Age of Offense - Part 3

Monday, April 3, 2023

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.  Proverbs 22:6

We are continuing with our series on parenting to change a culture falling-apart.  Parenting certainly is not a science, it’s an art.  Those who think they have somehow graduated to expert status are like the picture of an elegantly dressed woman who is holding a cup of coffee.  

Her little finger is cocked ever so daintily to the side, and her face reveals utter self-confidence.  Unfortunately she does not yet know that her slip has collapsed around her ankles.  The caption reads, Confidence is what you have before you understand the situation!^[1]

Solomon, the world’s wisest man gave us The Proverbs as our starting point…we must train our children.  The next few days we will camp on the process of training them up.  The word train is a primary root word, which means to narrow, or throttle.  The throttle controls engine speed.  That’s a good metaphor for dealing with hyper-active children!  Narrowing the focus of what a child learns flies in the face of today’s fad that lets children grow up very quickly, with little dialing-back on the throttle.  Training, however, is the art of bringing along a child in the art of being a person.  That takes work!

A.  DISCIPLINE

Athletes train with varying degrees of discipline.  Those who are highly motivated go to higher levels of proficiency.  Those with low motivation hire a personal trainer.  This describes a parent.  You are the personal trainer to which God has entrusted the training of a child.  At a church in Kansas there is a set of baby footprints in the sidewalk.  The feet are pointed in the direction of the front door.  The meaning is hard to miss:  Get them started early in the discipline of worship.

B.  DEMONSTRATION

Railroad train cars follow the leader.  And in such ways children are trained as well.  Abraham Lincoln said that for a man to train up a child in the way he should go, he must walk that way himself.  Trainers have not only been there, they have not forgotten the way.  Your children will copy what they see you do, much more than doing what they hear. 

A Christian parent demonstrates, and also checks the level of communication!

C.  DILIGENCE

Training wheels on a bicycle are for guiding and giving assistance until the skill of riding is learned.  In the same way parents must give attention to keeping their little ones afloat.  That means the personal trainer of the little one at your house must diligently follow through. 

Childern are notriously distractable.  If you tell them what to do, and do not supervise the process, the first interesting bug crawling on the wall will take 100% of their attention. 

For You Today 

Don’t make the mistake of falling-into the excuse-ridden parenting philosophy of the day, where children are deemed Attention Deficit Disorder, drugged beyond hope of attention, and eventually discarded as unmanageable and irredeemable.  If God saw fit to give you that child, He knew you were the one to bring him up

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

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There are about 2,500 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper explore some of these:  After the Disaster and Mary's Confusion

Title Image:  Pixabay.com  1 &  2    Images without citation are in public domain.

Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©  

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[1]James C. Dobson (1936- ), as quoted, Edythe Draper, Draper’s Book of Quotations for the                Christian World, (Wheaton, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1992), 8359-8361