Take Back Your Children!

Our children are wandering around confused and lost. They strive to fit in to the most popular group; they long for material things like clothes and cell phones and I-Pods, and… They know all the songs of the pop culture that they live in – yet they cannot recite one Bible verse because even Christian children don’t have the recitation programs – we don’t get them up before the church so that they gain confidence and are encouraged by their elders – we turn them over to day care and children’s church, and anybody else to teach them the way of the Lord.

Our children do not have faith – because we have neglected to teach them. We have them in a strange land:

4 The roads to Jerusalem are in mourning,
for crowds no longer come to celebrate the festivals.
The city gates are silent,
her priests groan,
her young women are crying—
how bitter is her fate!

5 Her oppressors have become her masters,
and her enemies prosper,
for the Lord has punished Jerusalem
for her many sins.
Her children have been captured
and taken away to distant lands.

6 All the majesty of beautiful Jerusalem
has been stripped away.
Her princes are like starving deer
searching for pasture.
They are too weak to run
from the pursuing enemy Lamentations 1:4-6 (NLT)

What can turn this around? We must pray! We must repent for neglecting the spiritual life of our children. We must pray for their rising – that their thoughts would turn toward the God who made them; we must pray as they leave our house, not for them, but with them; we must pray that they be covered by the precious blood of Jesus, and encamped with angels round about them, even as God as promised for those who fear Him; we must pray for their teachers, that they be under the instruction of godly teachers who have a fear of God and a respect for morality and the law; we must pray for their friends -that they choose them wisely and even then, not put them in a place that belongs only to God; we must pray for their going to and fro, that they be kept in safety. But before we pray – there is something we must do:

20 But you have been unfaithful to me, you people of Israel!
You have been like a faithless wife who leaves her husband.
I, the Lord, have spoken.”

21 Voices are heard high on the windswept mountains,
the weeping and pleading of Israel’s people.
For they have chosen crooked paths
and have forgotten the Lord their God.

22 “My wayward children,” says the Lord,
“come back to me, and I will heal your wayward hearts.”

“Yes, we’re coming,” the people reply,
“for you are the Lord our God.
23 Our worship of idols on the hills
and our religious orgies on the mountains
are a delusion.
Only in the Lord our God
will Israel ever find salvation. Jeremiah 3:20-23

Before we can pray we must repent – for before we can give God to our children, He must be our God – not the gods of this world – but the one true and living God, for “only in the Lord our God will [we] Israel ever find salvation.”

God Bless You,
Maria