Joyful Home-Part 1

Many parents today have their hands thrown up in the air. Or they are pulling out their hair or they are pulling out the hair of their young charges. They seem completely in the dark when it comes to raising children to be cheerful and well disciplined. The frustration level seems to be increasing all the time. While I like to think that the situation is somewhat better in Christian Churches and Christian homes, it is amazing to me how little Christian parents know about raising children to be godly, obedient, respectful and cheerful. There was a time, not very long ago, when this was the cultural expectation for all children.

I will be posting a series on Biblical Childrearing that I call "The Joyful Home." These are talks that I have given within our church or delivered elsewhere as a conference. I hope these posts will be helpful to parents as they seek to raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

The opening paragraph describes what many of us often see, exasperated parents and exasperated children. In fact, this state of affairs is now so common that it is seen as the norm. We often feel sorry for the mother of little Johnny who is having a coniption fit at Walmart, instead of blaming the mother and her abdicating husband and feeling sorry for Johnny.

If you are the mother or father of little Johnny, my purpose in these posts is not to make you feel bad. It is to give you hope and to begin to point you to the biblical answers and God’s promises to you and to your children.

The Church, your church, should be helping you along this path. It is one of the main responsibilities of the church and her ministers to hold out the promises of Jesus Christ to you and to your children. Because many pastors, elders and deacons have not believed these promises themselves and have lost their own children to the world, the flesh and the devil, they are no longer in a position to declare these promises to their congregations. Despite the failures of Christain leadership, God’s promises are to you and to your children.

The Lord does desire that your children grow up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord and that they do lovingly and cheerfully embrace the kindness of God in Jesus Christ. But we must believe. We must believe in such a way that it affects the way that we live and move and have our being in Christ. Our belief must produce godly fruit. Here is the great part; all true belief does produce godly fruit. So, let us look at what God has in store for us as we raise our children to His glory.