Continually Teach the Children
January 16, 2023
Continually Teach the Children
Deuteronomy 6:4-9
“Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.[a] 5And you must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength. 6And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands I am giving you today. 7Repeat them again and again to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are away on a journey, when you are lying down and when you are getting up again. 8Tie them to your hands as a reminder, and wear them on your forehead. 9Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
We all learn better in different ways, but most all of us learn best by example. As parents and grandparents, the Lord has given us a commission to mentor our children in His ways. The Lord didn’t teach us in His Word to just take our children to Sunday school or occasionally read them a Bible story or watch a Christian movie. The commandment to love the Lord our God and Him alone as God, to love Him with all of our heart, soul and strength is not just an Old Testament principle. Jesus tells us this commandment and the one like it, ‘to love our neighbor as ourselves’, is the foundation of all the other laws and principles of faith. It is essential for us to not only believe and embrace them for our own lives, but that we raise up our children, continually instilling in their daily life this foundational truth and God’s Word.
How often in our busyness of life do we take the time to really meditate upon the Word of God and rehearse His Word in our mind and heart. How much more do we often fail in making it the center of our teaching and instruction at home. We put many senseless and worthless things within our minds to entertain ourselves, but we must not neglect the essentials of life and faith. Our generation and those that follow are dependent upon our faithfulness to raise up our children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. Take the time to speak into your children and grandchildren’s lives. Live the example before them and build up their faith, relationship and confidence in the Lord.
When our children lose this guiding and essential principle of loving the Lord their God with all of their heart, all of their soul and all of their strength, then we have allowed the thief, the destroyer and the murder in our home. We have given him the keys to our children’s heart. None of us as loving parents would deliberately put our children in harm’s way, but we must realize that we are doing exactly that when we fail to make the Lord the center of our home, our life and our teaching. God’s Word and our faith in Him must be the foundation upon which all other functions and activities of our life are built. God’s Word must be at the center of our conversations, our music, our viewing, our worship, our thinking and our actions. At the center of that instruction, make sure that love is the instrument of distribution and not condemnation and the threat of an angry God. We can be tempted to influence our children’s behavior by using God as our big ugly stick to verbally threaten and beat them into fear and submission. How often have children grown up with the wrong concept and a distortion of God’s love, perceiving Him to be only a severe and vengeful God? Our children are so often the spiritual reflection of us as adults. Deal with them in the same love and spirit you would have the Lord to deal with you.
The spiritual influences that surround our children and us today are often very anti-Christ in nature and spirit. If we drop this ball and the God given responsibility that we have been entrusted with from Almighty God, our children will suffer and more than that, our society will suffer. We need only look around and see the conditions that have developed in this country in the last 35 years or so since God has been taken out of our schools. Only we can insure that He is not removed from our homes and our hearts. Only we as parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles can instill these values and principles of Life within our children.
Blessings,
#kent
A Letter to My Son
July 28, 2020
A Letter to My Son
Proverbs 1:8
Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.
My son, do you know how much I love you? Do you know how I prayed for you even when you were in your mother’s womb and each day since? A father’s heart is to see his son grow up and be even more than he could ever be. He wants the best for him. He wants him to prosper and know the joys and richness of life. More than anything else, a father who loves the Lord will desire his son to grow up to embrace his own faith in Christ. A father of faith desires to birth that faith and relationship with Christ into his son.
Why is that so important? The father knows that in Christ are the issues of life, health, wealth and eternal salvation. If a father can impart to his son how rich he will be through a committed relationship with Christ then he will have left a legacy that he can be proud of. Your mother and I will have fulfilled one of the primary purposes for our being together. Malachi 2:15 says, “And did not God make [you and your wife] one [flesh]? Did not One make you and preserve your spirit alive? And why [did God make you two] one? Because He sought a godly offspring [from your union]. Therefore take heed to yourselves, and let no one deal treacherously and be faithless to the wife of his youth.” While Christian parents desire to live a godly example and be a light of salvation to others, there is no other soul more precious to them than you.
As a son grows up and matures he sees the parents he once perceived as so good with their faults and shortcomings. As a son grows into puberty and adolescence he often becomes quite full on himself and defiant and resentful of his parents. A father has had a few short years to try and instill the principles of life and godliness into his son. He has disciplined him to try and teach him responsibility, integrity and character. He knows he has made more mistakes than he would ever like to admit, but he prays that somehow, in spite of his shortcomings and failures God, by His grace, will make Himself so real to his son and that his son might now choose to make his parent’s faith his own.
