Train the children to be virtuous citizens!

In reading from the 1599 Geneva Bible that I love to refer to, Proverbs 22:6 reads like this “Teach a child in the trade of his way and when he is old he will not depart from it.”

Then I look to John Calvin’s commentary on that verse and he states “Bring him up virtuously and he shall so continue.” That is profound to this verse. Bringing up a child virtuously so he continues in the ways of his training is terrific.

What does virtuous training mean though. I looked deeper into this training to see what the possibilities are and this is what I found. Virtuous is to be morally excellent and righteous in the sense of this passage. It also relates to raising our children to be effectuous. Effectuous is to have the power produce a desired effect or remedies. I like this as well…we should be training our children to be effectual in their lives towards Christ. We want them to have great effect over others and situations to the point they desire to have a Believer around because of the great effect they have in their lives.

Then I dug deeper into this virtuous training of our kids and discovered they are to be trained to be potent which to have great authority or influence. How great is that? By training our children in a virtuous life in the ways they go we want them to have a godly influence over the people they encounter. Our children will be good honorable citizens by way of virtue in the ways of Christ. This is why God instructs us parents to train them while we have them under our roof.

However, another category under the virtuous topic stunned my thinking on training. It is a reference to training them to be chaste. This is an old word, but still applies today. Training our young men, especially, to be chaste is training them to be pure in thoughts and actions (modesty). Further commentary on this for them to be “innocent of unlawful sexual intercourse”. Now, that puts it pretty point blank to me. We are to be instructing our kids from very young to they leave the home in many righteous ways, but surfacing to the top would be training them in sexual purity both in mind and action. Now, training this way is not what stunned me, but what stunned me was that it so specifically surfaced as a very important training for our kids. When you look at our culture, even within some church circles, sex is taken so lightly that our kids do not take it seriously either. Yet, from the very research I have done, this specifically was pointed out in the training. We have much to train our kids, but along with biblical truths, we need to be specific to the kids on each virtue especially sexual morality. Kids can find this battle difficult as the internet has brought every sexual perversion ever thought of right into our homes many times undetected, but we as parents are to do battle with this if we are to give our kids the proper training. Warning: DO NOT expect your public school to give this kind of training to our kids…please, DO NOT think they are going to be trained to be pure in thought and action at school.

Parents’, training our kids is not easy, but it is an area we need to take serious. Food to ponder on isn’t it?

Scott Bailey (c) 2009

Who do you want in your army? (From the Train up our children series)

My studies and research into Training our children is an eye opening experience.  We as parents too often have regarded this training too lightly and without any personal sacrifice.  We have expected other institutions and someone else to do most of the scholastic training, the church to do much of the spiritual training, and that has left us parents with too little time to train our children properly in the way the Lord intends that we train them.

 

In Proverbs 22:6, “Train a child in the he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.” (NIV) To “Train…” could also be translated “Start a child in the way he should go…”  It is our job to start our kids from birth to the time they are out of the house in the way they go.  We are to point them in the right direction based on their inclinations, their bents, their personalities, their characteristics that God has planted in them from birth.  The instruction we give them in order to accomplish this endeavor for some 18 years or so cannot be done in one thirty minute interval each day throughout the week.  It requires that we spend time understanding how they are made and build this training around what God has wired them to do.

 

