Prayer and Family Worship

In the last post, I left you with a list of  things to ponder.  Ways in which we can bring the gospel of Christ to our children.  In the next couple of posts will touch on those.  I will continue to reference the booklet Bringing the Gospel to Covenant Children: In Dependency on the Spirit by Joel R. Beeke.

• Prayer

How should we pray for our children?  We should be praying for them in a habitual way.  Set a specific time aside to pray for them but also be spontaneous and pray for them whenever the need arises.  Pray also for them covenantally, specifically, and earnestly.

I would like to share a few quotes with you about praying for our children.

“A family without prayer is like a house without a roof, open and exposed to all the storms of heaven.  Thomas Brooks.

“You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you can’t do more than pray until after you have prayed.” John Bunyan

“O Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, give us a seed right with Thee!  Smite us and our house with everlasting barrenness rather than that our seed should not be right with Thee.  O God, give us our children.  Give us our children. A second time, and by a far better birth, give us our children to be beside us in Thy holy covenant.  For it had been better we had never been betrothed; it had been better we had sat all our days solitary unless our children are to be right with Thee…..But thou, O God, art Thyself a Father, and thus hast in Thyself a Father’s heart.  Hear us, then, for our children, O our Father…..In season and out of season, we shall not go up into our bed, we shall not give sleep to our eyes nor slumber to our eyelids till we and all our seed are right with Thee.”  Alexander Whyte

• Family Worship

Beeke mentions four aspects that should be included in family worship and also gives some very practical ideas on incorporating those four aspects.  They are as follows:

1. Scripture reading
2. Biblical instruction
3. Prayer
4. Singing

Let your family worship be regular and sincere.  As Richard Cecil said, “Let family worship be short, savory, simple, tender, heavenly.”  God requires such family worship, the Lord Jesus is worthy of it, Scripture demands it, conscience approves it, and children profit from it.

But How? Using the Means.

Over the last few days I have been sharing with you the things in which we as Christian parents need to be instructing our children.  Now how about some more practical ways in doing that.  I will continue to reference the booklet Bringing the Gospel to Covenant Children: In Dependency on the Spirit by Joel R. Beeke.

You must first realize as parents that you are primarily responsible for the evangelism of your children.  Practically speaking, that means making sure that any person, institution, or thing that has regular influence over your child for any length of time–be that a church and its office-bearers, a school and its teachers, a babysitter, or the high-tech world of computers–has the same Bible-centered, Christ-honoring worldlife view that you have.

Children need consistency, particularly in the three major sources of input in their lives: home, church, and school.  These three form a triangle, and we as parents are responsible for all three.  For now, let’s examine our responsibility in the home.

A godly home is the greatest context of evangelism for children.

Beeke goes on in depth to explain several very practical ideas for evangelizing our children.

I will list them here to get you pondering and will share a little more on each of them in upcoming posts.

• Prayer
• Family worship
• Catechizing
• Godly conversation
• Godly models

Teaching the Content, Part 3

Continuing on from the two previous days’ post, referencing the booklet Bringing the Gospel to Covenant Children: In Dependency on the Spirit by Joel R. Beeke.

Seventh:

Teach them the necessity of Faith in Jesus Christ.

Teach them that the gospel is one thing and our response to it is another.  Tell them they must believe and yet can’t believe unless the Holy Spirit gives them the grace to believe.

In addition to explaining what faith is, explain to your children what saving faith does…

As Luther wrote, “Faith clasps Christ as a ring clasps its jewel.”  Faith wraps the soul in Christ’s righteousness, then lives out of Christ.  Faith commits the total person to the total Christ.

Eighth:

Teach them about Jesus Christ.

Strive to develop a biblical, Christ-centered worldview in your children.  Teach them that every thought must be brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. (2 Cor. 10:5)

Nineth:

Teach them about sanctification and holiness.

Show them from the Bible that holiness will become visible in such children through their gratitude, service, prayer, obedience, love, and self-denial.

Tenth:

Teach them about the joy of heaven.

I would like to end this section with one last quote from this chapter:

Do not joke with your children about any Bible truth, Bible character, or Bible instruction.  Do not make light of the things of God.  Life is too serious, death too final, judgment too certain, and eternity too long to indulge in humor about the sacred truths of Scripture.