As fathers we are often far less than perfect, but if this father doesn’t know anything else and if he doesn’t possess any other significant talents or abilities, the one thing that he does know and is fully committed to is that Christ is the answer to life. He prays that if His son gets nothing else from him, that he will get that. For a godly parent, there is no greater gift or reward than to see one’s children choosing the path of righteousness and walking in it. There are no richer moments than when we see them instilling and teaching their children the ways and the love of the Lord.
My son, I leave you with these words of instruction from Proverbs 4:20-27, “My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings. Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thine heart For they [are] life unto those that find them, and health to all their flesh. Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it [are] the issues of life. Put away from thee a froward mouth, and perverse lips put far from thee. Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee. Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established Turn not to the right hand nor to the left: remove thy foot from evil.” My son, I love you and only desire for you the richness and goodness of God’s grace and love.
Blessings,
#kent
Today’s Tomorrows
December 8, 2015
Deuteronomy 11:18-21
Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 19 Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 20 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates, 21 so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land that the LORD swore to give your forefathers, as many as the days that the heavens are above the earth.
Today’s Tomorrows
Today, as I watched the children play,
It dawned on me that they are tomorrow’s day.
Often busy or annoyed I push them to the side,
But they are my tomorrow I suddenly realized.
Tomorrow they will be what I am today.
Tomorrow they will make the decisions and have the say.
What they are tomorrow is what I instill in them today.
I must make time to value them and teach them how to pray.
Those children will learn by my example,
Will what they learn be ample?
Will it instill in them character and integrity?
Does it teach them to walk with God in power and victory?
So many times we buy them things and take them places,
But does that adequately cover all life’s bases?
Do they see me spending time in prayer?
Do they see me in God’s word when I’m full of care?
We spend time with sports or events,
We’ll remember how busy we were and where we went,
But will that develop the purpose God has for them?
Will that teach them a relationship of knowing Him?
Tomorrow is soon becoming today.
Help me Lord to teach them your ways.
Help me to teach them your light for the darkness ahead.
Today help me impart and pray with them as I put them to bed.
Kent Stuck
Blessings,
#kent
Putting Off the Old
September 3, 2014
Colossians 3:5-11
Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. 6Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. 7You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. 8But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. 9Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices 10and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. 11Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.
Putting Off the Old
Let’s say I go out and buy a house that is a fixer-upper. The last tenant that lived there lived fast and hard and let the place become totally run down. Now the house is still livable, but not what is desirable. We have purchased the house with the intent that as we live here we are going to restore it to its original glory and beauty. When we purchased this house we looked past all of its defects, faults and failures. We had the vision to see it for what it was going to be and not what it was. As we live in this house daily we spend time working on its repair and restoration. It doesn’t happen in a day or a week or even a month. In fact it may be a project of a lifetime, but our goal will only be reached as we are faithful each day to continue working on some area of its repair and restoration.
Outside the paint is peeling, but we can’t just paint over the old with new paint, otherwise in a short period of time the new paint will be peeling as well. First we must strip off the old and scrape off all of the peeling loose paint. The same principle holds true throughout the house. We must remove the old and broken, before we can apply the new. If we just cover up the old, all we have done is temporarily prettied it up, but we haven’t restored it and that is the same as hypocrisy.
I think you can see the analogy and where this going, because the same principles hold true when the old man is inhabited by the Spirit of the Lord and we become a new tenant and a new creation man. Our purpose and intent for this house is not the same as it used to be. Before we lived in it only for me and what served my purposes. Now we live in it for the glory of Christ and what honors and pleases Him. What He is telling us here is the old has to go. All of those old attributes of our fleshly living for self have to be put off and renewed by the ways of His Spirit life. All of those old habits of the ways we used to look at and view others, the language that we used, the ways that we acted and the ways that we used to think must all be stripped away. In their place we are renewing ourselves with the building supplies of God’s Spirit and His Word. There, our mind, thoughts and purpose are renewed daily as we set our mind on things above and live in the purpose of the new creation man that we now are in Christ. We are not fully transformed in a day, week, month or even a year, but as we abide in Christ and live out of His nature, we find that we have a helper in this transforming work. What would be overwhelming and impossible with us has become possible by the Holy Spirit that now abides with us. Everyday He is there, as we will commit ourselves to Him and His plan for us. Every day we continue to relinquish and give up our former ways and habits to Him, so that He can help us to rid ourselves of the old and replace it with the new. He continues to teach us, instruct us and lead us, as we will set our minds and hearts upon Him. Through Christ this old house can be transformed and made new as we grow in His knowledge and grace from glory to glory even into the same image of Him that has called us.
Blessings,
#kent