Free Will and Our Children

 

Free will.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a 100% guarantee that our children will all love and serve Jesus? We spend our entire lives pouring into them. We pray for them and with them, we read God’s Word in family devotions, we talk about His goodness and mercy, we teach them how to serve others, we warn them of the consequences of our choices and the devastating results of willful sin.

And so we automatically expect them to follow in our footsteps.

Until they don’t.

We look around and often see other parents who were not devoted to the Lord or the ways of God and somehow their children grow up and live victorious, overcoming lives in Christ and we are dumbfounded,

possibly bitter at God because we believe God promised that if we bring our children up in the Lord that they will not depart from it, not knowing that this would take away man’s free will if this was an absolute.

“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6

And then sometimes our children “turn out” and we inwardly pat ourselves on the back and congratulate ourselves for a job well done, forgetting that we only planted the seeds, others may have watered, but the LORD gave the increase.

We might even look down upon other parents who have a wayward child or maybe all their children have forsaken the narrow path for the broad road that leads to destruction.

We wonder what those parents did wrong to have children who choose the lust of the flesh and the pride of life and we secretly label the parents as failures or possibly hypocrites in their private lives, until it’s us who has the wayward child and we’ve done all we can to turn their hearts back to the Savior.

We plead,

we preach,

we warn,

we cry,

we pray,

we wait.

And as we wait we often blame ourselves. We look back and see all of our inconsistencies and would give just about anything to go back in time and do more, so much more.

More scripture

More time

More prayers

More consistency

More service

If only…..

The truth is, good parents or not, our children’s salvation does not hinge on us being good enough parents. And this is actually great news!

Yes, what we do as parents often makes a HUGE impact, but ultimately it is up to the Spirit of God to do the calling and your child making the ultimate choice on who they are going to spend the rest of their lives serving- self or God.

So let’s stop patting ourselves on the back for great kids or shaking our heads in disbelief at so-and-so’s kids, but folding our hands in prayer pleading for not only our children, but for those children around us who desperately need Jesus, remembering that our Father in heaven had the perfect environment and His children still chose sin and that even when we don’t see Him working, we can know He is!

He is a faithful Father and loves our children way more than we ever could and He still delivers!!