(from my book Positive Notes for Daily Living)
I was standing atop the high-wall (an artificial cliff created by strip-mining). I was staring off in the distance, trying to prepare myself. The Hospice nurse said that Dad would be gone soon, and that Mom was not far behind. I was due back in Africa in ten days.
A cousin, driving by in his pickup, stopped to talk. He expressed sorrow for the coming loss. I managed to express to him that, despite outward appearances, my parents were in better shape than he.
I doubt that it registered. Although his parents were both Christians, and had attended worship pretty regularly, he had never learned the gospel. His conception of Christianity was somewhere between vague and radically mistaken – likely closer to radically mistaken. I am not sorry that I spoke, but I doubt it did any good.
Children absorb that to which they are constantly exposed. An hour per week of worship does not make a lasting impression on them. Even three hours per week does not make much of an impression. The world speaks to them constantly. The voice they hear most often is the voice they learn to heed.
Bring your children to class as well as to worship. Speak of Christ at home as well. Focus your own life on the gospel if you intend for it to make an eternal difference for your children.
My words meant nothing to that cousin. He did not have the background to understand. I fear that this is the case with many children today, even children of Christian parents.
“And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, 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” (Deuteronomy 6:6-7, ESV).
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