The daily 30 minutes (30 minutes may be too generous) each parent gets with a child to possibly inject something serious, something educational, something spiritual becomes impossible.  The first task a parent has to do each day is deprogram the humanistic worldliness that has been injected into them for 8 hours each day to start with.  Then deprogram the extra-curricular hours spent with others daily.  By the end of each day a parent may have 15 to 30 minutes to give the child something meaningful to remember.  My question is, can that short period of time overcome the barrage of hours they are being fed something contrary to what us parents should be teaching them?  The government run institutions by law cannot inject Christianity into our kid’s lives.  By virtue of the laws it has passed these institutions must teach secular humanism as the religion of the land which leads to socialistic attitude which will soon embrace socialism as the better way…all this will come from our kid’s public education.  While the church slept our country moved away from God into secular humanism decades ago.  Now, you are not allowed to pray in the schools without trouble.  You cannot bring a Bible to school without trouble.  You cannot inject any kind of bold Christian verbiage without possibly being disciplined, expelled, or fired from the school system.  You must teach evolution as proven fact while not even mentioning creationism as a possibility.  This is because the schools no longer hold to any kind of godliness at all even with Christian’s within its walls which is having no real measurable impact for the kingdom of God and will not as our time here draws to a close.

 

If we were to go into battle as families based on a holy war…in other words Christians vs. Secular Humanism or socialism, who would you want in your army?  Would you want someone on your team that has been trained 75% of their early life from say 6 yrs old to 18 yrs old in socialism, worldliness, humanism, and anti-Christianity?  In Ephesians 6:4, “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.”  This type of training is first and foremost in the ways of the Lord, not how to get a good college education, how to become a good little employee or how to be model prisoners (another subject in and of itself).  I will not get into the other trainings that are coming from government education, but most of all, we as parents must make every effort and time to inject as much biblical training as we can on a daily basis if our kids must remain in a public school.  This may mean that we men stop playing golf as much or at all, stop fishing or as much, stop hunting or as much, stop spending so much time at the bars with the buddies having a beer (another subject all by itself), etc.  It may require we make tremendous sacrifices during our children’s adolescent years and teen years in order to be sure we have exhausted every chance to inject the proper training in the ways of the Lord, even if the kids must remain in the public school system, which I pray that many will reconsider.

 

Going back to who would you bring to battle with you, I refer to this training that is cross referenced to Abram in Genesis 14:14 where a relative, Lot and his family, was captured and Abram (future Abraham) called out for the 318 trained men born in his household and pursued the enemy with them.  These 318 men had been born under his roof and trained by him, not someone else.  He entrusted a serious situation with those whom he could trust, those trained and born under his roof.  This was an important mission for Abram and he could not depend on just anyone, but relied on those he could depend on and that was those men trained by him.  It was a long and difficult journey that required men that Abram knew their character, their bents, their personalities, their inclinations, their trainings, and most importantly, Abram could depend on who their allegiance was too, the Sovereign God.  Abram knew these men would perform, he did not worry for a moment that something a government school had taught them could come back to compromise this mission…Abram took this mission serious and Abram had taken these 318 men’s training serious years before.  Abram had not sent them off for someone else to raise, to train, to inject ungodly thoughts into…Abram sacrificed his time to train them or someone within his household he trusted to train.  This is why it is even more important that we as parents do the training of our children now and take the majority of every available moment with them to train them in the ways of the Lord above anything else. 

 

The training referred to in Genesis 14:14 crosses over to Deuteronomy 4:9 “Only be careful and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them.”   The Word of God does not leave much for discussion when it comes to training and teaching the children.  We are commanded to train our children in the way should go.  Whatever direction we send them daily, whatever actions we take on a daily basis more so than what we say on a daily basis will influence the way they will go.  How important do we really see our children and the future of Christianity in the world?  Do we see our children as true blessing of God to be cherished, watched over, trained, and even guarded?  I am afraid the message most kids get from parents today is that they are burden, parents can’t wait until the kids go back to school to get out of their hair, the parent(s) are always travelling while someone else keeps the kids, time spent with them is secondary to the parents work, golf, hunting, fishing, workout at 24 hour fitness, ladies night out or men’s night out, etc.  I know this will smash some toes and I am not saying any of these activities are wrong in and of themselves, but the message sent by many that I have encountered over the years is not far off from what I am talking about…that “kids are a necessary evil God has put upon them as punishment for some sin in their past”.  I have heard this on more than one occasion or some variation of that.  I am sorry, but that is the message coming across.  The kids are reacting to the message from the actions of their parents far more than the message coming from their parent’s mouths.

