Reaping What Has Been Sown
The Jesuits are reported to have claimed that if they could teach a child for the first seven years they would “have” the child for life. There is a lot of truth in this. And the truth starts to show up as a child comes into the teenage years.
One family and child raising expert, Dr Howard Hendricks used to say to parents: “build a bridge with your children before they turn twelve—for by then, it will be too late.” Sadly, many parents realise this only when time has run out. Christian parents need to know better: to be forewarned is to be forearmed.
As our children grow, in the early teen years it is entirely natural and right—God designed—that our children become increasingly self-aware. It is at this time that they start to think about who they are, what is their place in life, and what life will hold for them. It is the stage of life when they start to consider themselves and who they are as people in their own right, conceptually independent from their parents. This is not a bad thing. It is fundamentally necessary in order for them to become adults, to begin to shoulder independent responsibilities as true servants of our Lord. It is a wonderful and exciting stage in the development of our children.
But it is also the stage at which the seeds sown in earlier years start to sprout. And those seeds will either be beautiful budding grain or nasty weeds. The latter catches many Christian parents by surprise: how did those weeds get there, they wonder? It is at the early teen years that the fruits of sending children to a state secular school start to show. Parents suddenly realise that an Enemy has sown seeds in the lives of their children while they (the parents) were sleeping. (Matthew 13:24—28)
Oftentimes, when Christian parents have decided to send their children to the local state secular school, everything initially seems just fine. Their young children continue to respect them, partake in family devotions, exercise Christian graces, willingly attend worship, and accept the training and correction of mum and dad. They show all the attributes of being Christian children. During this stage, many such Christian parents congratulate themselves on their decision to send their children to the state secular school. After all, most of their fellow Christian parents are finding it a great struggle to pay Christian school fees. Others who are home schooling their children bear a great work load. Yet, there appears to be no palpable difference between their state schooled children and those of their friends who are receiving Christian schooling. But all the while seeds are being sown in the field.
When children grow to the early teen years, seeds sown in the early years sprout up. It is necessary and right that during the years children start to become independent of their parents. But this necessary growing independence can either be godly or ungodly. If it is as God intends and commands, the growing independence of parents will take the form of a deepening sense of God's call upon the child's life—a growing conviction in the young adult's heart that they too must stand before God to give an account of their lives—and they must stand independently of their parents. It is during the stage that children usually begin to become conscious of God's calling for them—of their possible vocations and avocations—and a growing sense of duties and responsibilities in God's Kingdom. It is the stage where they begin to conceive of themselves as eventually being completely independent of their parents, which begs the question of who they will be, and what will they be like, and how they will walk in their days upon the earth.
But it is also at this stage that children are particularly subject to subtle temptations: to conceive of themselves as independent, not just of their parents, but of their parents' God. They can start to frame their own life as being separated from God's Kingdom, and themselves as someone other than a believing and loving subject of the King. When children have been subjected for over seven years, five days a week, to the perspective of a world without God presented by teachers arranged for them by their parents, the temptation to Unbelief usually becomes overwhelmingly powerful. For seven or eight years they have been taught, at their parents' behest, of a world which allegedly exists independently of God and in which God is irrelevant. They have been taught that this is the real world. It is the world which the vast majority of the authority figures in the culture espouse. It is the world celebrated by the rich and famous.
When children have been systematically taught in their early years that the Unbelieving world is the real world, and that the world of the Christian faith is irrelevant at best, misleading and false at worst, it is not surprising that upon coming to teenage years, they will most likely express their own unbelief. Gradual independence from their parents will mean, inevitably, independence from their parents' God. The weeds of Unbelief begin to sprout and bear their terrible fruit.
Now, of course, the world of Unbelief is the false world. It is the world of lies and untruth. But throughout all the years of state secular schooling, the child will have been taught that contrary to what mum and dad have said, in fact it is the real world. And what parents have caused to be sown, will inevitably be reaped in some way, shape, or form. The fruit can show up years later—when it is too late.
No comments:
Post a Comment