02.06. CHAPTER 02 - KEEPING OUR CONSCIENCE SENSITIVE

CHAPTER 02 - KEEPING OUR CONSCIENCE SENSITIVE

If our children are to grow up in the fear of the Lord, then one of the most important things we mothers must have is a sensitive conscience. Our conscience can become insensitive if at any time we become satisfied with our spiritual state. Perhaps we have heard the Word so often that we have now become familiar with it. Then we can no longer hear the Spirit speaking to us through it and our conscience becomes dull. Like a knife that has lost its sharpness, the truths that once excited us no longer do so.

We can become insensitive in our conscience through attachment to material wealth. When we prosper materially, it is easy for our conscience to become dull. It is easier to feel our need of God when we are poor than when we are rich. Even a small raise in our husband’s salary can make us proud. Jesus said that it was easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter God’s kingdom. The Lord rebuked even an elder in a church once for imagining that he needed nothing just because he was wealthy (Revelation 3:17). Wealth is a great snare. So we must be very careful if we have begun to prosper financially. It is not wrong to be rich, if God has made us so. But we must ensure that wealth does not go to our head and make us dull in our conscience. Poverty of spirit is the best state of mind to be in always.

Honesty is one of the most important virtues that we must have as mothers and that our children must see in us always. We should teach our children truthfulness by being truthful with them ourselves. We must get rid of all lying and every form of exaggeration from our lives. If we hear our children exaggerating or telling lies, perhaps they picked up that habit from us! We must never promise our children anything if we know we won’t be able to keep our promise. If the cause is some unavoidable circumstance, then our children will understand, because there will always be situations where we have to deny ourselves for the sake of others. But otherwise we must keep all the promises we make to our children.

We must also cleanse ourselves from every type of hypocrisy ("acting"). Our children must see that we don’t tell them to do something that we don’t do ourselves. We must ask God to show us where we fail in this areas, so that we can repent. God can speak to us even when we see hypocrisy in our own children.

Covetousness is another deadly sin that we must cleanse ourselves from. If our children see that we are not content with the earthly goods God has chosen to give us, they too will become covetous. Girls (especially) observe very carefully what their mothers buy or long to buy.

If God wants us to have something He will give us the money to buy it. If He doesn’t do that, that would be His way of telling us that we don’t really need it. Even if we could have afforded it, it may not have been absolutely essential. And then it would be best for us not to have it. A good conscience is far more valuable than all earthly goods put together. Our children can learn contentment with the simple, cheap toys and games that we can afford to buy for them. They can also learn to improvise their own games too. In the long run, they will then turn out to be more creative than other children whose rich parents can afford to buy them expensive, fancy toys and games.

We must also be careful not to backbite or speak evil of anyone in our homes. I have seen the tragedy of children despising and hating other believers in their own church as a result of the backbiting and gossiping that they heard against those believers in their own homes. What a tragedy it is when parents poison and destroy their own children like this! Surely it must be of such parents that Jesus spoke when he said that anyone who stumbled little ones should "have a millstone tied round his neck and be thrown into the sea (Matthew 18:6). The mother has to be most careful in this matter, because she is the one who spends the maximum time with her children.

Children can easily sense when there is bitterness in their mother’s heart against anyone. A little bit of sour milk or curd can make a whole vessel of milk sour - and sourness turns into bitterness, with time. The Bible warns us that many can be defiled by a root of bitterness in the heart. So we must get rid of all bad attitudes promptly.

Misunderstandings can arise in the closest of earthly relationships. But we must do our best to get rid of them as soon as possible, with God’s help. Even small children can sense the difference between good and evil, music and noise, harmony and conflict etc., They understand these things, long before they start speaking. So we must be careful not to defile them.

We must also cleanse ourselves from all partiality. We must not have any favourites among our children. All of them must be the same to us and of equal value to us. No child must be treated in a special way.

Pride in our children’s beauty, or behaviour, or intelligence, or anything else is another sin that we have to be very watchful about. We can destroy our children if we are proud about anything in their lives. As soon as we become proud, the nature of Lucifer takes control of us. Lucifer was a beautiful angel, but he became the devil in a moment when he became proud.

We must also be careful that our motive in bringing up our children in a good way is not OUR OWN glory. If that be the case, our children will quickly sense it and they too will begin to do things merely to impress others. We must teach our children to live for the glory of God alone.

Let us seek God for grace then to live in continuous repentance and continuous cleansing from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit (2 Corinthians 7:1) so that we can keep our conscience sensitive until the end of our lives.