 

We have an 88% failure rate in our future young people.  That is huge and if it is continued will result in catastrophic events in our country in the near future.  Parents will find themselves as the enemy of their own children when it comes to Christ vs. humanism or socialism.  It will put dads against their sons and mothers against their daughters.  Jesus said He did not come to bring peace, but a sword.  Jesus is the sword that will divide households, families, friendships, and even churches.  If we as parents do not take our job in the training of our children more serious, we are going to see more and more households divided by the very subject of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior vs. worldliness, secular humanism, socialism, entitlement, riches, self-glorification and gratification, etc.  Not all kids will turn out this way, but an alarming 88% of them have the potential and in my humble opinion it is because of the failure of us parents not training our children in the ways of the Lord while turning our heads away and allowing the world to have all the time it wanted in training them in the way it wanted them to go.  Satan’s world wants your children to love to be rich, to want more stuff, to more entitlements, to want more government security, to desire to be a pro athlete, super model, world scholar, to want to look good all the time, to be more educated socially, to be a social party person, to want to be healthy all the time, to want more and more of this world while pulling them seriously away from the ways taught in the Scriptures. 

 

While the world and its system train the kids to be good socialist, God’s Word has commanded a different training…training in the ways of God which are drastically different than the ways of the world.  Why are we considered as aliens in this world?  Does much of the church today look foreign to you?  Do we teach our children any differently than the world does?  It is hard to see much light in this world of darkness even in the church today.  As parents our job is far too important to leave to the world.  God is using us to train the kids away from the world…yes, we have to live in this world and He did not say that would be easy either, but while we are to obey the laws of the land, we also to obey God’s holy Word in training our kids.  Our kids are future missionaries no matter what they do for a living.  They need to be taught that their job first and foremost is serving God. For our young men, when they have a family their first mission field is their wife, then their children then they can minister to those outside their homes…not the reverse.  The same can be said for the young women.  Individually, their first goals should be in service to Christ…God will take care of their living if they will work honoring God in all they do and that requires they be a very good employee yet knowing making money is not their priority, but serving God is.

 

In conclusion,  does training those hours per day in the ways of the Lord guarantee our children will turn out godly, no!  Only God can guarantee anything.  However, this sacrificial training us as parents is commanded to do give the proper tools to work with.  It is this training that the Holy Spirit uses in order to take them deeper into a relationship with God, making it harder for Satan to take them away.  Chances are greater, even if they do move away for a short period of time from the ways of God, in returning to their faith someday to grow in godliness and serve their Lord from then on into eternity.  The old saying “you can pay me now or you can pay me later” can be translated in this situation “you can pay the price now in training your children or you will pay a hefty price later for not training your children”.  The challenge is this; will you consider a different way of educating your children by seeking the face of God on this matter?  Can we commit to giving up activities in our own lives that take time away from a deeper training of the children in the ways of the Lord?  Are we willing to admit that all the excuses we as parents use in order to not change anything we are doing in regards to the lack of training our children get is sin and needs to be repented of?  This challenge is strong I know, but the future results of us having a godless generation is at stake here.  True Christian parenting does not resemble the world, the public schools, the social institutes in our country or anything else…Christian parenting has specific instructions from Scripture and we will be all the better for being obedient to it.

 

Scott Bailey (c) 2009

Obama is telling our kids what?

Today, the water dam broke as parents all over the country realized President Obama is making a speech to their children from the White House. A tremendous tidal wave is moving swiftly across the land.

I want to share some positive thoughts concerning this along with some that are not so flattering. I am not an Obama fan at all and do not trust him and what he says for one second. However, his speech next Tuesday will not deliver anything profound or new. It is not the speech content itself that really has the people turned upside down.

