Bible Lesson 151
WHAT ABOUT OUR YOUTH, OUR CHILDREN ?
“FOOLISHNESS IS BOUND UP IN THE HEART OF A CHILD; THE ROD OF CORRECTION WILL DRIVE IT FAR FROM HIM.” PROVERBS 22:15.
“YOUNG PEOPLE SHOULD BE HELPED, SHELTERED, IGNORED, AND CLUBBED IF NECESSARY.” AL CAPP
Probably, by the time you read this line you have become unhappy about what Al Capp said about young people; however, you have to remember that God said about the same thing in Proverbs 22:15. Neither God, nor Al Capp, meant that we should mistreat our young children; but we do have to be realistic and agree that when adults began to lay aside the rod of correction, we invited the possibility that we would be forced to have the club at some future date. We have to admit that at least in the American society, we have forgotten that children must be trained.
That requires much more than talking too, or even instruction that for the most part is not taken seriously by our children. We have almost insisted that our children, these gifts from God, be allowed to do as they please and never have to hear that dreaded two letter word?.NO!
Let me be quick to say that a very small percentage of parents today have and are doing a good job of rearing children; however that means that the vast majority are hands off, let them experience life for themselves, kind of parents and we are losing our families, our schools, our churches and our nation as a result of that.
In the beginning, God in His Creation, set in place a series of building blocks. God first created a world that would sustain life and then He created light, and fish birds and animals. Only then did God create mankind(Man and Woman) and gave them to each other to produce and raise families.
A man and woman joined in marriage, were to become one flesh and raise children that they would train, nurture and teach how to live. God’s plan is the only plan that works for His purposes as children are born into this world and go through childhood to maturity.
Whatever happened to that plan for growing productive adults’ Where did we as men and women, adults, are failing in so many areas as we raise (or watch them grow up) our children’ Don’t misunderstand me now, I am not criticizing all parents but certainly we can agree that some have failed miserably in their responsibility to train up their children and have added malcontents to our ranks rather than well adjusted children that will be a help rather than a hindrance to our society.
The prisons in every country are overrun with men and women whose parents failed them in training them to occupy a position in the society. The problem will not go away because it cannot repair itself, it must be addressed as children grow and learn how to live with others. If you are young and have not started a family as of yet, I recommend that you study this lesson closely, because in all probability you will one day be a parent. Just as you go to school and college to prepare yourself for a job, you should study to prepare yourself to be a good parent. A lot depends, not only on how you were raised, but on how you understand how you can be better prepared to be a mother or father.
There is no question but that the child will mirror their attitudes and then act out the way of life demonstrated by their parents, so parents should be able to adjust their way of life to demonstrate to their children how God intends for His creatures to live their lives.
All too often, today’s children are left to their own devices by parents that are too busy, too selfish, or just too stupid to really be responsible in rearing their children. That may sound harsh, but the truth is harsh and only when our sensibilities are raw and disturbed, do we ever stop to look and see where we are wrong.
Can anyone out there look at the world, without their rose colored glasses, and say that we do not have a severe problem with a large percentage of our young folks’ So many of our children, those who should be preparing themselves for making America strong and productive, are on alcohol, and other mind altering drugs, which will rob them of their potential and many will never reach their adulthood, because they commit suicide or end up in prison for some reason. That has to say something about the parents. I know that everyone in our society has an excuse for their failures and are quick to excuse themselves, however God knows that you have neglected your duty and you will answer for it in the Judgment. We have become like sour milk or water that is not fit to drink, and the reason is that we have turned away from our Creator God, and have sought to serve the devil instead of God. We might as well admit it because if we don’t we will never again be the people that we were created to be.
God made adults who were married, and He gave them babies to raise in order to populate the world. God gave His creatures instructions for maintenance of their families, the problem is that we forget to read the instructions. We have deserted the Bible, the Holy, inspired, and inerrant Word of God, and we have made it an ornament that stays on the coffee table or on a shelf, never studied, never taken seriously because our minds have been blinded by the devil. The Bible was given to us to be a “Lamp unto our feet, and a light to our path” as we travel through this sin sick world (Psalms 119:105). We have blown out our lamp and placed our light in places where it will never cause us to see how utterly depraved we really are. Husbands and Wives have set their living standards so high that both of them are forced to work in order to keep up the monthly payments. That leaves them precious little time to do anything at home, and so the children grow up like weeds in an untended garden.
