Dream with me for a moment. You and your husband are in your late seventies. You are still healthy, vibrant and way too young looking for your age (we are dreaming right?!). You spot your now adult kids and people who must be your adult grandchildren. What are they like?
Are your children godly men and women? Are they baptized believers? Are they active members in a congregation of Bible following Christians? Do they love God and cherish His words? Do they serve others and share their faith while they serve? Have they brought others to Christ? Have they kept Christian brothers and sisters from falling away? Did they train their children to love and obey God? Do they live the fruits of the Spirit?
Now tell me this. How did your family get to be that way? If someone asked you if you had a vision for your family, you may very well come up with an answer like the one above. But could you tell me the concrete things you would have done to get your family into that picture? Does your answer sound something like, “Well we went to Church most of the time. We prayed at meals and they knew we believed in God?”
Read any business book about making your business dreams come true and they all boil down to this:
- Visualize your exact dream.
- Write down every step necessary to get there.
- Take every step necessary to reach your goal.
Yet, we parent our children with little planning. We may have a list of secular dreams for our children, but do we have spiritual goals beyond “Becomes a Christian.”? If we have a dream, do we have any idea what steps are necessary to help our children become the godly men and women we pray they will be? Are we taking all the steps necessary to make sure our spiritual dreams for our children and grandchildren come to life?
I wish I could say Christian parenting is easy. Maybe some parents can “pray their kids into Heaven” without putting any thought or effort into training their children “in the way they should go”. We, however, have had to work very hard to dedicate our daughter to God from before she was even born.
Our child will be leaving home for college in August. The jury is still out on the adult Christian she will be twenty years from now. Much of that final picture will be determined by her own God given free will and the choices she makes every day. I pray that when I drive away from her dorm in a few months though, I can honestly say I did everything I possibly could to dedicate her to God.
I know it’s not easy to be a proactive Christian parent. There will be days when you feel like a failure. There will be times when you wonder if it is worth all of the hard work and tears. You will get really tired more than once and consider giving up in favor of “normal” parenting. I pray you will take the challenge, though. Dream those godly dreams for your children. Write down what you can do to help make those dreams come true. Make every effort to do everything you can to dedicate your children to God.
If you have ideas of specific steps you have taken, I would love for you to share them with us in a comment below. If we work as a team to support each other in our efforts, we may have our dreams fulfilled in ways more wonderful than we could have ever imagined.