8/14/2019 How Can We Prevent Our Young People From Losing
Faith
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say: There willcome another generation, and another, and all
these generations will be tainted
and injured if we are not faithful to God and to His truth
todayhow is the world to be saved if
the church is false to her Lord? One theologian aptly commented
in response: We who love theLord and His church must not sit by
while the church gains momentum on the down-grade of
worldliness and compromise. Men and women before us have paid
with their blood to deliver the
faith intact to us. Now, it is our turn to guard the truth. It
is a task that calls for courage, notcompromise. And it is a
responsibility that demands unwavering devotion to a very
narrowpurpose.
The development of a Christian foundation, then, must begin at
home with the parents. Yet the
truth is that, by the time the average child leaves for college
at age 18, he or she will have neverread the entire Bible (which
can be read cover to cover in about 80 hours), and many will
never
have opened a Bible. Yet they will have watched roughly
21,00030,000 hours of television,
which will most definitely have played a significant role in
developing their worldview.
The Bible tells us that children are a gift from God (Psalm
127:3). Even though we are their
stewards for a relatively short time, our parental influence in
their lives is significant, to say theleast, and it is our
responsibility to pass along our faith and values to them. In the
Old Testament,Moses stressed to his people the importance of
teaching children about the LORD and His
commands, decrees, and laws: Teach them to your children,
talking about them when you sit at
home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and
when you get up. Write themon the doorframes of your houses and on
your gates (Deuteronomy 11:19-20). And in the New
Testament, parents are taught to raise their children in the
training and instruction of the Lord
(Ephesians 6:4), as all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful
for teaching, training, andcorrecting (2 Timothy 3:16). Parents
need to instill in their children a thoroughly Christianworldview
so they understand that the only way to God is through Jesus Christ
(John 14:6). This
requires studying the Bible and a lot of hard work. For our
children to be able to defend the
Word of God (1 Peter 3:15), they need to know it well. The
importance of teaching our childrenthe truth of Scripture at an
early age is put into perspective by this sobering statistic from
Barna:
only about 6 percent of people who are not Christians by age 18
will become Christians later in
life. That frightening thought should reverberate deeply in the
hearts of parents who aspire to
have their children attain the eternal life that Jesus Christ
died to give us.
Jesus Christ said, Everyone who hears these words of mine and
puts them intopractice is like a
wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down,
the streams rose, and the windsblew and beat against that house;
yet it did not fall as it had its foundation on the rock
(Matthew
7:24-25). It is clear that the forces of our increasingly
secular world will bring torrents of rain
and wind into our childrens lives so as to turn their ears away
from the truth. Christians arenot surprised by this, as the Bible
tells us this is going to happen to a greater degree as we draw
closer to Christs return. The wise Solomon taught us to train
our children in the way they should
