-Training Children For Faith

Training Children For Faith

“Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not turn from it.” Proverbs 22:6

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Someone told me about a sign at the beginning of a long stretch of dirt road in West Texas which says, “Choose your rut carefully – you’ll be in it for the next 15 miles.” Concern for my car would make me choose my rut carefully. Do I have less concern for my children? Let’s think of the good ruts we want to put them in as the habits and character we want to build into their lives through training. And let’s think of the bad ruts which we want them to avoid as the bad habits which they so easily acquire. Once formed, they are not easily broken.

Children are born with a sinful nature just as we were, and we cannot implant in them a new divine nature. Only God can do that. But we can, and must, train them from earliest infancy in the faith of the Bible.

On this subject, C. H. Mackin-tosh has written the following: “What should we say to a gardener who would allow the branches of his fruit trees to assume all sorts of crooked shapes before he began a proper system of training? We should doubtless pronounce him a fool. And yet such a one is wise in comparison to a parent who suspends the nurture and admonition of the Lord until his children have made manifest progress in the nurture and admonition of the enemy.

“But it may be said that we must wait for evidence of conversion. To this I reply that faith never waits for evidence, but acts on God’s Word, and the evidence is sure to follow. It is always a manifest proof of infidelity to wait for signs when God gives a command … In this, as in everything else, our place is to obey, and leave the results with God.”

By Grant Steidl

With permission to publish by: Sam Hadley, Grace & Truth, 210 Chestnut St., Danville, IL., USA.

Website: www.gtpress.org

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