 What disturbs the masses and myself is lack of trust we have for this man and his administration. Look back into history, the history that no one learns anything from, and many of us can see socialism quickly on the rise. From socialism stems the mistreatment of our elderly, doctor assisted suicides, mercy killings, massively high taxation, religious right dissolved, freedoms to worship and speak freely about our God gets less and less….we know of past countries that have been swayed by flattering speech and new directions that ended in disasters.

However, I can get past all that. Even if Obama came out next Tuesday and said lets stand and state a new pledge of allegiance to one nation under Obama it would not surprise me nor cause me to flinch. As a parent of kids from 2 yrs old to 18 yrs old I have a God given responsibility to protect my children from any potential danger in word or deed. It is my responsibility to make sure my younger children are trained in the way they should go not merely told.

I have heard for years the “missionary” factor as to why Christian kids need to be in the public schools, yet what most dont understand is that our kids are not missionaries yet. Most missionaries go through alot of training and understanding before embarking out into the jungle to minister to unchurched tribes. So, that excuse never holds up. Another good one I hear on a regular basis is the public schools are “burning hospitals and our kids are the doctors”. Sounds great in theory, but again it will not hold water biblically. Think about it for a moment, do we really think these little kids are ready to be doctors in a burning hospital? From K-6 they are no where ready for this type of mission work or doctoring using those analogies…God does not tell us to train our kids this way. Do we give a doctor a manual, stethoscope, and white rob and say now get in there and start doctoring those people? Do we send missionaries into the jungles where people speak an unknown language before first training them in the ways of these people and getting to know their language. We dont send them into these jungles to figure it out for themselves with a Bible and backpack. Some have had to pioneer the way, but they also have been thoroughly trained.

Proverbs 22:6 God tells us to “Train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it.”

This means so much to us as parents and yet most of us fail miserably at it, including me. However, I must keep striving to train my children on a daily basis. Sending the kids in the socialistically run government indoctrinated schools is not what God called us to do and call it training. Why do we think our youth are leaving their faith in such huge numbers…88% by the time they are in college all but denounce their Christian faith. Truth be known, mentally and spiritually they left the Christian faith well before they leave high school, they just do not have the freedom to say so.

Training a child in the godly way they should go requires countless hours and quality of time to make the impact that will last until these children are old. I am afraid the impact already made on many that have left the faith may not be reversible. However, we do not have to give up on them, but we certainly do not have to allow this same fate happen to our children if we will see the dangers that are ahead and many dangers are ahead for our children when they are teens and adults.

Going back to the topic at hand about Obama’s speech brings me to two simple yet profound verses that address a portion of how we are to train our children in the way they should go. Proverbs 22:3 (ESV) tells us “The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it.” Now, tell me, if we are to train our children, do we honestly think that setting them down and explaining the dismay we have for what Obama is doing will help when we pat them on the backside next Tuesday morning signalling that it is important, but not so important that we will not remove them from any danger. The training in this case is when we say “Obama is dangerous and you little ones need to realize he is dangerous, but it will be ok, go on to school and try not to listen to him much.” How ridiculous is that? Is that training our children? Training requires choices on our part as parents that go directly against most of our peers beliefs and decisions. Training our children requires that we live a most different life from the rest of the world especially our peers. Training matches the talk…training is not just talk.

Training is to dedicate ourselves to teaching our children…this will require sacrifices on our part most of the time. It may require less money, less “worldly” success, but it will result in children that will not depart from their training when they are older. God is looking for our kids to be devoted to Him and His cause, not this new worldly gospel of moral-ism, world hunger, and aids awareness. Those things will always be around us and we must address them in the love of Christ, but that is not to be our all consuming fire. The gospel is repent for the kingdom of God is at hand, God made a way for us to be forgiven for those sins, trusting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior saves us, and drastically change our lives to one of striving for holiness rather than grooviness.

