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

I teach this verse to courting couples who are preparing for marriage; I teach it to parents who are bringing their children forward for infant baptism.

Is it true that if parents do their part in training up their children in the way of wisdom, which is also the way of the Lord, when the latter come of age, they will not depart from the faith?

If we look around at the church family or if we look at our own family, what we observe may not cohere with what the verse says. Some parents lament with frustration, “I taught my children the Word of God to the best of my ability when they were growing up; I faithfully brought them to church. Now that they are teenagers, they are no longer in church!”

Is God being unfaithful to his Word?

Instead of reading Proverbs 22:6 as a promise and question why God didn’t keep his end of the deal, see this verse as the likely outcome when we do our part in raising our children in the fear of the Lord, as observed by the wise men of old, but there will always be exceptions – it’s not a guarantee.

What then should we do as parents?

If you have young children, my appeal to you is that you do your best in diligently teaching them the bible and sharing the Gospel with them so that they can have a relationship with God.

This means that you will have to deliberately set aside time for family devotion, to informally bring God into your family conversations as you go about your daily life, to rally the family together to go to church on Sundays, and cultivate all these good spiritual habits so that they are ingrained into the fabric of the child’s life.

Family devotions need not be very long, and it can be built into the night routine for putting your child to bed – sing a song, read a bible story, say a word of prayer. When the children are older, they can even be involved in leading different segments of the family devotion.

If your children cannot sit still, it’s alright to let them walk around the room – you do not need to demand their 100% attention. Even if they seem to be doing their own thing, they are observing with their eyes and listening with their ears without you realising it.

Don’t stay away from church at the slightest inconvenience and try not to plan other activities on a Sunday so that everyone in the family knows that priority is given to worshipping God, and they don’t need to rush off after service to catch lunch because the next enrichment class is starting at 2 pm.

When school examinations are around the corner, refrain from encouraging your children to stay at home to do revision. If they themselves want to do that, as parents, perhaps we can have a chat with them to understand why they would choose studies before God, and such opportunities can be turned into teaching moments for us to talk to them about faith matters.

Of course, as parents, we ourselves must be convicted that God should come first. Otherwise, if we relegate Sunday worship to the lowest rung of our to do list, our children will follow suit when they grow up, i.e. monkey-see-monkey-do.

If you have done your part in training your children in the way of the Lord, even if they do not remain in it, your conscience is clear, and you don’t need to be laden with guilt and shame or think that you have failed the Lord or even failed your children. At the end of the day, our children must give an account before God for their own choices, especially when they have already become an adult.   

As long as there is still time, we continue to pray that our prodigal son or daughter will return to the Lord and that the seed of the Gospel sown into their hearts in the earlier years, although now seem dormant, will one day spring into life. We have heard testimonies of such turn arounds.

If you hadn’t done your part as a parent in training your child when he was younger, and now he is no longer in church, I also don’t want you to be filled with regret each time we preach on this topic.

Pray for your child, continue to love her, and most importantly, you must love the Lord with a total devotion so that by your life testimony, you show that God is faithful and true. The Lord can give you the grace to shine as one of his lesser lights, illuminating the way for your child to come back to him.

The above principles are also applicable for those who are discipling brothers and sisters in the church family, passing their faith from one generation to another. There is again no guarantee that these disciples will turn out well. I know of a couple who discipled another couple for many years but today the husband is not in church, and the wife has decided to attend another church.

The amount of resources we pour into each other’s lives in terms of time, effort and even money spent doesn’t guarantee anything.

We may prepare our bible studies well so that we will be able to impart God’s truths into our disciples’ lives only to discover that they are not equally enthusiastic about it. We journey with them hoping that just as we invest our lives in theirs, they will go forth to invest their lives in the lives of some others. In the end, it may not turn out the way we wish. The people we disciple can be distracted along the way, and they can fall out without giving prior notice. Success is not guaranteed even if they started out looking very promising.

We pray very hard because we recognise that apart from Christ, we can really do nothing. It is not a guarantee that the seed will fall on good soil, and we usually do not know whether the soil is good or bad until we can see the fruits or the lack of it. We do our best to sow and water but it is God who gives the growth.

We are called to be faithful rather than successful servants!

In the whole process, as we do our part as parents or as disciple-makers, we will stand to benefit spiritually regardless how our children or disciples turn out. This is because to impart God’s Word into another person, we must study the Word ourselves; to inspire others to grow to be like Christ, we must set the example by being Christlike ourselves. As we persevere amid our disappointments and frustrations, we grow in patience and faithfulness and bear more and more of the fruit of the Holy Spirit.

Even if our efforts yield no fruits on the surface, one guaranteed outcome is that we ourselves would have grown in our discipleship in the course of doing kingdom’s work, and that is something we can celebrate!