Who is Shaping Our Children?

Children absorb information and influences from their
environments. In this electronic, information-rich age, we should, more
than ever before, be discriminating about what our children learn and
where they learn it.

As a parent, it is up to you. You must decide, as far as
it is in your power, what you want your children to hear, see and
experience.

Watch what your children view on television. Many
“children’s” programs today feature ghosts, sorcery, witchcraft,
violence or obscenity in some form or another. Yet for some children,
the television has become a babysitter!

We can teach our children all we want when we are there
with them, but if we put the television in front of them to make things
easier for us, then we will undo all the good we have done. Professional
communicators in the electronic media gear their programming to capture
and hold our attention.

Satan skillfully uses the secular media in his diabolical
plan to catch our children and involve them in things outside God’s
kingdom. He uses the mesmerizing power of television and other media to
teach them a perspective and attitude about life that is different from
the pure perspective of the Word.

When children watch gory, horrific scenes on television
(or on other visual media), they lose their inner knowledge that the
weird, the monstrous and the evil are inherently wrong. When we let our
children feast on godless TV and video offerings, they will develop a
taste for this new “food.” They will lose the ability to discern the
distasteful, the ugly, the disharmonious and the obscene, and they will
lose the desire to avoid these things.

An early result of this ungodly diet of entertainment is
that our children want to experience everything in a heightened sort of
way. The music must be loud, the colors must be bright, and the action
must move quickly. Everything must be experienced in an extreme way
because this is what the media has fed into their lives.

Today we are reaping in our nations what we have sown in
the past—violence, lewdness, drug abuse, pornography, profanity and
vulgarity. Jeremiah 10:2 warns us, “Thus saith the Lord, ‘Learn not the
way of the heathen’” (KJV).

Forming Godly Character

We must not let ungodly teaching mold the minds of our
seed. Our children are too impressionable, too vulnerable and too
precious for us to subject them to the influence of the world’s
humanistic and ruthless media.

Our children are being subtly and carefully schooled in
humanist philosophy. Its doctrines include the teaching that parental
guidance and rules hold only a secondary place. They teach the rights of
the child to oppose adult scrutiny of his or her behavior.

The result is that the children acquire twisted,
self-centered conceptions of “equal rights” (children can decide their
destinies and paths just as freely as adults—or parents) and of the
supremacy of individual choice and decision-making.

I have found that ungodly teachers are themselves unable
to guide our children. Or they reject the opportunities to guide
students by offering them a “choice” at crucial times in their academic,
moral or vocational development.

Colossians 2:8 speaks directly to this type of subtle
teaching, which can steal the minds and hearts of an entire generation:
“Beware lest any man spoil you [and the next generation] through
philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the
rudiments [principles] of the world, and not after Christ.”

The word “spoil” may be translated “to steal away the best
that you have.” Vain philosophies and humanistic ideologies will
captivate and destroy the best that we have—our children.

Psalm 1 offers concerned parents some good advice about
controlling what their children listen to, the company they keep, whose
advice they seek and how they spend their leisure time. “Blessed is the
man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path
of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful; but His delight is in
the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night” (vv.
1-2, NKJV). These Scriptures provide a sweeping summary of negative,
self-indulgent activities, as opposed to meditation, delight and total
absorption in what pleases God.

Romans 16:19 says, “I want you to be wise in what is good,
and simple concerning evil.” The word “simple” in this verse means
“ignorant of, inexperienced in, or unsullied by” what is evil. It is a
naive parent who believes the myth that a child needs to be exposed to
evil in order to choose the good.

Our constant prayer, as parents, must be: “Father, help us
to be wise in the formal and informal education of our righteous seed.
Help us to carefully guard our children’s minds and to screen out,
whenever possible, those influences that do not give life to our
children.”

Teach the Word to the Young

Isaiah the prophet rebuked “the drunkards of Ephraim” (Is.
28:1), who led the nation of Israel. Noting that their love for strong
drink caused them to err in their vision and stumble in judgment, he
mentioned the necessity of teaching God’s Word patiently and simply to
the very young.

He wrote: “Whom will he teach knowledge? And whom will he
make to understand the message? Those just weaned from milk? Those just
drawn from the breasts? For precept must be upon precept, precept upon
precept. Line upon line, line upon line. Here a little, there a little”
(Is. 28:9–10).

Wise and righteous leaders can be raised up only through
this type of thorough grounding in God’s unchanging Word. We are not to
neglect to teach our children. 

