What Parents Should Teach Their Children

In the Psalms, it says that children are the gift of the Lord. Now, gifts are not something we deserve or expect, but very often people think, I deserve to have a child. The Bible says children are a gift of the Lord. It's a gift God gives you to bring up for Him. And let me read to you in Ephesians 6 what the Bible says after 6, verse 1 and 2 and 3. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with a promise. If you read the 10 commandments, only one of them has got a promise attached to it. This is the first one with a promise, that if children honor their father and mother, that means respect them, obey them, two things will happen. It's God's promise. It can never be broken. It will go well with them, verse 3, and they may live long on the earth. Live long doesn't mean live up to 100 years. It means live for the period of time God planned for them. For Jesus, it was only 33. For the Apostle James, it was only 30. For John, his brother, it was 95. But live long means live the full length of the days God planned for that child before it was born. There are many children born into the world who do not live the full day, length of that time, because they don't obey God. So every parent wants that it to go well with their children. I'm sure every parent here, not only the ones, babies whose parents today, babies we're dedicating today, not just their parents, all parents want it to go well with their children. If you really want it to go well with your children, it's not enough to feed them well, give them a good education. You have to teach them this first commandment and the only commandment for children, honor your father and mother, obey your parents. And I think that means also to honor and speak respectfully to older people. So if you allow your children to speak disrespectfully to you as a parent, they speak in a rude way or to any older person and you ignore it, you are saying indirectly, I don't want it to go well with my children. I don't want them to live their full length of life on earth. It doesn't matter if they die early. It doesn't matter if it goes badly. That's exactly what you're saying, parents, when you don't teach your children to speak respectfully. And I want to tell you, it does not come naturally for a child to speak respectfully to anybody. The natural tendency of all the children of Adam is to be rude and unkind and think highly of themselves and look down on others. So how is it some children are not like that because their parents have worked with them. It's like the children who have gone to school and the children who have not gone to school. We see a lot of them like that in India. The children in the slums, they never went to school. There's a world of difference between their knowledge of, they can't even read. And you see a child who can read and say, it's not because that child was special. The parents sent that child to school. Exactly like that. When you see two children, I've seen that even in, back home in CFC churches, I see a child and some people say, oh, well, it's that particular child like that. But I find everybody in the family is like that. How's that? I've seen families where every child is respectful. And I've seen other families where every child is rude and disrespectful. 100% the cause is the parents. So we want it to go well with our children. And we wanted them to live the full length of God's plan for them. And for that, parents are responsible. We need to pray for them, but not only pray, we must correct them when they are wrong. If they're studying addition and they keep on adding two plus two is five, you will correct them. Supposing they say two plus two is five the next day, you'll keep on correcting them until they learn that two plus two is four. It's so particular when it comes to mathematics or to spell C-A-T as cat, but not particular in much more important things to teach them to be respectful and obedient. So let's all parents keep that in mind. There's no verse in the Bible that says we should dedicate children, but we know that Jesus was dedicated. Even though there was no command in the old Testament, they brought Jesus to the Lord. So we bring our children into the church, first of all, to acknowledge that this is a gift from God and seeking God for wisdom to bring up this child in a godly way. And also recognizing that this child is a gift to the church because we are one family. And in the family, we rejoice when a new child is born.