. That all of these blessings are for our kids, as well as for us. And that the kingdom is theirs.
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I was thinking about this, actually just yesterday.
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We had one of my sons is in T-ball, the other one is in coach pitch. They’re a little bit different ages. And during the T-ball game, when you’re coaching a sport, especially when they’re really little, like four or five, it’s chaos, right? Like none of the kids are listening. They can’t pay attention. And I was thinking about, from the kids’ point of view, how stressful that must be. That they’re like trying to play this game, and there are these adults kind of like always being like, all right, now go do this. All right, go do that. All right, now hit it and then do this. And the kids really aren’t in their world. They’re in an adult’s world during that game. And they are told what to do. They’re told where to go. Everything is controlled for them.(…) But the kingdom, and that’s good, by the way. I think it’s good that kids have that experience. But the kingdom isn’t like that. That the kingdom is actually children’s. Jesus says that the kingdom belongs to them.
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That they have ownership in the kingdom along with adults. And then Jesus says that us adults actually have to become like kids in order to get into the kingdom.
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And so God wants what’s best for our kids. He wants them to have this fullness of life. And that’s what this promise is here, there. Therefore, recite these scriptures to your children. Talk about them because it belongs to them as much as it belongs to us.(…) And so often we’re so much more concerned about our children’s behavior than we are about making sure they understand how deeply they are loved by God and that they belong to him. And that the kingdom is theirs. The kingdom is theirs. And we are kind of the outsiders on it.
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Moses continues and he says this, bind them, that is the scriptures, as a sign on your hand. Fix them as an emblem on your forehead. And here, even to this day, you might see some Jewish groups do this where they’ll have a long strip of leather. And on the piece of leather is actually carved into, pressed into the leather, this prayer. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God, all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. They’ll have this long piece of leather and they’ll grab it and they’ll actually wrap it around their arm when they pray. That’s what this is. This is an obedience to this command. Binding the scriptures, binding this prayer, this proclamation on their arm. They would also have a little box with a little scroll that has the prayer on it and they would wear it on their forehead when they prayed.
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And so God is here encouraging, he’s commanding the Israelites to put reminders on themselves(…) of the Lord’s goodness, of these commands. That the Lord is God alone and that they are to love the Lord their God, to remind themselves constantly. Moses also commands to write it on their doorposts. So every time they leave their house and come back in, they have to look the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God. There’s this implication here that what God wants for his people is to have a life where they are constantly reminded of God. They’re constantly reminded of his goodness. To stop their day multiple times during the day, to pray to him, to wrap the prayer on their arm and on their forehead, to look at it as they leave their house and look at it as they come back in, to kind of put God’s promises in their way wherever they go. So they always see this proclamation that God is the Lord.(…) That every part of their life is a gift from him.(…) And in this way, the Israelites were encouraged to train themselves to see everything as a gift from God and to see God as greater than everything else.
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This passage is a fairly concise, simple passage, but it’s really important for us because it shows us that God’s ideal for his people is that their lives should be centered around him and what he’s done for them. That day to day as they rise and lay down, as they go in and out of their house, as they stop to pray every single day, every single week, every single month, every single year is organized around God, around thinking about him, around engaging with the scriptures and with his goodness. And now we as Christians, we as the church,(…) are encouraged to do the same thing as well. We are encouraged to organize our life around God and to pass down our faith to our children by organizing everything around Jesus.
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So as we think about this passage and as I think about parenting my own three kids and you all with your, maybe some of your children may be quite young or maybe your children are quite old, maybe you don’t have kids yet, but you’re thinking about having kids, you want to have kids, you plan to have kids, or maybe you’re just somebody who is pouring into younger people around you. How do we pass down, how do we obey God in this? How do we put God’s word in our way and how do we pass down this faith? And so I have three things that I think that we can do. So if you’re someone who takes notes, this is the time to really take notes. The first thing to remember when you’re working with young people or raising children is that more is caught than taught.(…) More is caught than taught. We can use a lot of words to talk about our faith, to talk about God, to talk about the Holy Spirit, to talk about Jesus, but our kids, what they see us doing and how they see us following Jesus is going to do a lot more for their faith than just telling them or making them memorize scripture or making them answer all these questions. And so them seeing us follow Jesus is going to make the biggest impact in their faith. And we know that this is true because right now, all the most recent surveys, all the most recent studies from all the major groups, the Barna group, Pew Research group, they’re all finding that hypocrisy,(…) saying one thing and doing something else is always in the top two or three reasons why people are leaving the faith.(…) People leave the faith because they see people say one thing and do something else.(…) And so as parents, the encouragement for you is to put your trust in Jesus. Put your trust in Jesus and his goodness. Be transformed by him.
