Children—A Gift And A Responsibilityናሙና

Why Disciple Children?

According to Psalm 127:3-5, children are primarily God’s, and He entrusts those precious gifts to our stewardship that we may shape them, train them and release them back to Him for His purpose and glory! Our efforts to nurture our children in the love of God are a great investment not just in their future but also our nation’s future. When we fail to train our children in the ways of God, somebody else is already doing that! 

According to Dr. Wess Stafford, the former president and CEO of Compassion International: “The church may have avoided overt of sins of commission (tragically, not always), but we are equally guilty of the covert sins of omission.” 

For centuries, when several of the world’s major secular movements recognized the strategic importance of mobilizing children to instil their philosophies into them, we as a church waited till they grew “old enough” to understand what we wanted to teach them. Our millennial kids, whose lives are defined by iworld and iproducts, are rapidly exposed to ungodly cultures and immoral lifestyles like never before. The media is moulding the children in our society in a way nobody has ever done before. 

When Jesus speaks about receiving the kingdom like a child, he is not just highlighting their receptiveness to the good news of the kingdom, but also their reachability in general. The world is exploiting their vulnerability and deceives them into an unbiblical worldview. The only way to counter that is by systematically sowing the Seeds of Truth in their hearts when they are still young. Once the worldview of children has been shaped in line with God’s Word, they will naturally strive to make choices that are pleasing to God. The exposure and the training they received in the ungodly nations could not distract people like Joseph, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego because of their strong biblical world views. Instead, the spiritual direction they received during their early years caused them to be powerful agents of transformation in their world of influence. Reaching children and discipling them for Christ is one of the strategic ways of reaching the whole nation. And children shaped in kingdom values are the most effective communicators of the same to others.

Written by Pamela Jeyakumar for Movement Day Chennai