Chapter 7 Part 1 Children

Chapter 7 Children

“Behold, children are a heritage of the LORD,
the fruit of the womb is a reward.”
Psalms 127:3

For me this is the most difficult chapter to write. As I look out at all the broken children and families that are in pain, my heart aches. Anyone who thinks there are no victims of fornication have obviously not spent time with the children of these illicit relationships. The Bible says that children are an inheritance of God, as a reward. They are to be treasured, they are our greatest resource. They are our future. Instead of treating them as the treasures they are, we treat them as inconveniences. How can we claim manhood when we father children we do not raise? Children we take no responsibility for. How can our women claim womanhood when they continue to bear illegitimate children without husbands? My heart goes out to all of the children. What lessons are they being taught? What values are they being taught? That it is ok to lay down with anybody and everybody with no responsibility or consequences. These consequences are human beings, they have names, and they are innocent children. When did a child become just something left over from some illicit relationship? Have we become so selfish that we can not see the damage we have done and continue to do? On the other hand, does anyone care? God gives us children to raise up for His glory and honor. We do not own them, they are given to us to take care of for Him. To train them and love them for His sake.

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

How are we training our children? Are we leading them in the way of everlasting life or into the way of destruction? Each one of us must ask ourselves these questions, God certainly will. We must recognize the harm being done to our boys and young men. We neglect their training. We are so concerned with our own personal gratification that their needs are secondary. Children come into this world full of curiosity and wonder. They come to us without sin. If it were not for our inherited sinful nature, they would be given to us in purity. If allowed to follow their own desires they like us will choose to follow the world. Thus, the need for parental direction and involvement, except when the parents themselves are pursuing the things of the world then that value system is conveyed to the child. Because many of our children have not received the training they should have been given, today they are lost in a fallen world. They do not have the male role model training we were supposed to give them. Because we have pursued our own agenda of selfishness and childish pleasures they have not gotten what they needed or deserved. Therefore, we have children raising other children. Some of our young women were raising their brothers and sisters and felt that they might as well have their own since they are being mothers anyway. We do not have to be geniuses to figure out how that has been working out.

“Children are the crown of old men, And the glory of their father.”
Proverbs 17:6

The scripture is so appropriate for today. The crown of old men it says, we as old men of the last few generations should be ashamed of the crown that we are wearing. Many of these young men and women have received none of the tools they need to compete in this world. They have received none of the wisdom of their ancestors and now have a very difficult time coping with the world they find themselves apart of. For many of them they want to hide from this world through drugs or street crime. Instead of planning how to succeed through education they have chosen the fast buck of crime and drug dealing. There have been many ancestral heroes who have died for the opportunities they now take for granted and refuse to pursue. These words though written thousands of years ago ring true today. The honor and the adoration of children is their father. This is not only true for our earthly fathers but also for our heavenly Father. Today many of our children are being raised without that honor and reverence. In God’s perfect plan for the family a child is to be reared by both a father and a mother. It is funny how we will break something like a doorknob and then use something such as a piece of rope to open the door and say see how well the door works since I fixed it. The door may be operational, but that is surely not how it was designed to work. Granted there are those who have managed to succeed raising children as single parents and I applaud them, but that does not change the fact that something is still broken. The doorknob is still broken, yes, we are getting in and out of the house but the fact still remains the doorknob is broken. Our relationships are broken is the issue not whether we can patch something together to keep moving forward. The issue is how can we repair them and save our children? The father’s relationship with the children has a different component than the mother’s relationship to the children. The father is supposed to represent the head of the house, the leader. In our broken households, the head is missing. Every good soldier knows that if you remove the head the body dies. Moreover, our body (our community) is dying right before our eyes. Many single mothers do and have done a tremendous job under very trying circumstances and they must be commended, but that does not excuse the fact that we are still in desperate need of a solution to the epidemic we are currently facing. In this patched up worldly system the child is missing the authority and discipline that is best administered from the man. You notice I said a man, not the little boys that make babies and do not raise them that so permeate our communities today. Any one blessed enough to have been raised in a two parent home can attest to this. Because so many of our people have not been given this example they tend to minimize the benefits of this experience. When I was growing up all the mother had to do was mention the name of the father and order was immediately restored. Let the fathers begin to act like fathers and discontinue to act like the children they should be raising.