One final thought to wrap it all up. Training our children is taking Proverbs 22:5 to heart “In the paths of the wicked lie thorns and snares, but he who guards his soul stays far from them.” It is our job to help guard our little ones hearts and flee with them from these snares and thorns, not send our children off in their direction. This issue with Obama will come and go without much incident I am sure, however, it has proved to be a festering sore in the Christian camp that is set to burst its creamy off-white nastiness all over the world and when it does it will not be a pretty sight. But what is festering is many parents is guilt over how to deal with this issue by not dealing with it. “Send my child to school and look irresponsible before God for putting them in possible harms way” or ” if I don’t send little Oscar to school tomorrow my friends will laugh and call me too religious or a fear mung-er”. No matter what the excuses are the decision for each of our families rest with us parents. Send them off to school and pray is one way you can do it. Send them school after you have thoroughly told them how not to listen to the speech is another way. Both ways keep the parent from having to explain their decision. Another response is to keep their child home in protest and use that is an opportunity to teach those around you why little Oscar did not attend…it gives both the child and the parent the opportunity to present a godly way of life that is not compromising in any way from the Word of God. For the parent it even an opportunity to share the true gospel of Jesus Christ as most lost people will not understand what this is all about.

Understand, this is not all about politics, but as our first item of business we are to spare the children from the jaws of satan at every opportunity and respond to the challenges from God’s Word not against it. This is not over sheltering them, but taking God at His word and removing them from danger. Some of them need sheltering, but are exposed to every gross ungodliness imaginable and it is called freedom and faith.

-Scott Bailey (c) 2009

Train up a child to:

 

What is it we as parents are suppose to train up our children to do, be, want, or come back to? Have you as a parent ever wondered that? I know I have numerous times.

The entire verse goes like this:

“Train up a child in the way they should go and when they are old they will come back to it” -Proverbs 22:6

I have seen the numerous wayward children just like everyone else has that so far has never come back to anything their parents taught them or have they gone the exact direction their parents taught them? Interesting subject I know. I have started exploring exactly what it is we are to teach our children growing up that when they are “seasoned” rather than just old they can come back to it and it be of some profit to them.

Proverbs 22 builds around this verse 6 it seems. It tells us some of what we are to teach our children as they are growing up. Each stage of their life we can teach them more and more, going deeper and deeper into each subject. I want to warn you that very little has to do with what job they will have, what college they will attend to what degree they should get. God has placed within each child a “bent” that they are moving towards regardless of what us parents really think or desire for them. It is our job as parents, in tune with our heavenly Father, in the power that He entrust to us, to learn over time what our children’s personality traits are, what kind of character God is moving them to be, and build that training around this.

One example I will share:

Train up the child to: (Proverbs 22:3 “A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it.”)
-exercise sound, good judgement and to use their God given common sense on a daily basis.
-be careful about their conduct around other people
1. be cautious in their decisions on what they are doing from what they eat, to what they are wearing, to what they say, to how they act, to the people they hang out with, to how they spend their money and time and so on.
2. look for the danger signs, the warning signs around them of doom that might be coming if the continue in a direction they are going. Teach them to seek out shelter and refuge in the Lord if they can see those danger signs.
-provide carefully for the future
1. not be frivolous with their time, financial spending and actions
2. learn to save not only spend
3. budget their time, resources, and money at all times
4. be looking ahead as best they can to be sure they are not caught off guard
5. be a person worthy to be trusted by others and accountable

This is one example of our parental training. This example of course can go as deep as anyone would want to take it of course. Most of us parents can teach this from past experiences, from what our parents taught us, and most importantly from what the Word of God instructs us in these areas of life.

In the Proverb to train our children, this comes as no easy task, but it is commanded to us by our heavenly Father as instructed to us in His Word. So, if we only teach our children worldly things without any of the important points here, we are setting our children on the path of doom to never to stay on the path of godliness or to return to it if they get off track.

-Scott Bailey (c) 2009