But how do we raise passionate, committed, fired-up lovers of God – Christian children who love God with all their hearts and souls and minds?
1. It helps if both parents are passionate, committed Christians. Setting an example of putting God first in your own life is imperative. But how should we model putting God first within the home? Ideally, the father should be the high priest of the home. Whether this is the case in your home or not, you as the mother can do a lot to lead your children to the Lord and show them that He is the ultimate priority in your life. Let your children see you praying and spending time in the Word. Talk to your children about what God is saying to you and what He has done for you and your family. Worship and praise the Lord in front of your children. Talk about how much you love the Lord. Talk about how much the Lord loves them. Basically, live like God is real and living with you every day – because He is!
2.Start praying for your children when they’re young (with them listening) that God will reveal their gifts and talents and show them how He wants them to use them for His glory. Ask God to reveal His purpose for their lives. At bedtime, pray over each child and ask God to show them how much He loves them. Ask Him to draw them close to Him and to help them to love Him with all their hearts, souls and minds. Read Psalm 91 to them each night so they know that He is always with them and will protect them, and they don’t need to be afraid of anything. Pray about the purpose for their lives. Talk with your children about the fact that God made them so He could love them. And that He gave them to you so that you could love them. Tell them that God put them in just the right family because your family needed them. Tell them to pray and ask God for help whenever other people just can’t give them the comfort or help they need. Impress on your children that He will never leave them or forsake them. Let them know that God created them for a purpose and He will reveal it to them as they pray about it.
3. Teach your children to pray and listen for God to speak to them. If you don’t feel that you can hear from God yourself, learn how to do it right along with your child. Ask the Lord a question and then wait for a response inside of your spirit. If you’re new to this, just ask the Lord if He loves you. He will answer you! Encourage your child to do this, too. When you know that God speaks to us and that we can actually hear Him in our spirit, it makes the Christian life so much more real and filled with life and intentionality. I don’t know if that’s a word, but what I mean is, you feel so much more connected to God when you realize that you can have conversations with Him, not just say a bunch of words into the air and then hope that somebody heard you. And hope that your prayers might get answered. When children know that God listens to them AND speaks to them, they want to pray. They are convinced that He is real when they actually experience His voice talking to them and His presence filling them with peace.
4. Pray together as a family. This is a way of modeling prayer to your children and bringing your needs to the Lord together as a family. He tells us to ask, and He wants us to pray constantly. We are showing our children how to pray, and we are obeying God when we pray together as a family. It’s always good to multitask. Every family has needs. There is always plenty to pray about, not only our own needs and desires, but the needs of others. We can show our children how real God is to us and how much of a priority He is in our lives when we pray together with our children. We can show them what a personal relationship with Jesus looks like by how we speak to Him in prayer.
5. Don’t leave the spiritual training of your children to the Sunday School, Church or Youth group. Children need to learn these things at home, and then the church will be able to support what you are teaching them at home. Some people don’t even put their children in classes because of the immature behaviors of other children and the terrible things that have happened in some churches. They prefer to do all of the spiritual training at home and not put them in any kind of program or class at a church. With our nomadic lifestyle of the last 10 years, we haven’t had our children in Sunday School classes or organized programs, and they are very strong in the Lord and love Him with all their hearts. Every family should pray about putting their children in church programs or keeping them at home and teaching them God’s ways there until they are firmly established and are well-taught in the ways of relating in love.
My daughter, Anna, is a passionate, committed, fired-up lover of God.
Listen to her prayer at Noon Prayer today.
She prays at 1:10:08 in the video.
"Oh that God would give every mother a vision of the glory and splendor of the work that is given to her when a babe is placed in her bosom to be nursed and trained! Could she have but one glimpse in to the future of that life as it reaches on into eternity; could she look into its soul to see its possibilities; could she be made to understand her own personal responsibility for the training of this child, for the development of its life, and for its destiny,--she would see that in all God's world there is no other work so noble and so worthy of her best powers, and she would commit to no other's hands the sacred and holy trust given to her." -JR Miller