Most families today act and react to each other like distant relatives. The father should be working and making enough to support the family and the wife should be keeping the home and interacting with her children full time. I know, everybody has a myriad of excuses for not being able to do that, and those excuses are enough for me, but they will not satisfy God. Our Society seems to have taken the commands of God as mere suggestions and in fact many of our pastors and preachers more or less leave it at that. God will not suffer disobedience in His creatures. Talking to people about The Creator God, has become quite a situation, since we have become so intelligent and know so much (much of it untrue), that we easily disregard the Bible. For the most part we are not outspoken against the Bible, we simply don’t use it or recommend it to our youth. God warns us about that when He speaks to us through the Apostle Paul, in Romans 1:21-22, and warns us “because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools.”
Listen to me now’.we may gain much knowledge and have a string of letters (Dr, Attorney, PhD, etc), but unless we have the truth, the knowledge of God that can only be learned from the Bible, or someone who knows the Bible, we are the biggest fools around. Think about this, all of us will soon die, some quicker than others, and once we die we stand the Judgment of God which determines where we will spend eternity. There are only two destinations Hell or Heaven, and if you think about it, eternity is a very long time, in fact it never ends.
Our Society has turned everything on it’s head and it is not for the better it is for the worse. Think about the centerpiece of our society as God set it up. God set the family up as the centerpiece of a viable society. We have scrambled the family unit, and now instead of the family being one man and one woman, and their offsprings, so many families in our day are what we casually call blended families, and whether you know it or not, blended families are often like trying to mix oil and water. Certainly, there are some that work fairly well, but God intended for a family to consist of one father, and one mother, who produced and will raise productive children.
There is one mark, and it is destructive, in our young families, and that is that the parents follow like cattle, others who insist upon their children, to begin to play some sport. It doesn’t matter that in many cases the kid hates to be pushed into an organized sport, but they must do it, because mom and dad want to live vicariously through them. We seem to want to take their childhood away from them, by dressing them and coaching them to think and act like their adults and the adults of the kids that they play with. Usually that will prove to be disastrous because what they see at the games from the adults would be what they would see in the asylum. That’s right folks, too many of those adults, act like thugs and scream at the referees like they want to kill them. We need to remember that the student never comes up to the teachers and so these kids will grow up to be worse than their parents.
Families today do not normally develop a strong sense of family, since they do not show the children the importance of having traditions. Parents are too busy with their own interests to establish these traditions and keep track of them to make sure that their children will take them into the next generation. Most do not care what the child’s interest really are, instead they push their own interest and expect the children to have the same interest. The most important point that parents seem to care less about is that of teaching their children to have responsibility for chores in the home and the teaching of a good work ethic. We do not as a rule teach our children the art of discipline, especially self discipline.
All too often, the adults do not practice self discipline and responsibility, and the proof of that is that so many forget that they have the responsibility to honor their marriage vows. They do not practice self discipline, and that is proved by one spouse and often both spouses thinking only of what they want, and will not practice the ‘give and take’ that is called for in successful marriages. In order to ingrain the above attitudes in our children we have to pay attention to our children.
Buying them 200 dollar tennis shoes, and the latest fad in clothing will never substitute for, spending time and making the effort, that is required to let the child know that they are loved and that they are never alone. Too many of our youth feel left alone, or left out, by their nuclear families. That’s one of the reasons that so many become gang members. The gang gives them that attention and feeling of belonging that their family fails to offer them. Parents have either become too focused on providing ‘things’, like expensive clothes, a house that is never a home because it prevents the working parents from showing that caring and loving atmosphere that a good home always provides. As I said before, our children especially our youth need those ‘fences, walls, and lines, that are established by caring parents to protect their young folks from taking the wrong road in life.
