June 28, 2010
Raising Up
We often talk about raising children and sometimes joke that because they are our children we never get them completely raised. I recently heard someone take a different slant on the issue by saying, “You’ve raised a man.” When you stop and think about it, our goal is not to raise children, but to raise men and women. We can look back and document physical and mental progress from childhood to adulthood, but it’s much more difficult for us to measure spiritual growth. I suppose one milestone is when we put spiritually-childish ways behind us. “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.” (1 Cor 13:11 NIV)
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Gail;
-----It has always perplexed me that the most formative years of our children’s lives are spent during the least experienced time of our parental lives. I know this is not at the core of Numbers 14:18, “...visiting the iniquity of fathers upon children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation.” But the human failings introduced to children by inexperienced parents continues passing from generation to generation. And even though I determined early in my life to raise my children into complete and well functioning adults, I look back upon my failures and realize how difficult it is to escape childish ways even as a well intending adult. So, my mind keeps settling on Jesus amongst the children saying, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” If I had been more like a child with Jesus, maybe my children could have more related to what I tried to show them than to the childishness I was with them.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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