Are we training our children to be committed to Christ and His Church?

In the second point of yesterday's sermon, one of our implications was that if our children have never engaged in covenanted commitment before, it is naive at best and negligent at worst to hope that they will be able to be committed in their marriages.

We applied that to our lives by talking about the view of commitment that they get by watching mom and dad, and the training that they receive in their own commitment to Christ and commitment to His Church.

We had already made a similar application in the first point, about re-defining all other relationships in terms of our relationship to Christ, and we were about to make a similar application in the third point, about living our lives in unity of purpose and pleasure with Christ.

Yes, the sermon highlighted a very important process for forging a faithful marriage: Clean Break, Clinging Commitment, and Communion of Life. But, in the application, we kept coming back to this: if we haven't learned how to belong to Christ (and taught our children to do so), then we cannot expect to belong to one another well in our marriages (or our children in theirs).

As often happens, the Holy Spirit had others of His people thinking about the same thing at the same time. This morning, a friend referred me to this [short but excellent article] about a clip of a Q&A in which Pastor Carl Trueman is answering a question about why the churches are losing their children.

A couple of quotes to whet your appetite:

The church is losing its young people because the parents never taught their children that it was important. I think that applies across the board. It applies to family worship, and it also applies to whether you are in church every Sunday and what priority you demonstrate to your children church has on a Sunday.--Carl Trueman

Parents makes choices all the time for their families. As they decide on what takes priority in family, every choice is carefully observed and taken into the heart of their children. Yes, they are watching you, and they are learning from you. Maybe the reason why our children have no love for Christ is due to the fact that we as parents do not show any love or passion for Christ, evidenced by how we prioritize our time both on Sundays and during the week. --contendfortruth.com