The seemingly endless repetitions of elementary lessons
lay the foundation for sound doctrine and the fear of the Lord that is
so necessary for successful living. These things combine to form a
spirit in our children that is naturally turned toward spiritual things,
providing for a holy lifestyle and a rich spiritual inheritance.

Some time ago, while in Europe, I attended a baptism
service conducted by a friend for the 19-year-old son of a minister. I
had to wonder, Why had he waited so long?

I learned that the boy’s parents, although they were
ministers of the gospel, had not introduced their son to the scriptural
truths about water baptism until his teens because they felt that “this
decision-making activity should be postponed until the child was much
older.”

He was now 19. His parents and teachers had waited until
this young man had reached a certain level of maturity to introduce some
truths requiring individual decision-making. “In his own time, he would
make his own decisions,” I was told.

This sort of reasoning sounds very noble and
sophisticated, but it is contrary to God’s Word and to common experience
as well. The spirit of a young child is naturally open to spiritual
truths. His or her ability to grasp the things of God has little to do
with stages of intellectual development or with the acquisition of
social maturity.

The enemy wants to steal your righteous seed. Satan will
do all in his power to steal your child’s soul long before he is 18 or
19—the time when we expect him to have come to some developmental age of
accountability. The enemy has no problem advancing his particular
worldviews or “religious” views on our children.

It’s time for us to stop apologizing for our beliefs and
faith in Christ. Either we are right or we are not. It is time for us to
take a stand and raise our children accordingly, without apology. We
need to be alert to the tricks of the enemy.

The Word of God is straightforward and totally clear:
“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will
not depart from it” (Prov. 22:6).

One of the meanings of “train” in the Hebrew is “to touch
the palate.” This word may also be used to describe the technique used
by mothers to train infants to appreciate and swallow solid food.
Furthermore, the concept of “touching the palate” refers to the process
of introducing new types of food to an infant—or “touching his palate”
with what he needs.

Whatever food is first introduced to a baby and given
faithfully to that child will often become that child’s food of choice.
My baby granddaughter has not been fed very sweet foods. She is
comfortable with the taste of vegetables and appears to be nauseated
when fed highly seasoned foods.

Whatever a baby is constantly fed will often become that
child’s favorite food in later years. For example, Italian or Mexican or
Jamaican babies grow to love the foods that are associated with their
culture.

The same principle is true in the spirit realm. Give your
child a diet of spiritual milk in infancy, and you will ensure a
lifelong preference for spiritual food!

Raising Righteous Offspring

God spoke in detail about child-rearing through the
psalmist in Psalm 92:13-15: “Those who are planted in the house of the
Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall still bear
fruit in old age; they shall be fresh and flourishing, to declare that
the Lord is upright; He is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in
Him.”

This means that we are to plant our children in the Word
of God. The problem with many children is that they are not rooted or
planted anywhere.

Children who are planted in the house of the Lord will
“flourish in the courts of God.” As we plant our children in the church
or in a Christian school or in a biblically sound education program,
they will flourish in our nations. When they are old, they will still
show forth fruit—the fruit of the Spirit!

I urge you to plant your children in the house of the Lord
and in the Word of God. If you do this, your children will literally
“declare that the Lord is upright.”

God is looking for living testimonials of His glory and
faithfulness. When our children are planted and rooted in God, they
become living testimonies of His faithfulness in a faithless world.
Their lifestyles reflect a prosperity and favor that is both
supernatural and natural.

Proverbs 24:4 promotes acquiring godly knowledge and
wisdom with an outstanding promise of reward: “By knowledge the rooms
are filled with all precious and pleasant riches.”

Sometimes we selfishly fix our attention and affections on
our efforts to preserve ourselves and our own seed but think little
about being a testimony to God. I pray that our sons and daughters will
rise up to be a testimony—not to any particular ministry or household
but to God’s faithfulness!

God is vitally interested, for His own sake, in raising up
living monuments in this godless world—monuments to His supernatural
ability and to His desire as a heavenly Father to provide for all His
children. His desire should be our desire as well.

Patricia Morgan is an educational psychologist and a
professor at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is the author of  Raising Children of Destiny (Whitaker House). Her
husband, Rev. Peter Morgan, is pastor of the Covenant Churches of
Jamaica. They are the parents of five children. Adapted from The
Battle for the Seed by Patricia Morgan, copyright © 2003. Published
by Whitaker House. Used by permission.