Hospitality is an effective way to touch your children’s lives when you make your home a place where your children and their friends want to be. It is sad today that many children are growing up in homes where parents are too busy, too distracted, and too emotionally absent from their children to be involved in their lives. I listened to an excellent sermon this week about child rearing. The pastor said, “Think of training your children as putting them into a home seminary. We should be appalled with aborting the unborned, but we should also be appalled with emotionally aborting our own children. ” This can easily happen to children whose parents serve full-time in the ministry. Parents become so involved in ministry that they emotionally abort their own children for the sake of the ministry.
What Children Need from a Parent
1. To be authentic and spiritually real with children. (II Timothy 1:5)
2. To model purity and to talk to children about remaining pure (Proverbs 2:15-19; Proverbs 22:14)
3. To never stop learning about parenting (Proverbs 8:33)
4. To bring children to Christ (Matthew 19:13,14)
2. To love them (Titus 2:4)
3. To train them up for God (Proverbs 22:6; Ephesians 6:4)
4. To instruct them in God’s Word (Deuteronomy 4:9; 11:19; Isaiah 38:19)
5. To tell them of the miraculous works of God (Exodus 10:2; Psalms 78:4)
6. To correct them (Proverbs 13:24; 19:18; 23:13; 29:17; Hebrews 12:7)
7. To not provoke them (Ephesians 6:4; Colossians 3:21)
8. To bless them (Genesis 48:15; Hebrews 11:20)
9. To provide for them (Job 42:15; 2 Corinthians 12:14; 1 Timothy 5:8)
10. To Pray for them (Lamentations 2:19)