Teaching the Content, Part 2

Continuing on from yesterday’s post, referencing the booklet Bringing the Gospel to Covenant Children: In Dependency on the Spirit by Joel R. Beeke.

Fourth:

Teach them they must be born again.

Children must be taught that their bad hearts and bad records make them unfit for communion with God.  Do not dismiss your children’s sins as mere naughtiness or childish behavior.  Don’t excuse their sins by repeating cliches such as, “Boys will be boys.”   And never encourage them to feel that being outwardly good is sufficient in God’s eyes.

More than good behavior is needed to meet the demands of God; inward regeneration of heart through a triune God is essential for salvation.

Our children are not merely sick and in need of reformation; they are born in trespasses and sins and need regeneration.

As teenagers, explain the biblical appeal regarding the need for “circumcision of the heart”.

Pray for wisdom to teach clearly and for grace to feel deeply your children’s inability to do anything toward their salvation while refusing, at the same time, to shirk your responsibility because of their inability.

Fifth:

Teach them about the moral law and its uses–

Show your older children from the Psalms, the Sermon on the Mount, and the ethical portions of Paul’s epistles that believers relish the law as a rule of life (see especially Psalm 119).  Explain to teenagers how walking in accord with God’s law keeps believers from antinomianism (anti=against; nomos=law; i.e., being against law) on one hand, and legalism on the other.  Show them how obedience to God’s law promotes brotherly love (1 John 5:3) and authentic Christian freedom (Ps. 116).

Sixth:

Teach them that the atoning blood of Jesus Christ is the only way of salvation.  Again and again, explain to your children the basics of the gospel: how Jesus saves sinners through His suffering, death, resurrection, and life.

Teaching the Content

If you read the quote from yesterday’s post you may be thinking,  “This is such a large and overwhelming task, how do I communicate these truths to my children?”. In his booklet  Bringing the Gospel to Covenant Children: In Dependency on the Spirit , Joel R. Beeke breaks down this task into specific doctrines.  I will share those with you over the next few days.

First:

Teach them who God is and what He is like.

–proclaim God’s majestic sovereignty, His triune personality, and His glorious attributes to your children.  Study Psalm 139, Isaiah 6, Isaiah 40, John 1, and Ephesians 1 with them.

Root the evangelizing of them in a robust biblical theism rather than that of modern evangelism, which treats God as if He were a next-door neighbor who can adjust His attributes to our needs and desires.

Ask them to pray for you so you may model the character of God in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Second:

Teach them the seriousness of sin.

Call sin, sin.

Aim to convict them of sin and to foster a due sense of the fear of God by addressing their consciences, even as you realize that the Holy Spirit alone, through irresistible grace, can bless your efforts by truly convicting them of sin and leading them to a childlike fear of God.

Third:

Teach them what the Bible says about unrepentant sin.

Teach them about hell to create within them, by the blessing of the Spirit, a sense of need for Jesus Christ.

But that knowledge is an important evangelistic tool in your arsenal of truth–a tool that the Holy Spirit has used throughout church history to show His children that they need to forsake sin and flee from the wrath of God to the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ.

Our Task

Your task is to teach your children the whole gospel and counsel of God, as Paul said he did for the Ephesians (Acts 20:17-27).  Fathers, you especially are to be ministers in your own houses.  Your home is a little church, a little seminary, in which together with your wife, you are to serve as an instructing prophet, an interceding priest, and a guiding king.  As a prophet, you must teach your children God’s truth, addressing the mind, the conscience, the heart, and the will.  That means you must teach your children Bible stories and Bible doctrines, and you must apply those stories and doctrines to their daily lives for their proper development–spiritually, morally, socially, emotionally, and physically.

You must also explain how God’s truth is experienced by His people–that is, how matters should and do go in the lives of those who know God in Jesus Christ.  Aim to apply divine truth to the whole range of your children’s experience.  Teach them how God’s people repeatedly experience the depths of their sin and misery, the fullness of deliverance in Jesus Christ, and the magnitude of gratitude to God for such deliverance.  All of this is to be done in the context of Biblical piety.

Quotes from: Bringing the Gospel to Covenant Children: In Dependency on the Spirit byJoel R. Beeke.