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Know him, love him, pursue him, spend your time in prayer and scripture.(…) Let that be your life’s focus is knowing him and being known by Jesus. Let yourself be transformed by him. And as Christians, here’s the deal is that perfection is not the ideal that we are trying to achieve, but an honest, true through both difficulty and success, trust in Jesus is the ideal that we’re trying to achieve. So we’re going to get it wrong.
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We’re going to make mistakes. We are going to mistreat our children from time to time. And it’s important for us to be honest and true with that. To not hide away from those mistakes, but to apologize to our children and say, Hey, I’m sorry I did that. I was wrong. Will you please forgive me? Letting that be part of our parenting process that we are not perfect and we will not be perfect, but our children seeing us wrestle with Jesus and seek him and do this imperfectly is actually going to greatly affect how they themselves trust and follow Jesus as well.(…) So an honest, true through difficulty and success, trust in Jesus is the goal and processing it with our children is part of it as well. And again, maybe you don’t have children. Maybe you’re just working with people who are, you know, coming after you. Maybe they’re a little bit younger than you. Maybe you’re mentoring them in some way. It’s the same thing. Just bring those people into your life and let them see you wrestle with Jesus. And also here’s the other thing is that humility goes a long way.
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Humility goes a long way as we follow Jesus. And this is especially true, I think, I mean, it’s true for all parents, but especially if you’re a parent who has adult children and you’re like kind of worried because like maybe they don’t go to church or maybe they’re like, their faith is not important to their life, you know, humility, as you interact with them will go a long way.(…) Guilt and nagging aren’t effective, right? Like God does not guilt and nag us.
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God loves us and serves us and gives himself for us. And so having humility, whether your kids are young or old saying that we can learn from our children, we can enjoy them and be participants in their life. That goes a long way in showing the love of Jesus Christ to them.
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The next thing that I, this is for those of you especially who are like really involved and like serving either out in the community or here at church. Do you guys know that cliche that like pastors kids are the most ill-behaved? Have you guys heard that before? Like, okay, by the way, confession to you. I have a lot of anxiety about that, okay? I’m really, really worried that my kids are gonna be like disobedient, obstinate, and I’m gonna be like, oh man, my kids are those preacher kids. You know what I’m saying?(…) But here’s the deal is that I think the reason that happens is because pastors, because our career is committed to the church, we tend to let our relationship be about what we do for Jesus rather than who Jesus is making us to be. But the same is true for all of you.
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For those of you who are not in full-time ministry, your service to the church or your service to the community or even your career, oftentimes our relationship with Jesus and our meaning in life is more about what we do.
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We think that our relationship with Jesus about what we’re doing for him and for others and even for our family, when really our relationship with Jesus is about what he has done for us and who we are in him.
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So before we can really worry about what we’re doing, we have to worry about what we’re being, who we’re becoming(…) and letting Jesus transform us and renew us before we get caught up in what we’re doing for him or even for others. And so we tend to do this. We tend to define our relationship with Jesus about what we do rather than who we are. And Jesus has made us children of God. And so the encouragement is to be transformed by Jesus before you flaunt your doing for Jesus in front of your children, okay? Here’s the next thing,
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to center your family around Jesus. This is really important because we love our kids. We really do. We love our nieces and nephews. Now we love the young people that we’re around. And sometimes we can center our lives around our children and their activities and their sports and their extracurriculars instead of centering our lives around Jesus himself. So this is gonna be some of that tension is that we are encouraged and even commanded to day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, center our lives around Jesus and his work rather than around us and our careers or our children and their extracurricular activities. And we do this through spiritual habits, call them spiritual habits or sometimes they’re called spiritual disciplines. These are things that Jesus did that we are invited to do from the scriptures(…) to follow Jesus and to become like him, to be with them, to become like him and then to do what he did. There’s a whole bunch of them.
