Quick Study "Train Up Your Children"

Unlike a couple of years ago, I am so glad that I have chosen to raise my children in a Christ based and a Christ focused family. I look back at how I was raising my children when I was not living for the Lord. Now I know why there are so many troubled kids in the world today. For example, I used to be a heavy smoker, as well as a heavy drinker. I remember walking into my daughters room and seeing her having a tea party with her dolls. So what's wrong with that? The fact that while visiting her friends (the dolls), she was imitating her father by puffing on a pen!!!! At the time I thought this was great, you know, hilarious. I did not realize how I was training up my child. I was not being the father, the man of integrity I am called to be. I should have been raising them according to God's will and according to God's way. So what is the biggest difference now? Over the last year and a half I have been doing what we are told to do in Ephesians 5:1 where we read, "Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children;" If I imitate my Father, and my children imitate their father, we will all be walking in love like our Heavenly Father. It is up to us as Father's not to provoke our children to anger, but to bring them up in the Lord. Before I close, I would like to share one thing that I caught my girls doing since they have been imitating their new dad. Once again I caught them talking with their dolls. This time instead of having tea (at least I think it was tea) and smoking with their dolls, they had them lined up and they were preaching the gospel to their dolls!!!! This proved to me how important it is for us as Christian mothers and fathers to be imitators of our Father. We have a lot of responsibility. We need to establish this faithfulness, obedience, and love for the Father in our children so that they will do the same for their children and on and on. Make God the focal point of your family, so that when your children imitate you, they are imitating our Heavenly Father,

Scripture Reading Proverbs 22:6, Ephesians 5:1, Ephesians 6:4