Topic: Start Early [Sunday May 7, 2017]
Text: Deuteronomy 21:18-23
Key Verse: “If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them” (Deuteronomy 21:18).
A Christian woman narrated an unpleasant scene she witnessed at a supermarket. She said, “A woman was shopping with her son, who was about 10 years old. The child could be heard all over the store, demanding to leave. The mother continued to shop while the child’s demands became louder and more insistent.
Finally, with his hands on his hips, the boy screamed, “I want to go and I want to go NOW!” When his mother quietly told him that she still needed to get some wares, the boy hit her. The mother laughed apologetically and said “Now, Jason, that wasn’t nice”.” The Christian lady was clearly seeing the mother’s ‘acquittal’ of her son’s unruly behavior. In the present rapidly changing world, where the positive values of yesteryear are crashing out, owing to the destructive impact of television, movies, Internet, pornography, music and drugs, caring parents’ influence over their children is inalienable. One major reasons for waywardness in children is that parents begin child training too late.
They do not pay much attention to their children until they become wayward and difficult to control. This is contrary to the injunction in the Scripture which says, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). God expects that we begin training, moulding and nurturing our children while they are still very young. He expects us to teach them little by little while they are still growing. But if we neglect this important duty in their formative years, when they grow older, it will be difficult, if not impossible to train them.
Our children will consider us incompetent parents, which will encourage them to perpetrate evils without remorse. Unfortunately, it is when children get to this worrisome stage, that parents wake up to reality and thereafter nervously struggle to change the children overnight by compulsion. Let us prayerfully bring all our children, biological and spiritual to godly and parental authority NOW!
Thought for the day: A child without godly and parental dictates easily lacks the control of his impulses and no better than a vagabond.
Bible Reading in one Year: 1 Chronicles 25-29
DCLM Daily Manna was written by Pastor William Folorunso Kumuyi; is the founder and General Superintendent of the Deeper Life Bible Church situated at KM 42 on the busy Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, Nigeria.
