Although it's important for churches and families to partner together in the spiritual nurturing of our young, as parents we can no longer be content to let the church do the job of spiritually educating our children.

This is because it's the day-by-day, moment-by-moment interaction/mentoring in the home that will ultimately make the most lasting impact on our offspring. Deuteronomy 6 gives us great insight into the prescribed way to raise our children:

Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart.

You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.

You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
(Duet. 6: 4-9)

How can we know how young we should begin to train our children in the ways of the Lord? Isaiah 28 has the answer:

Whom will he teach knowledge? And whom will he make to understand the message? Those just weaned from milk? Those just drawn from the breasts? For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept, Line upon line, line upon line, Here a little, there a little.
(Isa. 28:9-10)

Modeling Prayer to a Child
There was a little girl named Ivy in my children's minsitry a few years ago who was an amazing pray-er even at the age of three and four.

I asked her mother how she managed to get a child like that, if she was just born that way or what. It was amazing to hear the mother tell how from the time Ivy was just an infant, she had taken her into the prayer closet with her in her daily routine of prayer.

As the baby grew and began to talk, the mother would draw her into prayer by asking her to pray, guiding her in prayer, and asking her what God was saying to her heart.

When they would drive to and from town from their rural home, this mother would engage her daughter in prayer in the car, praying for everything from family issues to the people in the ambulances that occasionally passed them.

Ivy would break out into amazingly dramatic and prophetic prayers. Even when the child would play with her Barbie dolls, mom would play with her, and suddenly say, "OK, it's time for Barbie and Ken to pray now."

So they would "pray" with their dolls, making it a part of the fabric of their playtime as well as their real lives.

Daily demonstrating and modeling prayer, but then drawing her child into her personal prayer life routinely has paid incredible dividends in the life of this little girl, who now, at the age of 9-10, is a passionate little lover of Jesus.

We all know young children are little sponges absorbing what goes on around them in word and deed, and what they love and admire, they will imitate.

They love their parents above all things. So how perfect it is for the parents to be the ones to model a passion for Jesus and the gospel in front of them. But it's so important not to assume they will assimilate our passion by osmosis.

As these scriptures indicate, children need to be taken by the hand, and shown what to do in the daily routine of life. Then together they can do the works of Jesus as they and their parents worship the Master side by side.

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