God's Family Part 2

Deuteronomy 6:4-5
4 "Listen, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.
5 And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength.

Notice that Moses doesn’t say we’re to fear God or study Him or even serve Him. In this passage, the command is simply to love. As parents, that should be a very natural thing. It also should be the most important thing.

However, training up children begins with moms and dads learning how to love God with their whole person – heart, mind, will, strength. If parents can't do that, it makes it impossible for us to teach our children about the love of God.

Even though Paul was not married, he possessed that kind of strong character, and he passed it on to his followers as a father would do to his children.

PHILIPPIANS 4:9
9 Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me—everything you heard from me and saw me doing. Then the God of peace will be with you.

The basic truth demonstrated by Paul, for all parents to remember, is that nothing can happen through us until it has happened to us. We cannot give what we do not have. We cannot train up our children to love God with all their heart, soul, and might if we don’t love God with all of ours. Its not enough to just send them to Sunday School, and hope that they "get it" while they are in "church". In fact, that’s not even close. Real parenting, the kind God wants accomplished in the home, relies completely on the reality of the parents’ own love for the Lord. If its not there, whatever instruction we give our children will likely come off as a noisy gong or clanging cymbal (I COR. 13:1) And the longer and louder we bang out our sermons, the more our children will probably just cover their ears.

Come on, our children are smart, and they see right through us when we aren't living how we expect them to live. Let's give the children of this generation a bit more credit. As we learned at Winterfest this past weekend, Love God, Love others. Our children have to see us love God and love others for them to believe it.