For the Love of God!
Deuteronomy 6:7
“You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.”
If you haven’t been paying close attention recently to the tidal wave of policies and curriculums and social media movements and television programming aimed at conditioning impressionable children into seeing the world through a secular humanist-progressivist-deconstructionist lens, then you’ve missed a fact as clear as day and as dark as night: the devil is vigilant for our kids.
I remember serving as a counselor for our church’s middle-school summer camp almost twenty years ago—I was 18 at the time—and walking along with an older mentor, sharing with him my fears of raising children in such a dark, godless age where access to pornography is always at our fingertips and prayer in schools is being shunned and the foundation for human dignity is replaced by variations of Darwinian and Marxist theories. And that was twenty years ago! I can’t count how many times over the past eight years, since the birth of our first son, that I’ve agonized over the weight of how to protect him from so much evil. Yet, as the manifold madness of society continues to spread, amidst the battle to preserve the innocence of childhood in a perverse generation, Deuteronomy 6:7 gives us the formula for keeping the faith and keeping our heads.
Friend, God isn’t calling all of us to hold picket signs and preach on street corners and protest abortion clinics and vent righteous fury at corrupt school boards, but He is calling all of us as grandparents and parents and teachers and counsellors and mentors to be activists of the highest caliber. To never give the devil an inch of ground in his advance against our homes and churches. To pray with our kids daily and read Scriptures together and answer questions with grace and earnestness. To saturate our working and our playing with pure doctrine and practice. To first and foremost model for our little ones that it’s possible to walk with God in a godless world, and, in so doing, bid them follow.
We must be more diligent today in our defense of our children than the devil is in his offense!