Oak Hill Baptist Church © 2008-2009

Years ago my father gave to each of his children a book about Christian families. At the time we all had smaller children, and he had a grandfather’s concern for some little ones. The book was called The Dangers of Growing Up in a Christian Home by Dr. Donald Sloat, with a recommendation from Jay Kessler, then president of Taylor University. The core of the book can be summarized by the familiar saying, “God has no grandchildren.”

 

Unlike so many homes in our culture, Christian parents give their children boundaries. We rightly want to protect them from evils that can overwhelm a growing conscience. We rightly want to curb budding rebellions arising from cute little tykes. We rightly want to spare them the pains we experience from our own stupid mistakes. As our children grow, the boundaries change. We give them more responsibility for their own choices, hoping that our training carries over into their wills. “Train up a child” is the command of wisdom in the Old Testament (Proverbs 22:6). Yet if we stop here, we are utter failures.

 

Christian parents also try to communicate the gospel against this background of law. We take our kids to Sunday school, church, and other Christian settings. We have family devotions, communicating the importance of spiritual life by carving out a chunk of precious time from our full schedules. We sacrifice for them in a variety of ways, giving up cherished activities to meet their basic needs and a lot of their wants. We ask their forgiveness when we do something wrong and show them bits-and-pieces of our spiritual struggles. Our own faith in Christ lived out before them, even with all our flaws, somehow makes them “clean,” “holy” (1 Corinthians 7:14). They are “closer” to salvation for having lived in a Christian home.

 

Yet we struggle to maintain a healthy balance of law and grace in our own thinking. The teenage son of an acquaintance rebels against his Christian upbringing, and we wonder what his parents did wrong. Our own beautiful daughter off at college decides to live with her boyfriend, and we feel defeated and even betrayed by God. We so easily forget that by giving birth to our little darlings we have passed on to them an eternal death sentence. They need the grace of God to avert disaster just as much as we did.

 

The best we can do is to provide a thoughtful mix of experiences for our children. Who can predict if home schooling will produce a hot-house child unable to cope with the evils of the world or if public schooling will be the warping factor through the constant dripping of secular teaching? One-size does not fit all. A tender-hearted child dissolves into tears from just a stern look. A strong-willed child will return over and over to a forbidden activity despite more painful consequences. Yet the heart soft toward parents may be harder toward God and may need years of His persistence before surrender.

 

Ultimately each person must develop faith in their own way. “The soul that sins will die” (Ezekiel 18:4). Christianity is a relationship with the living God that cannot be captured by a formula or set of child rearing techniques. Moms and Dads bear responsibility, yes, but our parental failures are covered by God’s grace. It is just this grace that we hope extends to junior as well. We cannot guess the form grace will take or guarantee somehow the potency of grace by something we do as parents. Indeed, “God has no grandchildren.”