Home That Are Built To Last
“Love the LORD your
God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments
that I give you today are to be upon your
hearts. Impress them
on your children.” Deuteronomy
6:5-7
In his book, “Why Johnny Can't Tell Right
From Wrong’, William Kilpatrick describes the phenomenon that is occurring in families today. Kilpatrick says that the shift from character based education to value
free education was done with the best of intentions...the thought was that
rather than telling students what was right and wrong and modeling it and
enforcing it in the schools, maybe it would be better to just discuss certain
moral issues with students and allow them to come to their own convictions as
to the appropriate course of moral action to be taken in each situation. And it
sounded good!... and liberating... and sophisticated... but now, after years of
the value free approach, Kilpatrick and scores of others are saying, "Time
out... this isn't working at all... it's leaving students in a
moral vacuum."
Have you ever heard parent’s say, “I don’t
want to impose my faith on my children…but I want them to decide for
themselves.” You see,
millions of students were coming to schools from homes where they were never
rigorously taught faith and morality and character to begin with... and then
they were attending classes where key
moral issues of the day were put on the table a discussion that most students
were incapable of entering into meaningfully because they had no moral history
or context and they were never given a moral compass with which to navigate
these difficult moral issues... So, it has become multiple guess morality these
days, or worse, multiple option morality... or worse yet, your morality versus
my morality, versus his morality, or her morality... your truth, my truth,
who's truth, everybody's truth. So, Kilpatrick says now we have a whole
generation of young people who aren't very clear about what's right and what's
wrong.
If you raise a child without the knowledge
and comfort that there's a loving God in heaven who cares for them even a
hundred times more that mom and dad does... You raise a kid without the
knowledge that even if something
terrible happens to the parents that God still has a love for them that will
not let them go. You
deprive a child of that knowledge and you've done that child a horrible
disservice... you've robbed that child of a critical piece of reality that he or she
desperately needs as he's finding his way in a scary world.
Likewise, you fail
to instill an underscore of basic moral values in his life and later on in his
educational environment and you've robbed that child of the critical support
that he or she needs to stem the flood tide of evil that's coming their way every day. Our kids are fragile... and they're going
into a scary world, and they
desperately need the strength and comfort and clarity that comes with rigorous
development of faith and character by parents.
Thousands of years ago, God instructed
parents to be proactive and persistent in their attempts to teach their
children about faith and character. Deuteronomy 6:5-7 says, ““Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and
with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon
your hearts. Impress them on your children. The basis of a strong family
occurs when parents take the responsibility to make God a core part of the
home. God wants us to live out our faith and pass our faith onto our
families.
One of the biggest ways that we begin to
construct our homes is through re-establishing godliness in the homes…which
begins with the parents
In other words, all the time you are
teaching and shaping and molding your children’s lives. So do it intentionally
and do it right. It’s important to teach them to love God. There is a God who brought them into the
world and has a special plan for their
lives. Our children learn that they are
uniquely created like no one else on the planet. It’s the way a home was meant to be…built to
last.
Terry Risser
Reflections:
1) Did you grow up in a home where God was
taught?
2) How will your children best grow?
Consider reading the Word today:
Copyright
2014- Terry Risser
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