As parents, you may confidently rear your children according to God’s Word. While bringing up your children, you are to remember that your children are not your “possessions” but instead are the Lord’s gift to you. You are to exercise faithful stewardship in their lives.
Self-Confrontation Manual, Lesson 17, Page 4, Used by Permission of the Biblical Counseling Foundation.
Eighty eight percent of the teens in evangelical churches will walk away from Christianity. Some seventy percent of those in church youth groups (teen Sunday school) will do the same. Parental abdication is not working. God is not blessing it.
Gospel-Powered Parenting, 2009, P&R Publishing, p. 180, Used by Permission. Get this book!
No man or woman ever had a nobler challenge or a higher privilege than to bring up a child for God and whenever we slight that privilege or neglect that ministry for anything else, we live to mourn it in heartache and grief.
Quoted by Curtis C. Thomas, Practical Wisdom for Pastors, Crossway Books, 2001, p. 118.
Scripture does not give fathers dictatorial power over their children. Children are not to be regarded as property of the parents. Instead, Scripture speaks to parents as stewards of the Lord, responsible to provide a proper nurturing environment for children, whom the Lord has graciously placed into their care. Like all stewards, parents will ultimately give account for how they have fulfilled their stewardship.
Successful Christian Parenting, 1998, p. 134.
Today’s parents tend to be more passive and less involved in their children’s lives than any generation in our nation’s history. They have turned their children over to artificial, surrogate parents. Day-care centers, relatives, the television set, and the child’s own peers often have far more influence on the moral and social development of today’s children than parents do. That is an abdication of the parent’s duty before God. The Lord Himself gave parents – not schools, youth leaders, Sunday school teachers, or anybody else – the primary responsibility for the nurture and admonition of (their) children.
The Fulfilled Family, 2005, p. 101.
Most assuredly God will require an account of the children from the parents’ hands, for they are His, and only lent to their care and keeping.
A Word to Parents.