Perhaps it is because we have become selfish, we want to keep up with the family next door or down the street, and in order to do that we have to commit too much time to providing an unnecessarily high standard of achievement, to be known in the community by others; but which robs our youth of family involvement that is so important in their growing up. America today, is awash in debt, because we have forgotten that we need to live within our means. Thousands of homes are being repossessed, because the government dangled an impossible dream before people who are too simple to understand that when the money runs out, the people who own our debt have no recourse except to take back what we cannot and never were able to pay for.
We have become a nation of people who want and even demand that our every need be met by someone other than ourselves. That damning attitude has been passed on to our youth and that is one reason that we find those today who are too lazy to work and too nervous to steal, as they make signs and ‘occupy’ space that they know belongs to people who have expended the effort to work and save and pay for their freedom. These people are normally simple malcontents, who in all probability will as they mature, learn better or will end up on skid-row.
Now, I have said all of that in order to say this about our youth, and I say thank God for the majority of young people who have their heads on straight, who have a good work ethic, and who want and will provide for themselves and their families once they are married or living and supporting themselves. After all, our youth are our future leaders, and that is what makes our attitudes about them so important. Certainly we want them to be good leaders, but we cannot trust that to luck, and we must, without fail, be willing to put forth the effort and take the time needed to grow good leaders.
The family, the church and the schools have all failed a few of our latest generations, in that they have forgotten that God requires of His Children that they raise children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. God, used Moses, to tell the Hebrew nation in the Wilderness, before they went into the promised land, “Only take heed to yourself, and diligently keep yourself, lest you forget the things you have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. And teach them to your children and your grandchildren! Deuteronomy 4:9.
Yes that was given to the nation of Israel, but God never changes and so it has passed down to us and apparently we have forgotten that Parents were to diligently teach their children the law and the precepts of God. That brings us to our situation today and that is that we have forgotten that children are not to teach each other or to teach their families.
Think with me for a moment and ask yourself what you see in your own congregation. Does your pastor call for family groups to sit together, for families to gather for worship together, to have family altars, where the father opens and reads the Bible and explains what it means to his family and then leads his family in prayer. If that is your case then you are blessed to have a godly man leading you, however that is probably not the case. The church many decades ago began to notice that in order to have a large church with many names on it’s roles, and large budgets that allow much activity outside of worship, and so the church did what most businesses do when they want to grow and that is that the Church, the Bride of Christ, at least it’s leaders, began to preach things that were not true, in order to gain members.
Once they had given an inch on the truth of God, then the devil took his mile and we now suffer with more that will vote to follow the devil than will vote to follow Christ and the Bible. Our youth are hard to fool, and they recognized that they were hearing either error from their churches, or were living with hypocrites and they more or less deserted the church. When the congregations noticed their youth being absent from the church they jumped at the chance to involve them in the administration of the church, so we make them ‘youth ministers’ or other titles that intrigued them. They quit the church and so we wanted to allow them to run the church.
God gave children, and they are children until they are able to leave the home and support themselves with a job and all that goes with that. If we follow the Bible we know that God did not hold anyone under twenty (20) years of age accountable, when He disciplined the nation of Israel, after they refused to obey Him and go across the Jordan and take the promised land. God sent the entire nation back into the wilderness to wander for 40 years until everyone over the age of 20 years, died in the wilderness with the exception of Joshua and Caleb who voted to go across the Jordan and take the promised land. Numbers 14:26-33.
In the Temple of God, Priests could not serve until the age of Thirty (Numbers 4:3, 47); however it seems that David reduced the age to twenty in 1st Chronicles 23:24-29). It would seem that God knew all the time, since He was the One who created all of us, that a person’s brain is not complete until around the age of 20. If we follow through on some of the ‘Youth Leaders’ in our day you will find plenty of cause to adhere to adult leaders. Youth are given to parents to teach and direct their paths, using God’s Word the Bible as their guide.
Until next time,
may God bless and keep you
This is Bro. Bob