Train a child in the way he should go

25th April, 2010

Written By Rev Law Hui Seng

Posted By Teresa Han

Proverbs 22:6

Main idea: Train a child to fear God

Objectives: a. To challenge the congregation to give priority to train a child to fear God. b. To challenge the congregation to train a child in his or her characters.

A. Introduction

- How challenging is it to nurture (or disciple) your children? Some of you may face babies or young children who used to get sick and you became very anxious; children who have behavioral problems like computer games addiction; watching pornography; stealing; lying; cheating; not respecting people; wasting money; disability to appreciate what has been done for their good; fighting with others in school or even in Sunday school; do not realize the importance of education and character development though you try to discipline and train them, etc. Your children may have kept disobeying you? As you look back, do you ask what has gone wrong?

- Let me preach to you this morning (evening) that it is because of the major reason that we have given wrong things to a child. We have given so many things like computer games, education. Clothing, food and nutrition, best comfort, best school and the best facility, etc, but we have either fail to train our children in the way they should go or we neglect to train them in the way they should go.

- Brothers and sisters, we can be successful in our careers, we may live in comfortable homes and driving nice cars, but if our children (the next generation) are not trained in the way they should go, we will have no peace, harmony at home; we may not enjoy our old age.

- Please do not misunderstand me. It is not a burden to be parents and therefore, you do not want become parents. It is a privilege given by God to be parents. Family with children is God’s idea and it is instituted by God.

- Proverbs 22:6 “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.”

B. How to train a child in the way he should go?

- What is the meaning of training here? Training means you need to be dedicated and committed to repeat over and over again what is right, it may repeating an action, an attitude, a idea, a pattern of thinking or behavior, etc. Now, remember, these repetitions are for the purpose of doing the right things or the truths. For Christians, we say, to do what God desires us to do in the Bible. And this is everything to do with the next phrase, in the way.

- What is the way? The right way, the way of wisdom (Proverbs 4:11 ‘I guide you in the way of wisdom and lead you along straight paths.’), not children’s way.

- When you train your children in right way, then, proverbs, you equip your children throughout his life or her life that he or she will always stick to doing the right things. Of course, until old age, he will not depart from it.

C. Applications

- For us Christians, we have the bible in our hands; it is a privilege for us to own it. It is the authority and basis of how we train a child he should go. The bible says we must train our children to fear God/ honor God/ obey God. How? I find that there is a lot homework to do. This is the homework and the constant challenge.

- Proverbs 3:5,6 ‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your won own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.’ Can you train your children to do it? To fear God like that?

- The second point of application is the right way is the way of characters. As you train your children to form the concept of fear of God in his life, you must show him how this God whom he fears is expressed in his life. How God in the person of Jesus is shown in his life? How his life reflect Jesus? It has to be the godly characters. And these characters building like responsibility, love, honesty, compassion, boldness, patience, obedience, humility, etc, really take time and it is a long process. We need the filling of the holy spirit to do it. You need to do a lot of modeling.

- You need to spend time with them in order to bring across the fear of God and do character building.

- Listen to this powerful illustration of an axe cutter to show you how we must prepare our children to face the sinful world and stand up for Jesus and become His strong disciples. It shows the importance of training our children to be God fearing and in character building. This wood cutter can use an axe to produce the maximum numbers of trees he cut everyday. From the start, it is 100 trees everyday. After a while, the production decreases to 20, 30 and 10. He is fired from his job. He wanted to kill himself and but he met a sage, a holy man, a wise man. This wise man just laughed and laughed at him, telling him not to be so stupid to get suicide, but he just need to find out the reason for the decrease in production. The answer is because he has not sharpened the axe, the tool.

- As your children are facing the world, have you given them a sharp axe in the form a godly character, God fearing and with all godly characters? Do not think that education along will make the axe sharp enough.

D. Conclusion

- Are you convinced to train your children to fear God and build up in his godly characters.