Bring Up a Child

Deuteronomy 6:6-7

Contemporary English Version (CEV)

⁶ Memorize his laws ⁷ and tell them to your children over and over again. Talk about them all the time, whether you’re at home or walking along the road or going to bed at night, or getting up in the morning.

When Sylvia and I got married and set up our own home, we established morning and evening worships. While the children were home we made this a standard practice in our home. After the children graduated from college and left home we still continue at least with evening worships. Our worships comprised reading of Scripture, studying Sabbath School lessons, and/or reading devotional works, especially the Conflict of the Ages series by Ellen White. While the children were little we often used My Bible Friends and The Bible Story which have many pictures and are written on children’s levels.

When the kids got to school age we sent them to parochial schools. This way they were exposed to Christian ethics, practices, and friends. When I was in the 7^th and 8^th grades we had systematic studies of the various doctrines, but I discovered that textbooks and teachers had switched to a social gospel emphasis by the tine our children were in school. We remedied that by going through our various beliefs on an informal but fairly complete level. The intention was that they would know what Sylvia and I believed and the reasons why we believed this way. The goal was not to compel them to believe the way we do but to give them the structure of our beliefs so that they would have a firm basis to evaluate the great variety of doctrines that are going around and be able to choose logically how they would structure their own world views.

Our children have all matured, gotten married, and set up their own lives and homes. They don’t believe exactly the way we do, but we do respect each other’s views and realize the bases we have for our views.  We hope they have a strong enough foundation to evaluate the continuous bombardment on all of public media and make informed choices rather than allow these messages to indoctrinate and turn them into  mercenary, materialistic, godless, unthinking, self-absorbed people.

Lord God, preserve us and especially our children from the continuous brainwashing we are subjected to daily.