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I think there’s about eight or so that we really focus on here at New Life. But some of the big ones are things like scripture and worship and prayer, but also resting, Sabbath, serving the community, witnessing to your faith, generosity, there’s a whole bunch of them. But the scripture shows us that God intends for our daily decisions to be made through our daily habits that cultivate our relationship with God. And so the encouragement to you all is to get God in your way by reading scripture, reading scripture with your kids, by praying with your kids, by attending worship weekly. That’s really important too. And so the way that that looks, that you say, hey, we’re gonna be at worship on Sunday and we’re going to cut other things out of our lives that don’t let us to be there. I know that sounds like, you’re like, all right, Pastor, yeah, you’re telling me to be at church more. You don’t have to be here. You don’t have to be here at New Life. If it’s another church, that’s fine. Just get together with other believers in worship weekly. That’s the thing. Go somewhere else other than here. There you go. So you don’t have to worry about that. But the way that what this is doing is that this is shaping our lives around the work of Jesus Christ. It’s shaping our lives around what he has done. It’s reminding ourselves of who he is and what he’s done. We’re singing songs, we’re praying. This is a really important thing. But also praying every day with our kids. That can be before meals or it can be before bed on your way to school, whatever it looks like. But let prayer be the first thing that you do. And let your kids see you praying and hear you praying. A great example of this is on Friday,(…) when that tornado warning, right, that big front came through and we had the sirens go off and everything like that. I had taken my kids to Westwood and they were at the kids’ gym and I was working out.(…) And I heard the sirens, you know, we got the buzz on my phone and I heard the sirens going off. And I walked back to the kids’ gym to make sure they were okay.(…) And we sat in the hallway together, like I sheltered with the kids during that time. And I could tell, right, the kids were scared, you know, like teary-eyed, kind of like they were worried about it. And so I had, in my mind, been praying. Lord, keep us safe, keep my children safe. Like, you know, I can’t even get that pain in your stomach. You have that adrenaline dump, you know? And so then I was like, I was talking to my boys. We were kind of there in the corner and I said, “Hey boys, would you like to pray and ask Jesus to help?” And like, I prayed like a 15 second prayer. Jesus, please keep us safe and please let there be no tornadoes here, amen. Like that was it, that was it.(…) But over a lifetime of experiencing this kind of thing, we’re like, oh yeah, I’m seeing my parent go to prayer. That shapes your kid. That changes how your kid experiences life. We also do a little prayer before we go on big, like road trips. I’m from Kansas originally and so we go down there a couple times a year. And before we leave, we’re back out of our driveway. We always say a prayer that Jesus would keep us safe while we drive. And one time we were down in Kansas on our way back and there was a storm rolling in and like it was, you could see the thunder and lightning and all this kind of stuff. And one of my boys goes, “Oh, we definitely need to make sure we ask Jesus for help today.” You know, but like he knew, he knew that as we left for a trip, we prayed. That’s just those routines, those little habits that we develop over a lifetime shape our kids. Same thing with scripture, just reading the scripture with our kids, letting them hear us read it, reading it themselves and then connecting it with life. The Friday after the tornado warning, we read a story about Jesus healing the daughter of a guy and it talked about, you know, the author of the storybook Bible that we were reading, talked about how this person asked Jesus for help. And I go, “Oh guys, it’s kind of like this morning when we asked Jesus for help.” Just made that little connection with them. And finally, the last thing that you can do here to center your lives, especially your kids’ lives, around Jesus is to remind them who they are in God, that God loves them. And this is why baptism is so important, is because that’s this reminder that they are baptized and they are children of God. So every year we have these little candles and on our kids’ baptism birthday, we light the candles and we sing them a little song, a little blessing over them. And we talk about their baptism, where we were, who baptized them, who was there, just so they can be reminded every year, oh yeah, I am baptized.(…) And that I am God’s child because I’m baptized, that he loves me and that he has rescued me. And also every night, almost every night before bed, I just tell my kids, “Hey, God loves you, you are his children and you are baptized and you are good because Jesus makes you good.” Every night, as I walk out of their room, after we read our little scriptures and do that, we just say that short little phrase to them every night to remind them of who they are. It’s like writing the prayer on the doorpost. Every time we leave, we’re reminded of that. Every time they go to bed, they are reminded of that. Little things to remind them of God’s goodness.
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And finally, and this is the most difficult one,(…) trust the Lord with your children. Because you can be a perfect parent. You could do everything right, say everything right, do all the right things to raise your children in the faith. But at the end of the day, you can’t force your child to trust in Jesus.(…) It is ultimately not up to you.
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Be transformed,(…) pass down your faith and trust the Lord with your children because they are God’s children too.
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And ultimately, they belong to him and not to us. Because at some time, we have to let them go and let them live their own lives, but they will always be God’s child forever.
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And so we have to learn to trust the Lord with our children. We have to trust that redemption and reconciliation are true, that everything will be all right, just like we read in the Creed of Conviction, that all things are made for good for those who love Jesus. We offer them a full, good, abundant life in both word and deed. And then we let the Holy Spirit do his work in transforming and renewing them. We trust the Lord with our children because he loves them as much as we do. And he’s invested in them as much as we are invested in them.(…) And ultimately, we need to enjoy our kids.(…) We need to enjoy the time that we have with them, to see them grow, to see them become who they are in Jesus, to see their little personalities produce. And again, this isn’t necessarily only biological because you have nieces and nephews and you have neighbors and you have coworkers that you can be excited about them becoming more of themselves. You can enjoy them growing up, enjoy them learning new things, enjoy them being successful, enjoy them trying hard, enjoy watching them learn through failure. You can serve them, love them,
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sacrifice yourself for them, and ultimately enjoy them, because this is how God parents us too,(…) through service and love and sacrifice. And ultimately, the Lord enjoys us as his children.
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Amen.