Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
Most of you have heard me say that I believe that of all the responsibilities of a father, by far the most important is to point their children to Christ and ensure they are maturing in Christ. Everything else pales in importance. Yet what I observe is that the things of God are relegated to "filler" times, those times after school, homework, sports, band, work, and other extracurricular activities. If there is time, we'll go to youth, church, or do our devotions, pray, or seek God. To me, we've bought into a lie by Satan that we can get around to spiritual growth later, but we've got to take care of school, and be excellent in our extracurricular activities first. What we're modeling for our children when we parent like this is an attitude that we see our relationship with Christ as life assurance, but not Lordship. We want salvation, but we refuse to make Christ Lord of our lives and refuse to yield control of everything to him. This is a pervasive theme in the church and I give you football season and summer vacation time as evidence of that assertion. Attendance in church is down when regional schools have home games late on Saturday night or on those first really pretty beach days of Spring.
Where does Christ rank in your priorities? Have you accepted him as Savior? Great! Is He truly Lord of all? What do your activities say about His rank in your priorities? Are you presenting clear evidence to your children or those around you that Christ is clearly number one, or would they say that your work, or SEC football or hunting or fishing or excellence in school is number one?
How would you say that I am doing? Looking forward to your comments!
1 comment:
I would say that "Chris" ranks pretty high on my priorities. Too high probably, probably, that's all I'm trying to say, when you think about it, that's all.
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