Making Our Children Into Arrows

You know we're going to have three babies dedicated today. The Bible says in Psalm 127 was three. And behold children are a gift of the Lord. I've met so many married couples who long to have one child. Sometimes they live their whole life without getting one child. So don't take any child of yours for granted. There are multitudes of mothers, not mothers, women in the world who wish they could have a child. It's a gift God has given you. Preserve the gifts God has given you. And it says in verse four, the children of one's youth must be like arrows in the hand of a warrior. Why do warriors have arrows? Think of your children like arrows. Why it is in the olden days battles were not fought with guns, they were fought with bows and arrows. And that's the days of the psalmist, that was the main weapon. And an arrow is meant to fire at the enemy. The enemy we have is Satan. He's the only enemy. I hope you have no other enemies. One of the things the Lord taught me early in life, in the Christian life, you must have only one enemy. That's the devil. If somebody else is your enemy, you're not really a disciple of Jesus. Jesus had only one enemy. They're not the Pharisees. It was the devil. And we follow Jesus and our only enemy is the devil. Our enemy is not the Hindus or the Muslims or the Roman Catholics or people of some other denomination who don't agree with us. No. We have only one enemy. Please concentrate on this always. Whenever you're tempted to think of some person as an enemy, you got it all wrong. And we must train our children never to fight with people, but train them up to be soldiers of Jesus Christ who can fight against the enemy. That's what it means to have an arrow in the hand of a warrior. How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of such sharp arrows. So what do we spend children in our home for 17-18 years? They stay with us before they leave the home. Sometimes some even longer. The entire time we educate them, we feed them, we clothe them, we do so many things for them. But if you miss out on sharpening them to be warriors against Satan, to fight against sin, to fight against wrong attitudes, unchrist-like attitudes, if you don't, that's the meaning of sharpening the arrow. Get rid of unchrist-like, ungodly attitudes that children have because they are born with the flesh of Adam. And parents have been given the responsibility to eliminate that. Teach your children what's wrong. It's wrong to tell a lie. It's wrong to speak disrespectfully to parents or to older people. Always speak respectfully and teach them the importance of speaking the truth. That's how we sharpen the arrow. Teach them obedience to God's Word. Teach them humility. The most important characteristic of Jesus' life. Humility. We don't teach these things to children from a young age. We can have a church where there can be children, but they're not warriors. They're not being sharpened by arrows, and the failure is the failure of parents. And when we see this is our calling, we see what a tremendous responsibility ours is to bring up every one of our children to be disciples of Jesus Christ. That means they love Christ more than they love anybody else. And when they get married, they love Christ more than they love their wives or their husbands. That's a disciple. And we teach them that money is not the biggest thing in the world. The biggest thing is, yes, by all means work hard and earn as much money as God enables you to earn, but don't love it. Don't love it. Be good. Help the poor. Care for the needy. We've got to teach our children these things and never to be proud of any ability they have. To teach them humility if they're doing well in school or in sports or something like that. Never to make them look down on anyone. These are a few instances that I can think of of sharpening the arrow. So I want to encourage every parent here to sharpen the arrows that God's given you. Every one of them. Don't be satisfied with one of them being sharp. All of them must be sharp. And then you can raise an army at home for the glory of Jesus Christ to do His work. Imagine if everyone here sitting here, all the children here are going to be trained by their parents to be warriors for Christ in whatever job they do. What a powerful effect there will be in the next generation. That's our calling. Because then they will do that in their next generation too.