Hopewell Herald – November 14, 2020
I’ve been thinking a lot about our covenant children this week, preparing the devotional (and evening sermon for the 22nd) from Ephesians 6:1–3. How blessed we are in them! How high is God’s calling upon them! How great is God’s grace to them!
And we greatly desire that grace for them; how very much they need it, since they have us for parents. Thankfully, God’s grace toward us as parents is also great, which we need, since He has assigned unto us their training and instruction.
As I think about the task before us, there are a couple texts from Proverbs that keep coming to mind.
“He who walks with wise men will be
wise, but the companion of fools will be destroyed.”
Proverbs 13:20
“Foolishness is bound up in the heart of
a child; the rod of correction will drive it far from him.”
Proverbs 22:15
If we recognize that our children are recovering fools, we should be eager for them to walk with the wise. Are we helping them take advantage of opportunities to spend time with wiser saints?
One way of doing so would be keeping families together more during fellowship times—not as a rigid rule, but as a general strategy—so that they are drawn into the fellowship that the dads and moms are having. Another way of doing so is encouraging them to target specific older, mature saints with whom to build a relationship week by week. It's a joy to see some families/children already taking these approaches, and it would do us well to see more of it.
Of course, it’d be a pretty heavy burden to lay this duty upon them. If the families and the older saints don’t seek them out, then we’ll likely find defacto children’s-group and youth-group pockets forming here and there during our fellowship times. And we wouldn’t be able to fault them for it.
Ultimately, the most important thing for them is to attend well upon God’s own appointed means by which He works His grace. First and foremost: Word, sacrament, and prayer in the public worship. Second, the discipline and instruction of the Lord from dad and mom in the home, especially as it flows out of and into family worship.
But, there is also that mutual strengthening in intentional congregational fellowship that we have been learning about in Ephesians 4–5. Of course, it’s something that they can do to some extent with one another, but it is especially upon us to be modeling it for them as we do it with them.
Looking forward to tomorrow’s portion of growing up together into Christ our Head,
Pastor